Culvert

     This is a story of two boys.  The names have not been changed to protect the innocent.  There are no innocent.

     Jake and I were born about four days apart.  The first birthday party I can remember was probably his fourth or fifth birthday.  We visited school together pre-first grade.  We went twelve years to school together.  We rode the school bus together.

    Our first bus was a 1940’s Chevrolet panel wagon with windows.  Oliver, our bus driver, kept us separated because together we squirmed and wrestled and made life miserable for the other passengers.  One of us sat beside him in the front seat, the other in one of the back seats.

     It was our custom to “stay overnight” with a friend.  I spent a few nights with other schoolmates, but I stayed with him, or he stayed with me more than with any others.

      Jake’s dad Ed was sort of a gruff old guy.  He used a lot of forbidden cuss words in ordinary conversation.  When I was a kid, I was a little afraid of him, but as I grew, I learned his bark was worse than his bite.  He smoked Camel cigarettes.  He bought them by the carton.

      One day when a carton of Camels was about half empty, Jake lifted a pack, figuring Ed wouldn’t notice.  Jake confided in me.  We planned.  On a Friday evening, I spent the night with him.  On Saturday morning, after our fill of watching cartoons on their new television (all televisions were new in those days), we threw on overcoats and overboots and headed for the culvert.

      Jake’s place was about a hundred yards south of what is now Road 3P.  3P crossed the Lickdab just west of their driveway.  There once was a rickety bridge there.  The road made a curve there so the bridge could cross the creek at right angles.  The curve and the bridge were both road hazards.  The county replaced the bridge with a six-foot tube and straightened out the road when we were in second or third grade.

    Going to the culvert was not unusual for us.  It was a neat place that could be anything we wanted it to be, a bomber, a submarine, a cave.  This morning our game wasn’t imaginary.  Jake had stowed the Camels and a packet of matches in the culvert, ready for us.  Safely out of sight in the culvert, we opened the pack of Camels, took a cigarette apiece, and lit up.

     No, neither of us got sick.  I’m sure it was not the first encounter with tobacco for either of us.  One was enough, though.  We left the cigarettes and matches in the culvert, thinking there would be another day.  There wasn’t.  I left for home that afternoon.

     Sometime later, when I suggested we could go get another hit, Jake sadly reported that he had visited the site and the cigarette pack had slipped to the culvert floor and the cigarettes got soaked up with water and were no longer any good.  Shucks!   

     So that was that, at least so I thought.  Fast forward fifty years.  At an alumni gathering, I am visiting with Jake’s older brother Rod.  Jake always idolized Rod.  Rod was probably ten years older than we were.  He joined the navy out of high school and served on an aircraft carrier.  He went a lot of places, particularly, Japan.

      In those days, Japan was known to us as the manufacturer of cheap toys that usually broke before you could get them out of the box.  Rod changed our mind about that.  He brought from Japan a neat pair of binoculars and the first transistor radio any of us had ever seen, from Japan!  When leave was over and Rod returned to duty, the radio became Jake’s radio.

      It had an earphone.  Here was another opportunity to listen to the World Series in class without the teacher knowing. It had an FM band.  There weren’t any FM stations then.  It also had a short wave setting.  Once in awhile we could hear somebody talking over the short wave band.

        Rod and I are visiting at the alumni banquet, probably in 2011 or 2013.  He tells me he has a sort of funny story to tell me.  It’s something his dad shared with him.  That had to be an old story.  Ed died in ‘66 or ‘67.

     Ed told Rod he saw Jake and I headed for the culvert.  Nothing unusual about that.  A little later he glance that way and saw something quite unusual—smoke coming out of the end of the culvert!  Ed laughed.  Those dang kids!  In the culvert smoking cigarettes, thinking they were pulling the wool over anybody’s eyes!

     Rod laughed.  I laughed.  But I was thinking:

     Busted!  And I didn’t even know it, for fifty years.

     Here’s another Japanese import, less well-known than the high quality electronics that became Japan’s trademark in the 1960’s and beyond.

     Atama kakushite,

    Shiri kakusanu.

     Literally translated, it says, “Head covered, butt uncovered”.  There is no witticism, no Poor Richard wise saying in English for that Japanese quip.  It refers to a toddler who “hides” by covering his head with a blanket while leaving his bum exposed.

      We were beyond toddler stage, Jake and I, but we left our bums exposed in that culvert on that Saturday morning long ago.  I’d like to say it never happened to me again in my life.  Such a statement would only be one more unsuccessful attempt to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes.

       I’ll give Sir Walter Scott the last word:

      Oh what a tangled web we weave

     When first we practise to deceive.