I feel sorry for the kids in school today, what are they going to tell their grandchildren?
Drop by any school in the morning or afternoon and look at all the school buses and parents cars lined up to shuttle the kids back and forth. The little darlings have to walk all the way from the school building to the curb. That’s adventure?
Just after I finished the fourth grade my parents moved to a ranch in the mountains of
As always, fall appeared and I was trundled off to school in the ranch pickup and properly enrolled in the fifth grade. The next morning my mother tucked a lunch under my arm walked out the back door and pointed across the pasture towards a distant ridge line, “School is somewhere around two miles away, just behind that ridge. See you this afternoon.” She disappeared back into the cabin to do whatever mothers do when they send their first born out to get devoured by mountain lions. After that first morning she didn’t even bother to point at the ridge line anymore.
When the snow got too deep to walk in my dad took me down to the bar and rousted out a retired cow pony named Chief for me. To my dad he was a cow pony; to me he was an elephant with a horse skin on him. I couldn’t possibly reach up far enough to get a saddle on him, which was the first step to riding him. I assumed that was the first step since my dad had left to go do foreman things. I stepped back and studied that monster realizing that he wasn’t going to shrink and I wasn’t growing that fast. I learned to hoist my saddle up on top of a corral rail, climb up there with it and wait for Chief to wander past me whereupon I would fling the saddle on his back. Sometimes I missed when he wandered fast. I learned to compensate since he only knew two gaits, slow wander and fast wander.
The years have passed and somehow that small school house has magically changed its location. Not only has it gotten further away, there have appeared insurmountable mountains and raging rivers ‘twixt me and that seat of learning. Did I mention the bears?
Listening to my contemporaries talk to their grandchildren I have found out that back when they were kids it seemed to be a standard policy that no school was ever placed closer than five miles to any student. And every one of those students lived in an area where there were blizzards 365 days a year, interspersed with dust storms. “I remember back in nineteen-ought-and-froze-to-death, the year of the GREAT blizzard (as opposed to the everyday blizzard that took place in May) I had to chop a cord of wood, slop the hogs, and lug well water before I even made the trek to school and then…..”, and the story goes downhill from there.
And that’s just the average story, I have heard of some kids that really had it rough!
What are the kids today going to tell their grandchildren? “Rough? I’ll tell you it was rough back when I went to school in Selah. I remember one time when the temperature must have been in the thirties and I had to make that entire one mile trip in a school bus with a busted heater!”
You know, somehow that just doesn’t sound the same.
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