We were awakened by the strangest sound we had ever heard. It was obviously made by an animal, but we were frightened and excited and ran to the open window of the barn loft that were sleeping in and peeked out to see what it could be.
Chuck and I were sleeping off the effects of a long bike ride to a farm close to his parents cabin in Readlyn. The cabin was around Readlyn somewhere, maybe really in Buckcreek, but somewhere on the Wapsipinicon river. For some reason we never went to the cabin, just to this farm nearby. Looking at the map today, it looks like it must have been about a twenty-five mile ride, which was a chunk of distance for two kids about twelve years old. And just to fully occupy the victim position, I was probably on my red bicycle while Chuck was on some kind of ten speed.
My red bicycle was a sturdy, basic conveyance. Not the heavy, big-tired cruiser variety, but one speed only and rugged. It had two narrow bars that came back from the handlebars rather than one wide tube. That was its only concession to styling. But it stayed with me for a long time. And it took some major abuse, not the least of which was the entertaining pastime of getting it up to speed, standing on only one pedal and then jumping off and watching the bike roll on by itself for ten or fifteen yards before keeling over.
But this trip it was simply a long pedal to an unknown destination. Chuck knew the way, but I didn't have a clue. So, he was the leader. Chuck was a fixture in my life from about age five through tenth grade. In eleventh grade I moved to Des Moines. But until that departure, Chuck was my pal for comics, trail tag, campouts, sleepovers, girl talk, speculation, creek-damming, crawdad-catching, wrestling, pole vaulting with bamboo poles, and designing and at least starting to dig our own personal fallout shelter.
He was in a wealthy family, unlike me. You could tell they were rich because they had a canoe and they went to Canada every year. His mom worked teaching science in the same school where my father worked, and his dad worked in a big office where they had piles of punched out computer cards with little numbers on them. Before that he had worked for Dad's Root Beer. They had Mogen David wine in their refrigerator, which was how you knew that they weren't religious like we were. They couldn't be religious, because they were Unitarians, and we were Baptists. But they had butter crust bread. And Chuck had all the comics I could read, which usually got me in trouble: "Did you come over here to play with me or to read my comic books!?"
They were really nice to me, and I spent a lot of time there. It was the fear of God, too, when once during a sleepover where Chuck and I were giggling hilariously late into the night his Mom yelled out, "Chuck, if you don't keep quiet, Paul can't stay over anymore!" That would have been a major loss for me. And though she probably was just making an idle, sleepless threat, we shut up after that, or at least giggled more quietly.
One year, probably when my mom was in the hospital (See "Independence"), they kept me at their house all through the Christmas season. I think that I was sick, because I remember sleeping and lying on the couch all day. But the enormous luxury of that holiday season was that they bought each of the children, including me, an entire case of soda pop. It was just unbelievable to think that I could at any time go over, open a bottle, and have a drink. I felt I was living in immeasurable luxury. And at the time, a case of pop was probably about two bucks. But it worked for me.
Chuck and I would get in arguments now and then and break off our friendship, which usually ended with some kind of statement on my part like: "You wait until summer when you don't have any friends, then you'll wish I was there." Or, later in the year it would be: "You wait until fall, when you don't have any friends, then you'll wish I was there." Eventually he noted that I was running out of seasons, but we usually ended up playing all of the time anyway.
We have one ongoing disagreement over who was the author of our famous phrase "In there for ball three!" which was made up after a poorly placed pitch left some other male child huddled on the ground in pain. Of course, the phrase "in there" usually precedes "for strike three," so the humor was self-evident in context. We know that we were both there, but no one can prove authorship. I'm betting it was really Chuck, but I'm not letting him know.
So we had fallen asleep in this loft in near darkness. We had arrived late and could hardly see where we were. I suppose he knew, but I didn't. And then this bizarre sound woke us up. I can only approximate it as a very loud, ardent version of "ah-um-nah," with the stress on the second syllable. That at least is how we voiced it later when we used the sound as our in-joke message to each other if we saw a pretty girl. Which was appropriate because the sound was made by an extremely aroused stallion as he chased a slightly elusive female around the fenced-in area just behind the barn. It was our first exposure to animal passion. We had no idea that there were sounds associated with the process. And though we still didn't know much about it, we took the sound home with us, and we could still use it today, if we ever saw a pretty girl together. That's a bit of a rarity nowadays, but that's another story, somewhere else on the Iowa map.
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Next Chapter, #3. Eldora