It was 1966 and I was about six years old, living at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. We lived in new-ish housing. There was no grass in the yards, just straw, held down with tar. Made rubbing alcohol part of the nightly clean up.
Behind our quarters, there was sort of a low spot in the land, not quite a ditch, which would fill with water often after rains. A bunch of us kids tried to build a raft out of a pallet to float in this water. It didn’t float and we decided we needed to fill in the open spaces of the pallet with more wood, which we didn’t have.
There was still construction going on in the area. One day, I was with my brother when we came across this big, muddy crater. In the center of this crater was a board that I thought could be used on the raft. I told my brother to go get it but he refused. So I went in to get the board and to show him that he was a wimp for not getting the board.
I got maybe ten feet away from the board, when I sunk in deeper and the mud filled up my cowboy boots. I couldn’t move! I yelled at my brother to get our mom, and he just stood there and stared at me. Finally, after yelling a couple more times, he took off. My mom brought a neighbor woman, who went to where some construction trailers were and brought back one of the workers. Wearing rubber boots, he waded in and proceeded to dig me out with his hands. My mom kept saying to leave the boots if he had to.
Just as he freed me, cowboy boots and all, the fire department arrived and one fireman carried me all the way home, placing me directly in the bathtub. I was so embarassed and was afraid there would be a big report about me on the front page of the newspaper.
Though I didn’t want to leave the boots in the mud, they were ruined, and it was around five or six years before I got another pair.
Once a stick in the mud, now you’re an International Playboy!! It has all the makings of one of those Disney homely-girl-turns-princess movies. (unless your real name is Deuce Layboy. . .)
I can’t really top the getting stuck part, but I do have a similar yarn from my kidhood.
The town we lived in was down in a valley and was famed for its artesian wells. The local weekly newspaper even referred to the town as “Fountain City.” Many houses had their own private artesian wells, some were even indoors. This is all just to say that the water level was very close to the surface. No basements in town, and most houses were up on brick pedestal like things so you could play under the houses on almost every street that was in the valley section of town. The surrounding hills – in every direction – were less bothered by the water level problem, of course.
Our house was in that flat part and we had a big side lot that was all grown up in weeds. We decided we needed to make a cave! So we got shovels and picks and all that type of tool and began digging out this 10’ square area of dirt about a foot and a half deep. Took most of the day. Then we found some planks under the house or in a wood shed that were maybe 12’ long and like a foot wide and probably an inch thick. Would have made sense if they were 1x12’s but they were just boards to us. We put them over the hole and then threw all the dirt back on top of them to make it look like there wasn’t a cave there. We even had a dug out area for the entrance. We crawled in and set up candles to light it up and had all sorts or stuff in there so we could play like we were cavemen. That lasted the rest of the day.
That night it rained, and the whole roof of the cave got soggy enough that it collapsed. Nothing but mud the next day.
All that work for an hour or two of being cavemen.
We gave up on digging and stuck to leantos and huts we could make out of weeds after that.
[sup]What can I say?[/sup][/ul]