Incredibly Stupid Things We Did As Kids
If you're not from Mulberry you may be starting to get a little bit of an idea of what life was like in this dusty little one red light town. Often times peoples image of Mulberry is that of the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina. While there were some similarities there were also quite a few differences, probably the biggest one being there were a whole lot more Goobers and Gomers per capita in Mulberry than Mayberry. Looking back on some of the stuff me and my buddies did back in the day we definitely fit into the "Goober and Gomer" category .Other than playing sports and fishing there wasn't a whole lot of organized activities for us so we had to amuse ourselves. You take a bunch of bored "Goobers and Gomers" and some crazy stuff can happen. Thanks to the grace of God and a little luck and somehow in spite of our best efforts to kill or do serious bodily harm to ourselves somehow we all managed to survive. I could probably write a book on this particular subject that would be fairly lengthy but for now I'll just share a little bit about three of the more incredibly stupid recurring feats. Momma's and Daddies don't let your kids participate in any of these activities!
Crawling Through the Storm Drains
It was a simple thing that we figured out that could provide hours and hours of incredibly stupid fun. Take a manhole cover off, jump down into the storm drains that ran under Northeast Mulberry, pull the cover back on top and there was a great maze of tunnels. We'd crawl on our hands and knees all over or more appropriately under the place without any concern for snakes, rats, poisonous gases or whatever flesh eating bacteria might be living in those pipes. I do recall scraped up hands and knees but from what I can remember the most serious damage any of us came away with from this adventure was some serious ringing in the ears when one of my buddies who wasn't with us on a particular underground adventure figured out where we were and tossed a pack of lit firecrackers into the drain directly in front of us. I remember the sound of those things exploding sounding like bombs going off and the echo they made lasted well beyond the last actual explosion.
Riding Our Bikes Behind The Truck That Sprayed Mosquitos
The mosquitos that lived in the Mulberry area seemed larger than many species of birds. I'm sure they carried diseases back then but nothing like Malaria, West Nile or Zika or if they did we just didn't know about them. What we did know was that there were billions of them that would come out at night to bite and chew on any exposed flesh. To combat them the city had an old pick up truck with some kind of fogger/spraying device that would go up and down the streets at night spraying a thick white smoke that contained unknown amounts of unknown chemicals that were supposed to kill or at least send the mosquitos into some chemically induced high that would make them quit biting for a while. I don't recall it ever working but I do recall when we heard the truck coming we'd all hop on our bikes and ride along directly behind the truck in this chemical fog.
The last couple of years they have been spraying for mosquitos in the area of Texas we just moved from in an attempt to reduce the risk of exposure to mosquitos carrying the West Nile virus. It was quite controversial with good Momma's and Daddies all up in arms about the potential harm this was doing to their kiddos. All I can remember in Mulberry would be that if my mom heard the truck first she would yell out "Kent the mosquito truck is coming, you'd better get your bike and get out there with your buddies"!
Swimming In Alligator Infested Phosphate Pits
To the non-Mulberrian you would call it a "pond", to us they were phosphate pits which were actually nothing more than big holes left in the ground as a result of the phosphate mining operations (remember Mulberry is the Phosphate Capital of the World). These pits didn't really seem to have a bottom, and with few exceptions the water was stagnant so it was full of who knows what that had been dumped in there or carried there by storm water runoff. These pits were also home to a bunch of big gators. When I say "big" I mean 8-12 footers were not uncommon. We'd see them and stupidly figured that as long as we didn't go near them or where they nested that they wouldn't bother us. Thankfully we weren't wrong and as best as I can remember I never lost a friend to an alligator although a few pet dogs that liked to swim mysteriously went missing including my beloved Spot. Again, I can't ever recall my mom saying "Kent there are man eating monsters living in those phosphate pits, don't you dare swim in them" it was more along the line of "it sure is hot today, why don't you and your buddies take the pet dogs down for a swim".
Some parents sure seem to be over protective of their kids these days!
The idiots will be on the move again soon with some big news to share sometime in the next week or two. In the meantime I hope you are enjoying these reflections from my past, it was a heck of a ride!
