Is there any better summer than that final one before your senior year of high school? Probably. Hopefully. But that brief period is a one-time, flash-in-a-pan, over-before-you-know-it perfect mixture of freedom and responsibility which includes freedom from responsibility. I had a job, a cool car, pretty girlfriend, and no real clue where I was headed in life. I didn’t care and it didn’t matter. I cared about winning football games and not embarrassing myself at local weightlifting competitions for varsity athletes. I cared about beer and parties, titties and fucking.
For football players, two-a-day practices started first of August so our summer was June and July. We still were expected to show up for voluntary weight room workouts a few days per week, but we wanted to, so that was a given.
We spent more than a few days on the river, meaning the Tennessee, between Madison and Morgan Counties in North Alabama.
Ditto Landing was the general spot in the 80s but it was nothing like it is now. It had a nice enough marina, but that was about it. What we were there for was the old state docks and the sketchy rope swings on the undeveloped, smallish cut banks south of the marina. Entry was through thick pine woods with some mixed hardwoods and curtains of mosquitos during late spring and most of early summer. Cottonmouths, copperheads, and various species of rattlesnake including those local to the are and some completely made-up served as additional cautions, mostly for the city (meaning suburb) girls we brought there.
The first time out served as an initiation of sorts involving beer and legends of all the young people who died here because they didn’t swing out far enough and hit rocks or stumps in the shallows, or couldn’t hack the current and thus were sealed to a watery fate—and muddy water, at that. This probably wasn’t total bullshit—those dangers existed—but those who succumbed to them were always “the sister of a friend of the night-shift manager… .” You know how it goes.
I wouldn’t say I was scared shitless my first time out, but I was a tad concerned. The bank was higher above water than I expected. The rope so far out on a long branch that you had to climb out on the branch to retrieve it. The branch itself, and the tree it was attached to, was big and sturdy, but who really knew how much it had been tested, how strong it remained, were there termites…? Another ten feet and I would’ve begged-off, sat back against a moss-covered tree and drank beer with my girl. But it wasn’t that high. A little more than tree-stand height. It was a gimme. Someone had the rope in hand which made it even easier. “Who’s next?”
Like the teen asshole in some movie, I stood up, drained my Miller Lite, crushed the can and threw it over the edge. I heard it clatter on the bank as I took the rope, ran, and leapt.
***
It had been a year of firsts. Finally got my driver’s license and got laid at 16. Went off on a beach trip down to the Gulf with just my friends and I at 17. All of the teenage milestones were being passed one-by-one. I was feeling older all the time, yet it quickly became apparent nothing much changed. Older was only a little better than younger with the addition of a world ready to laugh at you for fucking up. Congratulations, Scooter, you’ve made it to where everyone already is! If you’ve ever been hiking in the hills and reached what you thought was the highest peak around only to see rolling hills stretching beyond, and ever higher, you get the picture.
Busting that first nut is a lot of fun until your girl tells you her period’s late. Traveling out of state under your own steam at 17 is great until Florida cops catch you drinking. The fact that girls are “sometimes just late” or the cops give you a break and make your pour it out on the side of the road becomes what they call baggage. It’s not how you think of it then, but that’s what it is.
***
I let go of the rope just before I began to swing back. The plummet to the water took no time at all. Remember that, you crazy kids.
The water was colder than I expected in mid-summer and the current much faster. I was surprised, and to this day believe I did not panic. I was alwaays aa strong swimmer, consecutive summers of swim lessons and the YMCA saw to that: Minnow, Fish, Flying Fish, etc. . Neighborhood pools were the destinations of my little kid summers. Eventually passed the test and became a lifeguard in college. Capability was never an issue.
So I instinctively guided myself towards the bank, stayed afloat and let the current push me while I steered myself. Stood up on the bank downstream and looked back, fists raised like Rocky to the half-drunk whoops and hollers by the brain trust atop the cliff back upstream. I was farther down than I thought I’d be, the caterwauling still audible, but faint.
Hitting that cool water and dealing with the current, I realized years later, was graduating from high school. It was my first live performance with a pick-up band and busting a guitar string before the endd of the first song. It was a few more pregnancy scares (who quits fucking, really?). It was decades of marriage and raising children. It was three careers and never getting fired until I was well into my 50s. It’s watching your kids succeed, and fail, and succeed some more.
It’s getting far enough downstream that most of the whooping and hollering is heard only in memory. It’s gradually losing control of your fingers aand wondering if itt will stop at alll before it stop forr gooood, then saaying fuck itt and not corrrecting aall the crazy ttypos because, really, it’s fine becaause it is.
It just is.
###