I remember the fine summer day Steve Dorfman lost his Wood burning set. The Dorfmans lived In the house later occupied by the Buchanans. They couldn't have been there very long; it was still a fairly new neighborhood when the Ds moved out and the Bs moved in.
My best guess is that we were nine, maybe ten years old. Too young to be held accountable for our actions -at least on that particular day.
On that particular day we discovered that the hot end of Steve's wood burning iron was able to melt through the plastic insulation protecting the power cord. I bet those cords have some kind of heat resistant fabric coating now for self defense.
One moment we were leaning in real close to get a good look at the tiny little sparks among the melting plastic, the next moment we were all on our backs partially blinded by the BIG smokey ball of sparks that had (somehow) surprised us. Of course once we stopped laughing uncontrollably we immediately decided to do it again, but the iron wasn't hot anymore. About then, Mrs Dorfman came out to interrog-um, investigate. We were young and naive, so we told her what had happened, thinking she, like any rational person, would think it was funny. Steve was sure his dad could fix the wood burning iron, but his mom let him know he would never see the thing again. Looking back, it probably wasn't even broken; more likely it threw the circuit breakers in the house. No T.V. (for anybody) till daddy gets home.
I think there is a part of every boy that measures his worth by the cost of the things he manages to destroy. Now deprived of the toy we thought was broken anyway, we decided to throw rocks downhill into the concrete drainage ditch which crossed the hill behind Steve's house. A large enough rock shook the concrete hard enough to kick up a dust cloud along fifteen feet or so of the ditch. You could literally see the shock wave - how cool is that? The bigger the rock, the bigger the shock wave. I'm sure there's some math involved.
Before long we found a rock too big for us to move. We spent ten minutes or so digging out the dirt around it till we could get it rolling down the hill towards the drainage ditch,
below which was another ditch,
below which was more hill,
below which was some dry brush,
below which was the driving range of a golf course,
protected by a chain link fence.
That'll keep the kids out. Unless they have a fifty pound boulder and gravity on their side. Against that there is no practical defense. That thing really flew. I'm guessing (from memory) that the kid who had to ride his ten-speed all the way up the hill into our neighborhood to inform Steve's mom that we had torn out thirty feet of fence was around fifteen years old. It took him most of an hour to arrive. That's a long ride just to be told we wouldn't do it again... long enough that we were (somehow) surprised to see him.
From our perspective, to do that kind of damage and not even get punished made it a landmark day.
I wonder if that had anything to do with the Dorfmans not staying in the neighborhood any longer than they did.
