The book I am never going to write

From the book I am never gong to write.

I might title it "Life Along the Railroad' Then again I might not.

Don and I decided to run away from home and go live in the woods next to the New York Central RR tracks.On the way we stopped by Carl's home to see if he might want to run away too. Carl was not home. Nobody was home.

Our small bodies slipped easy through the cellar window of Carl's house. In the cellar we appropiated (Stole) a quart of Jennie's peach preserves. Upstairs we located a half empty pack (or was it half full?) of Lucky Strikes and some matches. We left with our bounty and continued to run away.

It was dark now. In the woods we located our hut made of small trees, leaves and grasses. It was a very small hut being about two high, four feet long and a few feet wide. By the hut was a five gallon steel open top bucket. We built a fire in the bucket and placed it at the entrance to our hut.

With our hands we reached into top of the Mason jar to snare a peach half. It did not take long to eat all the peaches and drink the sweet thick syrup.

In our hut with our feet to the open end and smoked a few of the Lucky Strikes. For blankets we had burlap sacks. Don slid his body down into one of the sacks and when he straightened his legs out he touched the hot fire bucket. Whoosh! The burlap caught fire but Don quickly extinguished it.

So we lay there and soon the fire went out and we shivered and shook. Many trains passed in the night a hundred or so yards from where we shivered and shook. They were mostly steam trains but now and then a Diesel train would hum past. Had it been daylight we would have run to see the new fangled train, the mighty Diesel.

Come morning time we decided running away was not really a good idea. We went home to where I lived on the cliff overlooking mighty Lake Erie.

There we learned nobody had missed us.

It was not many years later when Don was taken prisoner in North Korea and I was offshore there on a minesweeper.

Don told me when we were much older that being a prisoner of war in North Korea was not much worse then was his life growing up at home.

It was that way.

And nobody missed us then either.

voyager