On the mountain road

On many a summer childhood day the declarative call went out to the kitchen door, "We're going on a bike ride" and the answering maternal call bounced back, "Be careful and be back by suppertime."

That simple.

Yes it was the country and we had simple bucolic roads to travel where the largest danger lurking was a mean dog on Billy Snyder's farm. He would run out and nip at your heels. Terrifying. To be avoided. But still, to get to those side roads meant navigating stretches of the heavily traveled Rt. 322. I still shudder when I think of our sometimes wobbly passages on pavement with no shoulders, high drop-offs, sometimes horse-and-buggy traffic snarls when cars would shoot out behind the slow moving vehicles, and always, always steady traffic. But once the secondary roads were reached we could amble at our leisure. And we often stopped at creeks, ponds, and shady trees to while away the time,whistling through blades of summer grasses.

One afternoon, however, bored with the usual, we decided to stray a bit further. I can't remember if we ever even broached the idea to our parents of riding up to the mountains, a ride far off our beaten path, to visit the radio station there - one we listened to all the time and thought it would fun to explore. We rode and rode - the actual mileage way beyond our scanty memories, anxiety mounting as we kept going. We knew that my friend's grandmother lived on the same mountain road and if worse came to worst, we could stop there and have our parents pick us up. Once committed we just kept riding. The trees got thicker, the road steeper and more lonely.

 All of a sudden a car roared by us and then stopped and backed up. I'm remembering at least three men, all scruffy, I'm sure from my now adult perspective, all high on something, called out to us "Hey girls, want to go for a ride?" Petrified, we said no and kept pedaling as they trolled along beside us. Then one of them said, "lets get 'em". The words tumble down through almost 60 years just as clearly as when they were uttered. And one guy opened the door and got out.

So who else was on the mountain that day? I didn't notice the rush of wings, but as we were pedaling indeed as though our lives depended on it, another one of the guys said, "Aw, let 'em go." And guy No.1 reluctantly climbed back in and they roared away.

We stopped. We had to because you can't ride bike with legs of jelly. We probably cried. And you know, my memory stops at that point. We may have pushed on to Grandma Fry's house. We may have turned down the mountain and literally sailed home. We obviously got home somehow. Everything is obliterated from the moment the car sped off. Horror does that.

I'm sure we were reprimanded. I'm sure parental hearts beat much faster at the telling of our story. I'm sure we never ventured beyond the known again. But we still were allowed to ride freely - now with fresh eyes.

So, yes, we lived and biked among birds, butterflies, creeks, dairy cattle in idyllic meadows, small towns with grocery stores, schools and churches in those long summer days.

But up in the mountains where life had shadows, it was not the same.