We moved to the farm when I was six, after kindergarten. My dad had been moving around from one job to another my whole life, trying to find something he wanted to do. He finally settled on moving back to the family farm and farming with his dad. He kept at it for the rest of my growing up years, and we lived there on the farm.
The farm was an amazing place to grow up. It's equally amazing that we didn't kill ourselves. One of Mom's most commonly told stories: she goes outside to look for Ryan when he was four (I would have been nine). She found him sitting at the top of the corn elevator, feet swinging. He had probably followed us up there and we'd ditched him. Or he'd simply seen us do it. We climbed the elevator a lot because it hung over one of the shed roofs, making for easy access. Ryan was probably only 10 or 15 feet off of the ground, but I guess that's too far for a four year old.
We climbed incessantly. Those were the only two roofs we climbed on. But we climbed up fences and through rafters in the scale shed, the oat shed, one of those sheds up on the hog floor, the barn, and the corn crib. We longed for a tree house, but we didn't have any suitable trees. I struck on the idea of building one in the scales shed, over one of the chutes for loading cattle, but Dad said the cattle wouldn't want to walk under it. Eventually we fixed on building ourselves in the rafters of that shed up by the hog floor. We hauled up scrap plywood and built ourselves a floor. There was a door in the west wall up at rafter level. I never knew why - maybe for ventilation. We nailed some wood chunk steps to the outer wall and found a rope for another means of access. We called it 'Daylight' and played there a fair bit. I remember reading some Anne McCaffrey up there and running away there some time after I was nine (it may have been the same event), but I still longed for a cooler fort.
I'm amazed we didn't kill ourselves. My children are four now, and when I think of them at the top of the corn elevator it terrifies me. But I don't want to be an over-protective parent. It's going to take resolution to give them some freedom. The world seems so much more dangerous now. When I was a child, not much older than them, Kyle and I could go to the toy aisle at KMart by ourselves while Mom and Gramma and Erin shopped. I would never allow my children to do such a thing. But I don't want to be too protective. I don't want to try to shield them from all harm. There is no such thing as fail safe. Some risks have to be run if we're going to live at all.
One game we played some was 'Corn Cob Fights'. We would stand in the barn on opposite sides of the hay mow on the second floors and whip corn cobs at each other. This only really seemed to be fun when I had a friend over to be on my side, me and him against Kyle. The corn cobs could sting when they hit, but mostly we missed, through bad aim or evasion, or maybe mostly poor aerodynamics, and we never really played it that much.
Our number one method of almost killing ourselves was riding the three-wheeler Dad bought us. It had one of the smallest motors you could buy, only 90ccs, and, in retrospect, that was a very good thing. One of the first days we owned it I drove too near a high line pole and broke off the foot-rest, which Dad had to weld back on. I ran over at least one friend, Steve Swenka, chasing him on the three-wheeler. Three-wheelers are notoriously unstable, both laterally and front-to-back. We loved turning sharply and driving on two wheels. We popped inadvertant wheelies all the time, usually throwing the driver and any passenger off of the back. I was driving my sister one time in the front yard, trying to go around a tree, and I drove the front wheel right up a guide-line-wire for a high line pole. The three-wheeler rolled to our left twice, down the hill by the road, in front of the whole family, who were all in the front yard. For a while I liked to dangle my feet when I was a riding, dragging them on the ground - until they caught on a hose one day and whipped me off and under the three-wheeler quick as fast you can say 'boo'. Kyle had a friend driving it one time who didn't make the turn and drove through a barbed-wire fence and was subsequently driven to the hospital for stitches.
