Daredevil Youth & How I Survived is a Mystery

I used to ride on the back of UPS trucks, but not in any official capacity.  As a young pre-teen/teen, a couple of my childhood friends and I would hitch a ride on the back of the UPS truck through the neighborhood.  There were three of us so the hope was you were fast enough to get one of the large step handles on the sides of the tailgate.  You could ride all day with that big & beefy handle. The unlucky third of us got the little door handle to hold on to.  This was just a few block joy ride when we saw one come by, pure chance. We did this until one day the driver caught us in his mirror, took a very sharp, very fast turn, and threw us all off, tumbling to the asphalt in a hard heap. Actually, it was kind of funny even then, even with the bruises ripped clothes and skinned knees.

Alex and Aaron, slightly older, were the brave ones and I’d mostly follow their leads.  I was often a little chicken, but usually went along with most of their plans.  Scaling tall structures; skirting the 2” edge of a house’s molding all the way around it, 10’ off the ground; sneaking into abandoned buildings at night; climbing cliffs; whatever other trouble we could locate in a moments notice. No job too big, or too small for us.  We once dove through a construction site dumpster over near Lake Union one evening.  Can’t remember why, but there was actually a couple of bags of good groceries that, I think, we took home. I remember a head of green cabbage, that’s what sticks out.

With some other friends, I got heavy into skateboarding and for a while and we had a little skate gang, a disorganized group of punks, varying in age and degree of stupidity. There was some combination of us, these punk hoodlums, roaming the Hill at any given hour. We skated often in Lake View Cemetery (where Bruce and Brandon Lee are buried along with a lot of Seattle royalty). We gained a lot of speed down those smooth surface inclines, while being only feet away from smashing our heads on a gravestone.  I think Matt was the only one to actually stand up on his board going down some of the longer & steeper ones.

At one point, we built a quarter pipe in an alley behind the Baetz’s house. The goal was to eventually turn it into a half pipe, but my brother broke his arm and we were forced to dismantle it by Mr. Baetz (RIP) who was an attorney. Looking back on it now, some 35 years later at my age, I’d have done the same thing and kicked all those little hooligans far away from my property. We’d often rummage the neighbors garages to find chemicals and light them on fire and just plain create teenage boy mayhem. What is it about being an unsupervised teenage boy and trouble that go so well together?

As a teenager I pretended to smoke. I say pretended because I would drag, but not inhale, ala Bill Clinton. I did, that is, until behind the neighbors house in our alley John taught me how to inhale by getting a big drag in my mouth and then taking a deep breath. I did this two or three times until I got super light headed and puked. I’d never felt so shitty. I can still taste it. I came from a family of smokers and never picked it up again, but probably would have been a lifelong smoker otherwise. Thanks, John. I probably owe you my life, or part of a lung or something. (I tried to dip, too, for a summer. Is there a more disgusting habit?) That’s the thing about growing up in a place like Capitol Hill, always some older kid in the neighborhood ready to show you how to do the wrong thing, until you become that older kid and pass down the knowledge.

When I got old enough, I traded my skateboard for the fastest car I could afford, a 1973 Road Runner with a 440 V8. One night, around 17 years of age, I proved just how fast it was on I-5 southbound between Northgate and Southcenter. I think we reached Southcenter in about 3 minutes. It started by me racing a white, early 80’s IROC, weaving in and out of lanes, around, between and, almost felt like, through other cars. We left the IROC somewhere up around the 45th Street exit, it’s headlights sufficiently loosened. I looked away from the windshield twice; first to look at the speedometer bouncing up and down on the 140mph mark, the highest it would go; and, the second, to see Nick, my passenger, holding on to the dashboard for dear life, fingernails seemingly dug into the blue vinyl. Otherwise my eyes were glued forward, and my hands, 10 and 2, gripping the wheel with white knuckles. The only thing I remember hearing is the hum of the slightly loose left muffler vibrating through the undercarriage. I can’t tell you how fast we actually went, again, speedo only reached 140, and I can’t tell you how either of us are still alive.

In my twenties it was all about mountain biking, especially downhill. Don, Mel, my brother, they all biked daily and were in far better bicycle shape than I, but I did my best to keep up. I love the feeling a flying down a hill on a bike hitting curves, feeling every rock and root, flying over every jump. My favorite memories were thinking we lost Mel over a cliff as he’d rode ahead of use and we found tracks leading to what looked like his doom. We tried for a bit to see over the side, but finding nothing, we rode on with thoughts of helicopter rescue and airlifts, only to discover him a mile or so up waiting on us. The other memory was flying down this logging road at full speed, up ahead a large tree blocking the road. Those three made it under the tree just fine by ducking and darting between the branches. Me? Not so lucky. Handlebars hit a branch and I was sent flying forward as my bike stayed there. I hurt like hell, but it was just as funny as it was painful. Wish we had Go-pros back then.

Don’t put me out to pasture quite yet, although, these days I have no use for cheap thrills, no desire for that kind of excitement, no need (yet) to jump start my heart. I’m more enthusiastic about staying put in the house and avoiding, oh, I don’t know…pandemics. What a crazy world we live in, 2020. I can’t wait to tell my grandkids how I lived through it, the pain and the sacrifices. “You don’t understand…we had to stay in and watch TV and work from home and stuff. The horror! And, there were murder hornets!”

Anyway, stay safe. Thank a nurse. Wash your hands. Stay 6’ feet close to each other. And, play more games!