Friends, For Better or Worse

I'm kind of homesick today so I've taken a little stroll down memory lane, looking at old pictures. I had a lot of fun growing up. I dated, played sports, and did what most kids do, but my favorite memories all include two things: the outdoors and my friends. We never got hooked on Nintendo or PlayStation. Instead, we had fun the old fashioned way, even though we didn't always come up with the brightest ideas...

I wouldn't trade those days for any others, even though they are not mistake-free. Like the time we skipped out in the middle of church to go "diggin" (a.k.a: Driving Jake's dad's truck straight up a hill only to slide back down and ruin the bumper).

Or when my buddies came and got me after work (while I was still in my white shirt and tie) to go look for deer, but we ended up breaking the Jeep's suspension playing in a mud pit.

I never did get the mud stains out of that shirt.


One place that saw its fair share of good times is Chris's cabin. Standing on the deck of the cabin is where we first attempted to cut down a tree with our shotguns. His dad was not too happy about it, so we waited to try again until later in the summer on a campout near Pump Ridge where we unloaded our boredom on a much larger tree. Forty five shotgun shells into it we finally realized how stupid the whole idea was and moved on to waste our money elsewhere. That wounded tree still stands in that field as a monument to our senselessness.

The Utah desert is another place where many memorable moments were born. Once on a southern desert trip we found ourselves bored around the campfire. Why not tempt fate by jumping over the fire with a big box burning in it?


When that got old we began searching for more interesting ways to entertain ourselves. "How can we involve guns," we wondered aloud, "Shotguns always make things more interesting." Right about then Ryan yelled from the truck, "Hey, aerosol bug spray is flammable isn't it?" I think it was Chris who linked the two together, suggesting that we place the can near the fire's edge and shoot it into the flames.


We had fun that trip climbing up rock goblins, hiking up slot canyons, and cliff jumping into flash-flood potholes.


I'm surprised we all came out of it uninjured.

On other desert trips we'd go out to hunt turkeys, coyotes, or rabbits, but usually end up messing around, trying to talk each other into letting us shoot a hole in the other one's hat, or seeing if we could keep an old tire rolling by repeatedly hitting the top of it with bullets. Once after waking up early and hunting hard all morning, but not seeing one coyote nor a single rabbit, (and as a result developing an intense need to shoot something), Jake finally found satisfaction for his incredibly itchy trigger finger...

He moved the crosshairs of his dad's .30-06 rifle into place and sent 180 grains of copper-coated lead down range at 2800 feet per second, carrying just over three thousand foot-pounds of energy, (enough to kill a mature bull moose), to eventually strike...of all things...a meadowlark. Pieces were everywhere.


He was so proud of himself. That stunt was almost as bad as shooting a little hummingbird out of the air with high-brass pheasant load. We won't mention who did that one, (because then my wife might not speak to me for awhile).

We've definitely grown up a lot since then, but I do miss it. I love the outdoors. The rise of hungry trout to a dry fly that I tied, the drilling of a woodpecker echoing through a hollow grove of white-barked aspens, the satisfying ache in my muscles after a long hike back to camp, the blended smell of dutch oven chicken and campfire smoke, and the satisfied look in the eyes of my hard-hunted, sun-soaked dog that declares "The world is a beautiful place", all fill me with life and energy; but the people I enjoy it with are what I prize the most.

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I plan to continue making more of "the good ol' days" in the years ahead of me. I have a feeling that though they won't be as senseless as the originals, they'll be just as enjoyable.