Ways to Get Hurt

I was challenged to make a list of the hazards we encountered in our free-range country childhood. How fun! Of course, it wasn’t all glowing, cookies-floating on top of water. Are you prepared to be appalled?

We got poison ivy every summer. Even though we knew what to avoid, there was so much of it, it was inevitable. In second grade I had such a bad case that my eyes swelled shut and I couldn’t go to school. I was still a bit funny-looking when I did go back, so I stood with my eyes very close to the blackboard to draw. I was trying to put off the moment when the other children would see my face. In my peripheral vision, I saw JR checking me out with astonishment. He always spoke the truth with vigor, but this time he was speechless for a bit. Then he simply asked the obvious, “DO you have poison ivy?”

Speaking of school- we walked to school- a whole herd of us from our neighborhood, swinging our lunchboxes and black bonnets, braving heat and dust and neighborhood dogs. There was a bus for the people who lived further away, but we only had about a mile. If it really rained, the bus would come pick us up.

We picked treasure out of a trash pile. It was a gleeful high point of any Saturday to be allowed to meet our neighbors at the spot where trash got dumped, sift through it for treasures. I never found anything special, and I can’t remember what the thrill was, actually.

We got torn by blackberry thorns. Blackberries are ready to pick in the hottest part of the summer, so you can imagine thin cotton clothes, flip flops, and buckets tied around our waists with strips of cloth. Blackberries have vicious thorns, but the fruit was worth hacking through thickets to get it.

Sometimes we felt edgy and ate a few berries we weren’t sure were edible. The test rabbit would nibble a berry, and we would stand around and watch to see if they would topple over. Nobody ever did, but most poisonous berries taste too vile to enjoy anyway.

But chiggers! Have you ever experienced the misery of chiggers on hot skin?

None of us kids ever broke a bone, despite our best efforts. That bed sheet parachute for jumping out of the hay loft – that should have been something broken at least. What can I say? We were built sturdily.

We had bike wrecks, and toboggan crashes, and skating smash-ups. I have three shiny parallel lines on my wrist from the figures on a friend’s skate. One of my friends hit her head so hard while skating, she couldn’t remember who the president was, and had to go for a cat scan. Now THAT was an injury in our world. The emergency room? Gasp!

Once I fell off a horse at full gallop, so I have a patch of funny looking skin on my leg as a result. I think we got all the gravel out that time.

My left hand has a scar from a gash I got when I wiped out on the school playground. It didn’t heal for the longest time, and then one day a little piece of rock surfaced, and it could finally heal shut. The up-side was that I had a scar for quick reference when I couldn’t remember which hand was left or right.

When I was about ten, I decided to learn to swim by jumping into a little pool in the creek. It wasn’t a deep hole, and I had heard that’s the way to do it. I took off my life jacket and jumped in, swallowing about a quart of water before hauling myself out to the edge to consider my options. We hit on a better method, wading out chest deep, then turning around and swimming to the edge. Eventually we got strong enough to swim across. Would I recommend this method to my children? No, no I would not. My Mom, in her defense, would always tell us to take our life jackets along, and we did. We just floated them instead of wearing them.

Swimming in creeks and ponds meant encountering snakes, snapping turtles, leeches, and crayfish. The bluegills were always nibbling on our toes when we held still. Our swimming clothes became stained an earthy shade of mud. That may have been because we routinely sat in the squelchy hot mud to warm up.

We got snagged by fishhooks, and stung by the catfish we caught. We ate bitter sheep sorrel and chewed rye grass and cheeses, all completely free of washing, in their native dusty habitat.

Going barefooted all the time was great, until we developed toe crack sores (I don’t know what to call them. In Dutch they were “kee gretzlies”) from walking on the baked clay soil of Kentucky. We’d tie yarn around our toes to keep dirt from collecting in the cracks. Of course, we had bandaids, but they didn’t stick on the undersides of toes.

There was a time when I accidentally stepped barefooted on a toad. Never will I ever forget that feeling. I have worn flip flops ever since.

We slept outside, under the stars, every unprotected skin surface fair game for mosquitoes, spiders, and ants.  These camping occasions usually resulted in campfire smoke in our eyes and lungs, poorly cooked proteins for our supper. We were usually grumpy the next day, a bit hung over from less than optimum rest, scratching our welts and looking for the Cortisone tube that was always empty.

We hiked without cell phones or GPS, wearing sneakers without proper grip. My brothers went spelunking in a cave that went nobody knew where. We were glad when they all came out again, following their ropes.

As I was writing this, I kept thinking that we weren’t complete idiots. We had boundaries, however loose. We used common sense, solved problems, found our way, dressed our wounds ourselves.

We probably tighten the boundaries a bit for our children. For one thing, we have better access to protective gear, helmets and such. We go to the ER for stitches, and we are very conscious of water safety.

It’s a tough one for parents in this safety-first world, where one could be reported if a little boy carries a pocket knife.

We do really want our children to have stamina, not wither at every adversity.  We want them to appreciate the enormous world out there, to be survivors, able to think on their feet and figure out which way to go. It can’t happen in an armchair.

I guess that’s why we look back at our childhood with such fondness. It seems uncomplicated and just wonderful. Even with chiggers.