Adbentures With Friends

ADBENTURES WITH FRIENDS

         Nearly every outing with my friend Vicky usually turned into an adventure. We were teenagers in the seventies, growing up in a small town where we usually found plenty to do  and had a lot of fun together.

         Vicky was more athletic and physically stronger than I was. She was the only girl I knew who raced mini bikes and was usually the only girl who competed. Her dad raced motorcycles and had gotten her interested when she accompanied him to races. Eventually, Vicky graduated to racing motorcycles as well, usually the only female racing against mostly males.

         One Spring day Vicky invited me to take a ride to the Sand Chassels with her. The Sand Chassels, which I may have misspelled,  was an area located just north of town which was basically a sandy bowl where kids would take their mini bikes to climb from the base of this bowl.

         We set out that day on Vicky’s racing bike, which was not street legal, so to get us from her house to the Sand Chassels, we had to ride through town, and took precautions to not call attention to the fact that the motorcycle shouldn’t have been on the street. We wore helmets, even though back then there was no helmet law. I had had to borrow Vicky’s dad’s helmet, which was way too big.

Also, there should have been footrests for the passenger (me) and there were none, so Vicky told me to just ride with my legs bent, so if a cop saw us from a distance, it would appear as if there actually were footrests. We were so clever.

         We made it to the Sand Chassels where we had the place to ourselves. After riding around the base of the pit for awhile, Vicky thought it would be a good idea to teach me how to ride a motorcycle.

         The bike itself was not very big; about 125cc, I believe, but I wasn’t as strong as my friend and could barely hold the bike up. After giving me a brief lesson on how the clutch and gas controls worked, Vicky decided we were ready to go.  

         “Whatever you do, don’t climb any hills,” she warned before she climbed on the back of the bike and wrapped her arms around me. 

         At first, it was stop and go as I attempted to get comfortable with the main controls on the motorcycle. The ground was pretty soft and initially I navigated slowly as I familiarized myself with the controls. Suddenly, I hit the gas too hard and felt the bike get away from me and we began to climb. 

         “Don’t climb, don’t climb!” I heard Vicky’s panicked voice and I tried to maneuver the motorcycle away from the hill, but still hadn’t released the gas. Then, Vicky was gone and I had this image of her rolling down the sandy hill, and I scared myself. Unsure of how to stop the machine, I simply let go of the controls and allowed myself to wreck. My oversized helmet fell off my head and from where I had fallen I watched it roll down the hill.

         “Pat, you scared the piss out of me.” Vicky was walking toward me and I looked at her and began to laugh. She had indeed wet her pants.

         Vicky took off her panties and jeans and hung them on a rock. She wrapped her denim jacket around her waist and we waited for her clothes to dry. It hadn’t been but fifteen minutes before we saw kids coming from a distance on their mini bikes. Quickly, she got dressed in her damp clothes and we rode back home.

         As was our custom, we laughed about the incident later as we entertained everyone but our parents with the details of our adventure. There were many more adventures, of course; both before and after this one. 

         There was the time we ended up in a one-car rollover. We had taken a summer school class together and, along with another female student who liked to drive her car fast, we drove to a local drive-in to get sodas during a break.  As we returned to the school (on a Thru Street), we came upon a hill and our driver accelerated as we began a short climb.

         When we reached the top of the hill, she did not slow down as we started to descend. At the bottom of the hill of the street we were on,  a street going east-west crossed, and it also became an unpaved road. Our driver braked hard when the car met loose gravel and began to swerve. She lost control and steered sharply in the opposite direction of where the car was going. It rolled over onto its top and we stopped.

         At this point we were two blocks from school and were unhurt, with the exception of the enormous bumps we three had due to the impact of our heads hitting the windshield. Our mothers knew of that particular adventure and they became angry, after they knew we were alright.

         Vicky was more athletic than I was but she managed to get me to join softball and volleyball, and this continued after we graduated from high school. I became inactive for many years, but Vicky continued her various physical activities. She played softball regularly and learned karate; earning her various belts and becoming a karate instructor. My friend was the picture of health, her body toned and strong. Often I would see her driving around town, enjoying the day on her Harley Davidson.

         Vicky’s final adventure occurred in January, 1992. With her boyfriend, she had been on his small plane, which he was also piloting,   when they crashed in the Big Horn Mountains in northern Wyoming. It was several days before a Search team was able to get to them and bring them down the mountain. She was thirty-seven years old.

         We never searched for Adventure; adventure found us, even in the the small, uneventful Wyoming town where we grew up. Our mothers might beg to differ, but those scary adventures were never planned. Adventures wouldn’t be adventures if they were planned. 

         Adventures are best when experienced with friends, and they are most appreciated when we experience them through the open eyes of our youth. Sometimes it’s the memories of those “adventures” that make our adult problems much easier to handle, if we view them as adventures.  For that reason, I’m confident that Adventure will continue to find me.