Civilization reached the Petunia Valley Sideroad last month. At dawn on a Friday morning, a big paving machine started up from the highway, fed by a series of tandem trucks and by 4:00 p. m. the sideroad was coated in asphalt. After 32 years of bone-jarring trips into town that reduced the life of every vehicle we owned by a third, we can now sail down the mile and a half to the highway without making a CD skip or splashing coffee onto the dashboard. Life will never be the same.
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Progress is a two-edged sword. My 16-year-old son, the Mouse, took one look at the vast, black, slightly sloping surface and went straight out to buy a long board. Now, most farm kids miss the whole skateboard, in-line and roller blade phase of life, unless they are lucky enough to be born on a cash crop place like the Pargeter brothers, with an acre of concrete in front of the machine shop and silos. Out here on a gravel road far from town, my boys had to settle for dirt bikes, fast horses, snowmobiles and high-powered weapons to feed their need for speed and near-death experiences.
Mother was dead set against the idea of a long board on that road. “It’s a highway now and kids don’t play on highways. The traffic will be double what it was and twice as fast.”
“So that means two cars every hour,” countered the Mouse. “I’ll wear a helmet.”
“Absolutely not on that road. If you want to do that sort of thing, you can use the skateboard park in town.”
It took 48 hours of hard bargaining before Mouse got his way. It all came to a head during a visit to the Bobby’s Boogie Board and Bike Shop in town. Bobby is one of those tanned blonde surfer dudes with earrings and a gold necklace. He really stands out in a place like Port Petunia. Bobby listened to the pitched battle between mother and son and found an opportunity to draw her aside and make a couple of telling points.
“Actually,” he confided to her, “You don’t really want him going to the skateboard park. Bad scene. You know… sex, drugs, rock and roll…. He’s a good kid. And if he’s on the PV Sideroad, you know exactly where he is, don’t you?”
Hats off to Bobby. He made the sale and now we have a signed contract on the fridge that says the Mouse will wear his helmet and my orange deer-hunting vest, not go boarding in the dark, or in fog or when the sun gets too low in the west and makes it difficult to see. He also agrees that if he irritates his mother, the long board gets locked in the pesticide freezer out in the barn. Great-uncle Barney dropped in for one of his twice-yearly visits last week and he paused in front of the fridge to study the contract.
“When I was his age,” he said wistfully, “I had a kind of a long board, myself. Only it was two thousand feet down a coalmine and it was on a track. Our little game down there was to try to make the empty carts go fast enough on the curves to hit the walls. That’s where I lost these three fingers.” He held up a mangled left hand. “They made us wear helmets after a bit, too.”
Barney offered to lend Mouse the little gadget he pins to his shirt when he is alone in his assisted living apartment. If he lies down on the floor for more than two minutes, as he sometimes does to do sink repairs, the gadget sends his son a message saying, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”
The fact is, we all come with our own built-in risk assessment instincts and they are surprisingly inflexible no matter how many ABS braking systems and two-handed start buttons on hedge trimmers they build to protect us from ourselves. We just drive a little faster, take wider swipes off the stepladder or skate a little closer to the edge.
And our mothers keep us in their prayers.
