101722d

We were told not to cross the railrod tracks, so of course we did. My best friend Darrell, his little brother Pete, and I scoured the roadside ditches for glass soft-drink bottles, because we could turn them in for cash at the country store. One bottle would buy a smoke bomb, and two would buy a bottle rocket. Not the kind that whistled, they just had the ordinary ones. We could have bought candy, but why would you do that when you could get fireworks? So when we had a little money we would hike through the woods about a quarter of a mile, slide down the dirt embankment, and cross the tracks (this was perfectly safe, because we could see in both directions, and how long does it take to cross a single set of train tracks?). On the other side we had to walk just a short distance through trees and brush to get to the Little country store on Highway 29 South. They sold a lot of things, but we really only paid attention to the fireworks. I do not now remember any other items that were in the store. We usually shot the fireworks off in my family's gravel driveway. During drought years there might have been some danger of starting a fire in the grass, but most of the time this was a very safe place for fireworks. We also made black powder, but we did not understand how to pack something that would actually explode. Probably just as well. Funniest thing about my mother telling us to never cross the tracks is that there was a much more dangerous place we could have gone. Two roads out of our neighborhood led to the highway. The main one crossed the tracks at a signal. We were allowed to cross there to get to our school-bus stop on a little piece of old 29 that was about 50 yards from new 29. The other road went through a tunnel. The tunnel was only about 15 ft long and a lane and a half wide, but I always imagined somebody hot running through it while we were walking in the other end. Never happened. After Hurricane Camille, which came ashore in Mississippi in 1969, and cut a swath all the way through to Virginia and out into the Atlantic, we were almost cut off from civilization. The pond at the end of our dead-end road filled up so much that it washed a good bit of the road away. We went down to that little tunnel, me and my sister and my dad, and we waded through waist-high brown water from one side to the other. It was the coolest thing. I'm sure my mother never knew we did that.