Open Writing

Fortunately there are a lot of positive memories to counter the bad ones during this time in our lives. With not much in the way of entertainment in Weed, we learned early in our lives to entertain ourselves. The boys built a house in a pine tree on the side of the rocky mountain near our house, and we regularly used it as a hang out.

Willie and Jessie also engineered a makeshift tram by climbing to the top of a sturdy pine and fastening the end of an old cable to its trunk. Then they unrolled the cable down the hill to a second pine tree where they again secured the cable to the top of the tree trunk. Finally, with the help of our mules, Buck and Rowdy, they pulled the cable fairly taut. With the tram now in place, Willie and Jessie would climb the uphill tree and hang a horseshoe over the cable. Holding onto that horseshoe with both hands, they would swing off the limb, and go flying hell bent for leather down the cable to the downhill tree. Because the cable had enough slack so that it dipped in the middle, the boys lost momentum toward the end of the ride, allowing them to stop without crashing. They would then grab onto a limb, scamper down the tree, and run back up the hill for their next daredevil ride.

I watched with envy as they whizzed past me, shouting and laughing all the way down. "I want to ride too," I whined.
"O.K., maybe we can fix something up for you to ride in since you ain't strong enough to hold onto the horseshoe," Willie said.

My ever obliging brothers found an old metal ring that had once held together the slats of a wooden barrel. They put the ring over the cable and fastened the ends together to form a circular seat where I could sit for the ride down the cable.
I was delighted to take my turn and eagerly climbed the tree, got into the ring and took my first look down at the rocky hillside. Then I suddenly realized how far off the ground I was and how rough the landing would be if I fell. My knees went rubbery, my arms started shaking, and I changed my mind about going for a ride.

Jessie and Willie, who had invested a lot of time and manpower into designing my circular seat, were determined to see their experiment succeed. "Let me down! I don't want to go now," I screamed. Too late. They ripped my fingers from the pine branch and shoved me down the cable.

Completely terrified, fearing if I weren't killed outright I would probably be paralyzed or brain-dead, I was on my way down for my first and last tram ride. Everything happened in such a fast blur, that I forgot what Willie and Jessie had told me about stopping: "Whatever you do, Bertie, stick your feet out in front of you, before you get to that downhill tree!"

I slammed into the tree with my knees and forehead. In my mind, I saw myself falling ten feet to the rocks below. My fingers were welded to that ring in a death grip. It took both brothers to pry me loose; they guided me, bruised, bloodied, and badly shaken to the ground. If their goal was to get rid of me, they certainly succeeded.