I will never forget the summer of my 5th year. I was totally free and can remember that sense of freedom like I can remember my first taste alchohol. I was also too young to be officially considered a girl by my brothers and their friends. We lived on the outskirts of town so there wasn’t all that fun “Town†stuff to do, like going to the Park or the swimming pool, so we had to pretty much invent our own fun. My brothers Michael and Joel didn’t really look like brothers. Michael was tall, thin and fair while Joel was kind of chunky with dark hair and dark eyes. Their best friend was Dusty Lee and he had a sister named Jeanie Lee. Dusty and Jeanie looked like 2 peas in a pod with straight, jet black hair and angular features Jeanie was about my age and then there was Susan...she was my little sister...We called her Suzie for short and she has pretty much stayed that way. That summer, even tho we were girls, we got to do everything the boys did. We went fishing where I caught my only Croppy,. I learned how to shoot a slingshot, and won a spitting contest. We rode around the country-side on our bikes with no shirt on. I tight-roped across a pipe-bridge that spanned the Red River where we would go wading up past my knees. What I didn’t know was, and my brothers probably didn’t know either was that the Red River was full of drop-offs and swirls. Those are vortexes caused by the water running so fast. And that it was full of quicksand. OK, I knew about the quicksand. And, I learned how sacred it is to be true to your friends. Behind our house on Linden Lane was a tank farm. That’s maybe 4-5 of those million or so gallon tanks that collect oil from the oil wells in the area. We had always been attracted to the tank farm and would spend hours walking around them playing Army or Indians or just telling stories about them where someone invariably falls in the tank after climbing the few thousand feet up to the top. One morning as we were out in the neighborhood we decided (after we double dog dared each other no doubt) to climb up to the top and look around. The ladder was skinny and rickety and the rungs seemed to last forever. I was first because I was lightest. The rungs made an echoing sound against the side of the tank after about the 30th rung and it seemed to call me to push onward and up the side. As I stood on the edge of the tank I looked across the roof. It was an expanse of tar and rocks and it smelled like a fresh road on a hot day. Dusty was just behind me and was urging me to climb up and over the edge so the others could come on up too. I stepped off the ladder and as I was looking down I started to sink maybe 5 or 6 inches into the wire mesh that had the coating on it.. I could see down into the tank through the mesh. And there was the oil...all of those millions of gallons. Then I sunk a little more and the next thing I knew Dusty was telling me to grab his hand as he pulled me back over to the ladder. As I made my way back over to the ladder Dusty and I looked at each other and at that moment our pact was made. We climbed back down the side of the tank and were met by my brothers. When they asked us what it was like up there we just said it was no big deal. That Dusty didn’t even want to climb over the edge. Later when we went home for lunch and my Mom asked what we had been doing all morning we just looked out our kitchen window to the tank farm and said...â€Nuthinâ€.
