In order to bring this book into the now, and connect it to my present life, I want to tell you about two incidents.
First, my own wonderful madness: I was twelve, living in a little northern Minnesota town that had a river and a small dam with perhaps a twelve-foot fall of water across the spillway. Remember these facts: waterfall, twelve-foot drop.
I had read an article in a men's magazine called “The Fools Who Shoot the Falls,” which described several men who tried to achieve fame by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
There was … something … about it thatdrew me. I completely ignored the fact that the idea of falling a hundred or so feet in a barrel was incredibly stupid. If you proposed just to jam a man in a barrel, take him up on a rope and drop him a hundred feet into a duck pond it's probable that there would be very few takers.
But for some reason the waterfall changed everything. Oh, sure, you'd still drop a hundred or so feet, still achieve terminal velocity, still probably die. Almost all the people who have tried Niagara Falls have been killed. But that waterfall … that made it worth doing.
Or, as I later told my best friend, Carl Peterson, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
And so I found an old wooden pickle barrel with oak staves, and after carefully reinforcing it by wrapping it with about two hundred feet of clothesline and miles of electrical tape (this was before duct tape) I lined the inside of it with an old quilt, set it on the bank near the top of the spillway, climbed into the barrel, wedged the lid in place over my head and threw myself back and forth inside until the barrel wobbled off the bank.
I'm not exactly sure what I expected. I might have had a thought that the barrel was made of wood, which floats. Therefore the whole craft would float, bobbing to the edge of the spillway and then over to drop to the water below, and would lead me to everlasting fame as the first boy to go over the Eighth Street dam in a barrel.
Instead the barrel sank. Like a stone. Straight to the bottom, which was about six feet down, where it bumped around a bit while I panicked. To my horror, I discovered that the lid had swelled enough with the water to be sealed in place, that the barrel was fast filling up with water, that pickle barrels were amazingly strong and you could not kick them apart from the inside, and that I would gain fame only as the first boy stupid enough to drown himself in a barrel.
But because there is a fate that sometimes protects idiots, a swirl of current caught the barrel and lifted it to the edge of the spillway, where it teetered once or twice before it dropped off the edge to fall the twelve feet to the river below. There it would merely have sunk again had not the same fate intervened to cause the barrel to slam down ona sharp rock exactly the way it needed to in order to break into fifteen or twenty small pieces and leave me stunned, with a bleeding nose, sitting on the bank below the dam contemplating the fickleness of fate, which endowed me with an uncanny, lifelong ability to identify with the hapless coyote in the Road Runner cartoons.
The second incident shows that nothing really changes. I had written a book about my life with my cousin Harris and talked about Harris peeing on an electric fence. The shock made him do a backflip and he swore he could see a rainbow in the pee. Many readers, especially women, were amazed that a boy would be insane enough to do this and didn't believe that it had happened. However, I did get many letters from men saying that either they or a brother or cousin or friend had tried the same stunt, with some exciting results. One man said it allowed him to see into the past.
I was sitting writing one day when my son, then thirteen, came into the house with a sheep-ish look on his deathly pale face. As he passed me, I couldn't help noticing that he was waddling.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure …”
“Why
First, my own wonderful madness: I was twelve, living in a little northern Minnesota town that had a river and a small dam with perhaps a twelve-foot fall of water across the spillway. Remember these facts: waterfall, twelve-foot drop.
I had read an article in a men's magazine called “The Fools Who Shoot the Falls,” which described several men who tried to achieve fame by going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
There was … something … about it thatdrew me. I completely ignored the fact that the idea of falling a hundred or so feet in a barrel was incredibly stupid. If you proposed just to jam a man in a barrel, take him up on a rope and drop him a hundred feet into a duck pond it's probable that there would be very few takers.
But for some reason the waterfall changed everything. Oh, sure, you'd still drop a hundred or so feet, still achieve terminal velocity, still probably die. Almost all the people who have tried Niagara Falls have been killed. But that waterfall … that made it worth doing.
Or, as I later told my best friend, Carl Peterson, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
And so I found an old wooden pickle barrel with oak staves, and after carefully reinforcing it by wrapping it with about two hundred feet of clothesline and miles of electrical tape (this was before duct tape) I lined the inside of it with an old quilt, set it on the bank near the top of the spillway, climbed into the barrel, wedged the lid in place over my head and threw myself back and forth inside until the barrel wobbled off the bank.
I'm not exactly sure what I expected. I might have had a thought that the barrel was made of wood, which floats. Therefore the whole craft would float, bobbing to the edge of the spillway and then over to drop to the water below, and would lead me to everlasting fame as the first boy to go over the Eighth Street dam in a barrel.
Instead the barrel sank. Like a stone. Straight to the bottom, which was about six feet down, where it bumped around a bit while I panicked. To my horror, I discovered that the lid had swelled enough with the water to be sealed in place, that the barrel was fast filling up with water, that pickle barrels were amazingly strong and you could not kick them apart from the inside, and that I would gain fame only as the first boy stupid enough to drown himself in a barrel.
But because there is a fate that sometimes protects idiots, a swirl of current caught the barrel and lifted it to the edge of the spillway, where it teetered once or twice before it dropped off the edge to fall the twelve feet to the river below. There it would merely have sunk again had not the same fate intervened to cause the barrel to slam down ona sharp rock exactly the way it needed to in order to break into fifteen or twenty small pieces and leave me stunned, with a bleeding nose, sitting on the bank below the dam contemplating the fickleness of fate, which endowed me with an uncanny, lifelong ability to identify with the hapless coyote in the Road Runner cartoons.
The second incident shows that nothing really changes. I had written a book about my life with my cousin Harris and talked about Harris peeing on an electric fence. The shock made him do a backflip and he swore he could see a rainbow in the pee. Many readers, especially women, were amazed that a boy would be insane enough to do this and didn't believe that it had happened. However, I did get many letters from men saying that either they or a brother or cousin or friend had tried the same stunt, with some exciting results. One man said it allowed him to see into the past.
I was sitting writing one day when my son, then thirteen, came into the house with a sheep-ish look on his deathly pale face. As he passed me, I couldn't help noticing that he was waddling.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
He nodded. “Sure …”
“Why
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