THE FENCE TRAIL

The family and I were watching the movie "A Christmas Story" when one of the scenes really hit home and brought back some great memories. The scene was when the boys were walking along a path of some sort, on the way to school, with old wooden fences as part of the scenery. The wooden fences had several gaps in them to allow access, permitted or not, each way.

My chums, in the era of my fourth grade grammar school experience, had already established a way home from school through people's back yards. This one day, they invited me to join them. We started out by climbing over a fence to gain admittance to the first challenging back yard. The challenge in this back yard was to race to the other side of the yard and climb over the fence to the next yard without the big collie attacking us. Most of my friends made it to the other side; however, as I was climbing over the chain link fence on the other side of the yard, the big collie emerged and, barking away, he came directly toward us (me). I love dogs and I was all ready to make friends with him until he jumped on me, halfway over the fence, and nipped me on the upper leg, about four inches from my groin. To this day, I still have the scar, which I wear as a medal of honor, although few have seen the scar (mostly women, who appeared to be distracted from the scar, for some other reason).

As we were wending our way toward our next conquest, a woman who had spied us trooping through her yard started shouting at us, so we took off and ran out the driveway, where she threw a crutch at us. Fortunately, the crutch hit no one. As I think about this incident today, I wonder if the proper thing to do would have been to return the crutch to her -- or not.

Two houses down, we resumed our fence trail activities. This time, the obstacle was a wooden fence. Luckily, our advance scouting patrol found a wide wooden slat that could be swung aside for easy entrance.

Once again, we where harassed by the occupants of the house and as we ran out of the yard, I ran into a bed of mud, where my foot sank down about a foot. Fortunately, I was wearing rubbers over my shoes, but unfortunately, the mud sucked one of my rubbers off my shoe -- never to be found again. Some story I'd have to tell my parents.

On another excursion through the fence trail, I came upon the skull of a dog. Since the following day, we were to bring in items to school for science class, I thought it would be a good idea to bring the skull to school.

When the teacher, I think her name was Miss Smith, asked if we had any items for science class, I raised my hand and said I had something. I brought the skull to the front of the class and as soon as Miss Smith saw the skull, she said, "Get that thing out of here!"

"But, Miss Smith..." I started to say.

"I want no further discussion, get it out of here." I went outside the classroom and put the skull on the floor outside the door. "Where did you put it?" Miss Smith inquired, unpleasantly. I told her. She said, "I want that thing off the school premises."

"Can I take it when I go home from school?" I begged.

"I suppose so. In the meantime, put it in this box so we can't see the ugly thing."

I complied. So much for scientific inquiry. However, the fence trail, continued to be a daily routine until we all tired of it and went on to something else.