Life on the Edge: Childhood Adventures of The Flying Dingbat Brothers

My brother Donnie atop the Mizpah Gate at SW Junior College 1969.
Campus security was not amused!

We always liked high places. We lived in the treetops in our yard - big oaks with brittle branches. Mom finally quit looking out the kitchen window. The view must have been worrying for a mother. Her two sons, who seemed to believe they were either Tarzan or Cheetah, would inevitably be swinging from the branches of the brittle old post oaks in our back yard or making like a gibbon, swinging arm over arm from branch to branch of the Chinaberry trees. We were pretty good at it too, though Donnie was somewhat better than me. My mom one day found one neighbor kid dangling from the Chinaberry with a broken bone (leg or arm, I don't remember). He had attemped the arm over arm trip round the Chinaberry that my brother and I used to do, only he was scared so he tied a rope around his leg in case he fell. 

He did!

It's fortunate he didn't tie the rope round his neck. Mom cut him down and called Edward's mom and he went off to the doctor. Nobody got sued for childhood stupidity fortunately. We were safe anyway as we were too poor to sue.

This is pretty much my youthful
self-image back then.

My kid brother, God rest his soul, and I made a ramp by our driveway on a little rise. We would come tearing down the street on our bikes, hit the ramp and go flying. My brother, not the finest bicycle mechanic in the world followed me over the ramp. He sailed up into the air (we used to get a couple of feet in altitude our of a jump) and as he left the ramp, his front wheel came off. He hit the ground, forks first, but gymnast that he was he managed to tuck and roll up to his feet. He looked around and spied the front wheel rolling off across the neighbor's front yard and took off in hot pursuit, managing to catch it before it ran out into the cross street half a block away. 

My brother was the epitome of cool, unlike his awkward older brother. I have two pictures, one of me and one of him doing a hand spring over a heavy sawhorse we had purloined for the purpose. Donny's image was captured at the peak of the flip, perfect form, toes pointed, back straight headed for a 3 point landing. I was better at photography than gymnastics. The picture of me shows a gangling kid, long torso, short legs, sort of a skinny flying troll look. I looked like someone had flung a bag of loose bones over the sawhorse. I was headed for a -5 point landing and a face plant. I told my brother his looked so much better than mine because I was the better photographer.

 

How Donnie actually looked!

Life back then was high-risk and a ton of fun!

Our friend Leslie Gilley had a great long rope that hung from a huge tree overhanging a usually dry creekbed in the pasture behind his house. I asked him how often he replaced it. Since his older brother had installed it years ago and the knot was above his climbing ceiling when he was 12, he told me, "When it breaks."

We would climb out on another limb that over hung a bend in the creek, grab the rope and swing out over the creekbed, back and forth until it slowed down enough to slide to a stop in the gravel that filled the bed of the creek at that spot. One day I climbed out on the limb with the rope, leaned back and launched myself out into space. As I approached the bottom of the swing where momentum reached its zenith, I heard a crack above as the rope parted. I hit the gravel in the creekbed butt first and at pretty good speed. Fortunately, I've been blessed with very tough bones and nothing was broken.

Leslie's comment was, "Hey man, you broke my rope!"

I answered, "I'd have been happy for you to break it."

My brother, the gymnast, decided he was going to do a triple flip on the trampoline. He finally did it, but got a bunch of bruises and sprained his neck along the way. One day he was late for school on Monday. Mom flipped back the covers on his bed and found him sleeping in his skivvies and covered with bruises. Turns out he'd been motorcycle racing, had run off the track, through a barbed wire fence and crashed in a gully sans bike. I'm not sure Mom knew he'd been doing motocross or that he could ride a motorcycle for that matter.

In the middle on the bottom,
where else would I be?

I thought I'd outgrown being stupid until I became a staff member at Lone Star Camp and was introduced to water skiing. I got to do a lot of stunts in our weekly ski show, I think, mainly because I used to do such spectacular wipe-outs. Remember: not as coordinated as my gymnast brother.

I was once jerked off my skis (on purpose), but then lost my swimsuit while being dragged around the lake (not on purpose). Though, I told the ministers wives watching from the doc that I had done that on purpose. We all laughed and laughed.

I've got so many stories about my brother and I and the disasters we suffered doing risky things. I once kicked myself in the back of the head while trying to barefoot ski. We did pyramids for ski shows. I was the center guy at the bottom. When the pyramid collapsed at the end, accidentally or on purpose, Guess who got fallen on?

The point of the story is that I look back on my misadventures fondly. I've been almost run over by a motorboat, jerked off a lifeguard tower by a ski boat, and was nearly immolated during a campfire skit of Elijah and the Priests of Baal (Donny was in on that one.) My best friend kicked loose a 500 pound boulder that hit me square in the chest while we were free climbing a 40 foot cliff over the Brazos River. Not sure how, but when the stars cleared up I was hanging from a scrub of a tree 30 feet above a field of rocks.

As a grownup I risked 5 nonprofit startups, unpaid, wrote more than one million dollars in grants, became a nonprofit consultant, a freelance commercial writer and am working on publishing a novel (the sixth book I've done). I taught self-defense for staff of a mental facility treating often violent kids from diminutive 3 year olds to 17 year old football players and one powerful 300 pound Samoan kid. I wrangled 20 horses, read a book on how to break horses and trained several to ride. I cut trails with emotionally disturbed kids and road 5 days a week, 5 hours a day and never lost a kid. I took youth groups camping and led canoe trips down Texas rivers. I taught canoeing and swimming and rescued a drowning steer from the overflowing Trinity River in a canoe with the help of a junior lifesaver girl I'd just graduated the day before. WE SAVED THE COW!

My wrangling days....

We made some memories and took some risks. My Mom had two ADHD boys and she raised us just right. We were allowed to take risks and we took 'em. She didn't hover. We grew up to be good people with the right blend of courage and kindness. My brother and I once extricated the car of a church singer from stuck high centered on a curb with the front wheels dangling in a deep mudhole. After we leveraged his car from the mud, Donny and I then walked home in the freezing rain afterward. And no, he didn't offer us a ride (we were on foot) because we might get mud on his mother's car's upholstery. Walking home, wet and shivering across a pasture waist high in wet grass, my brother and I felt like we'd won a battle against evil. After all, Steve did make it in time to sing for vespers. We made it home to a hot shower.  

I lost my brother his sophomore year in high school, killed by a stupid prank by a friend. Christmas, the night before he died, we sat up late talking about how we would do Christmas when we grew up and had families. He talked about his plans to work on improving his grades so he could go back to church academy with his friends. We used to fight like cats and dogs. I can't remember why we wound up in wrestling matches. We quit doing it when things got too dangerous and chances of hurting each other became too real. 

In that last day, however, my brother and I bonded as we never had before. And when Christ comes to take us home, I'll be looking around for my brother. We're still not done swinging on ropes, skiing, climbing trees and sailing. I never got a chance to take him out on my Hobie Cat and catch a full breeze and tip her up on one pontoon. 

Oh, the things we'll do once we have forever in which to do them.

© 2022 by Tom King

Tom king