Page 13 - Jeffersonville Journal Visitors Guide

BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE
BY scOtt WOODs
My brothers and I were raised
to be independent thinkers. It’s not
that my parents were particularly
progressive in their approach to child rearing, it’s just that four boys, each barely two years apart, can test the limits of any boundaries. Boundaries? What are boundaries?
but he cheats with a wrist jerk. When that got boring we decided to up the ante and took out both pellet guns and the .22. We set up a shooting gallery on a tree stump on the other side of the driveway. There was no shortage of targets. The farmhouse was chock-full of antique china dishes, porcelain vases, and old record albums from the 1920s. That afternoon we pulverized enough antiquity to finance our future college
On summer weekends, my father would take his boys and his beagles up to our country place in Callicoon Center. Leaving my mom at home in the suburbs, we’d speed along Route 17 in our imitation wood-paneled Country Squire station wagon, windows cranked open, no seat belts required.
educations.
At some point our adolescent attention spans were diverted
It was a boys’ club. We were 8 and 10 and 12 and 14. We fought like badgers but functioned as a team. These country escapes with our dad were bath-free days when a boy was guaranteed a trophy scar or two. Kid paradise, really.
to the derelict outhouse up on the hill behind our house. Of all the out-buildings that made up our farmstead, this was the least explored. A stinky relic from a time before indoor plumbing, now sadly abandoned by modern living.
One of the most treasured times in my life was the week Dad let us stay on the farm unsupervised, from one weekend to the next, while he returned to New Jersey to earn a living. Who needs supervision when you have a one-hundred-acre farm at the end of a dirt road? Back then it wasn’t considered child neglect as much as child adventure camp. Besides, it’s not as if Dad left us high and dry. He made sure we were well stocked with cans of Dinty Moore stew, cases of Coca-Cola, plenty of matches, and ammunition for the guns.
With each passing winter its brittle bones tilted just a little bit more to the south. The Leaning Tower of Piss-a. The crescent moon door now hung by just one hinge and let the sun shine in. It was a two seater, which I never understood.
There was no television on the farm or computers or even a phone. We didn’t need a car. First of all, we were too young to drive, and secondly, town was a mere four miles over the river and through the woods, if there were ever any real emergency. We brothers did just fine fending for ourselves. Mostly we kept busy hunting for salamanders in the swamp, building forts in the woods, and exploring the ruins on the other side of the mountain.
As a kid, I also never understood when my dad would boast to guests that he planned to “rent out the basement to the in-laws.” The archaic outhouse was a sad monument. But we didn’t burn it down on purpose. My older brother was acting out a classic potty humor routine. I swear it was the funniest thing ever! You had to be there. Right about the time he was demonstrating how to light a fart, he fell backwards, conked his head on the back wall and aggravated the resident hornets. They immediately launched a full scale attack. Being in a most vulnerable position, with certain sensitive body parts dangerously exposed to the angry bees, my brother dove out the door, accidently dropping his kerosene-soaked torch down one of the holes. That’s when things got a tad out of hand.
When the afternoon sun got sweaty hot, we retreated to the shade of the wrap-around porch, kicking back in a row of rocking chairs, swigging Cokes. The bottles had been chilling for three days at the bottom of the crystal clear water of the springhouse well. There is something special about a Coke chilled in spring water on a summer day. It is the ultimate quench.
I’m sure you have always assumed that dried up, sixty-year- old poop isn’t flammable, but I am here to assure you that it is. The smoldering mass quietly burned a swath that eventually ignited the dry-rotted sill beams which caught fire to the weathered siding. In an instant the entire shack was a towering inferno.
We had a competition to see how far we could flick the bottle caps off the porch. My younger brother claimed victory,
We dove into action. My brothers and I immediately set up a bucket brigade from the springhouse to the burning outhouse. Unfortunately, our buckets were pots and pans from the kitchen
“Hi there. Mind if I join you? How’s everything working out?”
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