Personal Narrative: Growing Up In The Woods

Growing up in rural Kansas was boring. Especially since I grew up in the seventies. There were no cell phones or game systems to occupy my time. My family had an old black and white television set. I loved to watch The Price is Right in the days before Bob Barker’s hair turned white. After the show was over, the only way to kill time was to play outside and wander down to the creek that ran parallel to our property. There was a secret trail buried in the wall of trees that lined our two acre yard. My brother and I would slide down the trail, landing on the dirt banks like explorers on a mission. Sometimes we would hunt for crawdads under rocks. Other times we would take our poles and fish. We never went into the water after the time I got bit by a gar.
The creek may as well have been the Nile River to my seven year old eyes. I saw adventure in the currents, and loved to follow it to see where it led. I imagined finding places with buried treasure in the form of antiques. I have always been fascinated by antiques and would be filled with excitement when we found an abandoned shack or old time car buried in the woods. My brother Eric always led the way.
We are orphans, abandoned by our parents but given a second chance in a loving foster home. Eric is an Indian. Our mom and dad adopted him from a Sioux reservation in 1970. He was the least lucky of his orphan siblings. He was born with fetal alcohol syndrome. His mother had put cigarettes out on his fragile skin when he was an infant and left him alone to die when he was three months old. He was discovered by a neighbor after three days alone in his crib. He was the most damaged of all of us. I did not care about those things on this particular spring day of 1977. He had Indian tracking skills that could not be damaged by any abuse, and I would follow my big brother