The Lumber Yard
Pepper Scott
My sister Sue once commented that she could not believe, or even imagine, that I had ever done anything stupid.
Oh, Sue.
I suppose that depends on your definition of stupid.
I have already admitted that I was fearless as a child, which, looking back, was probably just another way of saying I had absolutely no sense of danger. I did, in fact, do quite a few stupid things. This was one of them.
When I was little, I usually played with boys rather than girls. My big sister was nine years older than I was, so she had her own friends and her own world, neither of which included a little sister tagging along behind her. Besides, I had three brothers, and somehow our neighborhood seemed to have been designed with a surplus of boys.
We spent our afternoons doing what children apparently did before adults became quite so worried about them.
We skipped our naps.
We snuck out of the house.
And we went looking for trouble.
Or, more accurately, we went looking for fun, which sometimes turned out to be the same thing.
One of our favorite rendezvous was a huge lumber yard. And when I say huge, I mean huge. There were stacks of lumber piled so high that, standing on the ground, you could not see where they ended. To us, it looked less like a lumber yard and more like an enormous wooden mountain range, just waiting to be conquered.
Naturally, we conquered it.
We played hide-and-seek among the stacks. We climbed them. We raced each other to see who could get to the highest point the fastest.
Because apparently regular hide-and-seek was not exciting enough. We needed altitude.
At the time, none of us seemed to consider the possibility that several tons of lumber might not appreciate being used as playground equipment.
We were kids.
We were having fun.
And as far as we were concerned, that was the entire safety plan.
Years later, I had left my hometown and moved away for work. Those childhood adventures had faded into the soft background of memory, the way old summer days sometimes do. I rarely thought about the lumber yard anymore.
Then one day, I heard that it had gone out of business because part of it had collapsed, and someone had been hurt.
That news stopped me cold.
Suddenly, the lumber yard came rushing back.
I could see those enormous stacks again. I could see us climbing, running, hiding, laughing. I could almost hear the crunch of our feet on the ground and the excited voices of children who believed they were completely invincible.
Only now was I old enough to understand what we had not.
Those stacks could have fallen.
We could have been underneath them.
And there we were, happily racing each other to the top.
It was one of those moments when adulthood quietly taps you on the shoulder and says, "You know you were really lucky, right?"
When I told Terry the story, his jaw dropped.
“That was really stupid,” he said.
Then he laughed.
“I did many stupid things like that growing up, too.”
And just like that, we were both laughing.
Not because what we had done was particularly smart. It definitely was not. We were laughing because somehow, against the odds and despite our very questionable childhood decision-making, we had made it through.
We had survived our adventures.
We had survived our stupidity.
And maybe that is one of the little gifts of getting older. You look back at the things you once considered perfectly normal and realize just how much luck was quietly walking beside you.
We did not know it then.
We were too busy having fun.
