Killer Bums will Eat You, You’ll be Buried Alive, and the Mountain will Crumble

Thomas remembers things parents say out of unfounded fears to discourage their kids from wholesome behavior.

When Tommy was ten, he, his brothers, and a couple of neighborhood brats thought that it would be an adventure to explore the tunnels that emptied water from gutters into washes. They gathered flashlights and were going to set out on their expedition, but one of the kids could not go. His parent learned about what they were intending to do and made up a story about how homeless people live in the tunnels, along with bats, and other animals and it would be too dangerous. Of course, this was a huge lie. Tommy and his group spent several hours in the five foot tall tunnels and never came across a single one of those things, instead they found discarded items that had washed down from the side of roads. That kid missed out that day, but later was talked into going another day without telling his parents first. Incidentally, that kid became very troubled in middle school and ended up in juvenile hall for setting his home on fire.

When Tommy was twelve, he and his friend Willy designed a hideout which consisted of digging a hole in Tommy’s yard, covering it with strong planks of wood, and hiding the planks under soil. A trap door would allow them entry. They figured that the hideout would be approximately the size of a room. Tommy had been intrigued by the idea from reading The Three Investigators, a mystery series about three teenage boys who solve crimes and have a crime lab hidden under piles of junk in a junkyard. Anyway, Tommy and Willy began to dig.

Over the course of several days, they dug a sizable hole but had never anticipated what to do with all of the removed dirt. Tommy’s dad started to get annoyed about their tearing up the yard. For some reason, Tommy didn’t mind doing all that work but did not want to clean the chicken coop or pick up cigarette butts—a mystery to Tommy’s father Nolan. But, it was not Tommy’s dad that put an end to the dirty fun.

Every evening Willy would return home by bicycle and he would be covered in soil or dust. When Willy’s father learned about the hole, he became concerned and started telling Willy about how the ground would cave in on the boys and Willy would be buried alive. Total nonsense, but it was enough to cause Willy to stop assisting. Tommy continued digging by himself for several days but finally had to concede that he did not know what to do with the removed dirt and finally was ordered to fill in the hole by Nolan. It was no longer any fun without his friend. Bitterly, Tommy buried a time capsule in the hole as he filled it in.

A few years later, when Tom was 15, he and a friend from around the corner wanted to climb Frenchman Mountain (often wrongly referred to as “Sunrise Mountain”). Tom was a veteran climber by this time, having climbed to the top many times, but his friend Teve had not climbed it and Teve’s father was adamant against the idea. “That mountain is full of faults. It will crumble on you. Too dangerous.” Teve eventually ignored his ignorant father and climbed the mountain, and had a blast without a single injury.

In a city where children have very little to do, parental denial of wholesome fun (using silly safety arguments) stifles and forces children to have to disobey and lie. Thomas is glad that he was denied very little of the adventure of being a kid.