In 1971 I was out of high school for about 3 weeks, and I had been working for a carpenter Pat B. and his brother who was my age. We were building a cabin for someone? I can’t remember who, but I do know we had gone to Peterson Lake out of Deerwood for a swim after work on Mike B’s motorcycle. We had our swim, and I was sitting on the back of the motorcycle when a car came off the main road there and turned onto the dirt road we were sitting on and hit us! Mike B. went flying into the lake and I fell off the back of the cycle with a broken ankle. The car had shoved the foot peg into my leg.

Well, I ended up wearing a full length cast for 11 months and staying home every day. At this time in life, we didn’t own a vehicle that had an automatic transmission so one day I thought I would practice driving with Dad’s truck in the field, and I was getting pretty good at it too! My left leg was in the cast so I would push the clutch in with my right foot and feed the gas with one of my crutches!

Then as fall came, I wanted to go duck hunting as we had a small lake on the edge of our property and I could see the ducks and geese flying in and out of it every day. Well we had a big hill on the edge of our field right in front of the lake and I got the idea that I could take Dad’s tractor and get behind that hill and wait for the ducks sitting on the tractor and then shoot them before they came in to land? It seemed like a good idea? Well, the first afternoon I sat there and nothing! So the second day I backed the tractor closer to the edge of the lake just into the bog! I figured I would get something now!

I had been there about an hour when over the hill in the field came Dad’s blue pickup!!

OH! Shit!

He drove close to where I was sitting and asked, “What the heck are you doing?”

I told him, but he wasn’t too happy and he told me, “Get that dang tractor home and out of the swamp!”

Well like I said it seemed like a good idea? 

Shortly after this happened Mom talked him into getting a different car with an automatic and I at least could go up town during the day safely!