An apple a day keeps the trucker away.

south fork ernie said...
(The So. Fork of the Eel starts in Laytonvile and goes through Garberville. I am a fifth generation native of the so. fork.)

I was hoping to read other peoples comments, because I comment too much. Oh well…

When I was a kid on the family ranch in Laytonville, the family kids would often get into rotten leftover vegetable fights. They would last until the kid with the poorest aim would “go tell Mom”, then it was all over and we would have to clean up the mess. When it was discovered that we had “energy to spare”, we were each given a shovel and told to spade under the weeds in the garden. We soon tired of that game.

My cousin and I would go down to the bottom of the orchard, by the highway, and throw apples at the rear wheels of the trucks that went by. If you hit in the center of the wheel it was five points. If you hit the tire it was two points. It was a great game, and we would do it for hours, and nobody went and told Mom. One day a trucker, that must have somehow gotten wise to us, slammed on his brakes and jumped out of his truck and took after us. We were on top of the hill behind the orchard faster than you could say BOO!

He didn’t leave for quite a while. He must have gone knocking on doors, but nobody was home. Either that or he just took a dinner break and stayed there to make us worry. At any rate he scared the living bejesus out of us and we never went near the bottom of the orchard again.

If there are any kids reading this, please don’t consider throwing apples at trucks, we were highly trained professional hooligans!