Hopping through the woods

There was a crowd of people at our house on

Goat Hollow Road

on a beautiful summer day.  Ethan Benefield was playing w/ me outside so I decided to take him for a walk in the woods.  We went to the back property line and headed south.  After a little while we started downhill and I started to carry him. 

We were in the deep woods where there isn’t a lot of undergrowth, so the going was easy.  I noticed that when I hopped I would float almost like a balloon.  I hopped up, not very high, but it would be three or four seconds till I was back down close enough to the ground to be able to touch it.  Then I wouldn’t really land, but would just use my foot sort of as a paddle and propel myself forward w/ just my toes touching.  It was great fun floating down the hill, but I didn’t have great control over exactly where I went.

Eventually there was a big washout on my left, with a vertical face down about 30 feet.  I kept drifting toward it w/ each hop and I didn’t have enough contact w/ the ground to redirect myself away from it.  So when I saw that I wouldn’t be able to avoid it I gave a big last hop and went out over open space.  I went sideways enough that I crossed the gulley and landed on the far side bank, which was only about 10 feet lower than the side I’d left.  Normally a jump of 25 feet w/ a drop of 10 feet would be pretty jarring, but this wasn’t.  I did use both feet instead of just one like I had been, though.

I walked ahead and noticed an old concrete frame in the hillside to my left, completely overgrown w/ brush and trees.  To the right as I walked on down to where the gulley ended was someone’s back yard.  It occurred to me that it was a good thing I’d crossed the gulley or I might have hopped right into the house.  When I realized I was almost in someone’s yard I stopped to try to look around and make sure we didn’t surprise anyone. 

I saw an old woman who had been hanging up laundry, so I tried to hide, but she had seen us.  She walked into the woods and up to us and handed Ethan one of those little straws full of colored sugar.  He was excited about the gift and wanted to know if he could eat it.  I said he could and never thought till later that I didn’t know anything about the woman who gave it and I might have been teaching him to accept candy from strangers. 

Ethan wasn’t wearing a shirt and w/ all this hopping on a summer day he had gotten slippery, so we decided to head back home.  An instant later we were back in our yard.  I went in the door and Emma had set up the space right inside the door as her room where she had one of those Japanese style dividers separating it off from the rest of the room.  She said she needed some private space because the crowd had taken over the house.  I said that was fine, but I didn’t think right in front of the door was the best place.

Later, I went out to the barn because I heard there was drag racing starting there.  People were taking their cars into the barn and starting their runs inside on a floor of wood chips over dirt.  They would gun the engines and throw chips against the back wall and roar out the door.  I started talking w/ Bob Moser about what kind of car I wanted to try the run in.  I first said I was going to use an early 70’s Dodge Charger that had all the hot car stuff – huge engine, jacked up rear end, big wide back tires, etc., but as we talked about things that would be fun to race we kept changing to different cars and laughing about what it would be like to race in it.  I finally decided I wanted to run a Rambler w/ a U-Haul trailer behind it.