Surviving Lake Tahoe

In 1955, I was eleven years old and entering the 7^th grade in Lake Tahoe, CA; my brother Kenneth was a year older and a grade ahead of me.  We only lived at Tahoe, near the “Y” for about a year, but during that time we managed to flirt with death and danger on several occasions.

One time, Ken and a friend of his were chasing a squirrel when it ran into a very long piece of irrigation pipe.  Thinking they had the squirrel trapped, they decided that the friend would hold the end of the pipe down while Ken would raise the pipe vertically.  All was going well until the pipe came in contact with a high voltage transmission line.  Being in the center of the pipe, Ken avoided most of the harm, but his poor friend who was at the “ground” end was knocked unconscious and suffered some mild burns.  After the ambulance left, we looked around but never did learn the fate of the squirrel.

Another time, we were playing in a house that was under construction.  One end of the house was only about a foot above the ground, but because of the sloping terrain, the other end was well over three feet above the ground.  I can’t remember what we were up to that day, but we had a noosed rope tied to the rafters.  In a well timed sequence of events, I jumped off the end of the house about the same time Ken decided to lasso me.  The noose caught me around the neck and I hit the ground on my tip-toes with the rope stretched taut!  For several weeks after that, I had a rope mark on my neck that was reminiscent of Clint Eastwood in “Hang em’ High.”  I don’t like to think what the results might have been if the rope had been a foot shorter or the house a foot higher.

We must have been in the Cowboy mode in Tahoe because, another time, I was playing rodeo and using my bike as a horse.  I had a lasso firmly tied to the goose-neck on my handle bars (my saddle horn) and I was practicing my roping technique.  It never dawned on me until it was too late that if I roped something stationary, my bicycle was going to come to an abrupt halt.  Needless to say, I soon found myself on the ground picking gravel out of the palms of my hands.

Looking back, it all seems a little humorous but I guess we were lucky to have survived.  Oh well, it wasn’t the first time we had committed life threatening stupid antics, and it wouldn’t be the last.