It was the spring of 1959. Friends trying to find their way in the world.

It was Saturday night, about 11:00 pm. Bob had come down to visit his friend Darrell and participate in a party that was ongoing at the friend’s house.

Darrell had a younger sister who was hot. Bob had never crossed the line with her, but continued to step on it every time they met.

Bob was hoping that tonight was the night to cross the line, but events changed his dreams for the evening.

The younger sister ran into the room where the boys were and yelled that her mother had just taken off with a male friend while the father was in a drunken stupor in the other room.

The three boys were all fifteen and full of it. They were ready to try anything.

Darrell’s first thought was to abscond with the family car and trail the two lovers-to-be.

All agreed and ran to jump into the family car and take off in search of Darrell’s mother.

They caught up with the prospective lovers, but didn’t know what to do at that point. Should they follow them to find out what they were up to, or try to force them to stop?

They decided to discreetly follow for a few miles.

They lost the lovers’ car about ten miles out of the city and decided to return home.

As they approached a particularly sharp turn to the right, Darrell lost control of the car and ran off of the road.

The car burst through a white picket fence, caromed through a neatly manicured yard, and finally stopped on top of a group of doghouses.

Needless to say, the hound dogs started braying and scattered to the hills.

The three boys got out of the car to assess the damage. Bob rubbed his hand along the side of the passenger door and could feel only dented metal.

The car was sitting precariously on top on two of the doghouses, so they couldn’t drive away.

As they stood and contemplated their next move, the landowner came out of the house and approached the car. He shined his flashlight on the license plate and then turned around and headed back to his house. He didn’t speak to the boys at all.

Darrell said that the guy was going to call the cops, who probably weren’t going to be sympathetic to their situation, so the boys decided to run.

The boys got about two hundred yards up the road before they heard the police sirens. At that point, they decided to jump over the guardrail and head into the woods.

After about an hour of walking, they came upon a shallow indentation in the side of a hill, sneaked inside, huddled together, and waited for morning.

After several hours of restless sleep, the boys awoke to discover that they had hidden within sight of a dirt road, which led down to the river and the railroad tracks.

They headed toward the river to try to catch a train heading south. All three had much experience hitching rides on trains. In fact, that was their major source of enjoyment.

The only problem was that the trains that they had hitched in the past were only going five to ten miles an hour and, thus, were easy to jump on.

They quickly found that the trains traveling down by the river were going over fifty miles an hour and were impossible to hitch.

The third boy said he knew how to get the trains to slow down. He said that if you placed three flairs on the tracks at an even intervals, the engineer would slow the train down, because the flairs were a warning of a problem ahead.

The third boy broke into a railroad maintenance box and stole some flairs, which he then positioned on the track to slow the trains down.

He tried the trick three times, but was unsuccessful each time. So, the boys decided to walk to the next town and catch a train that was departing from the station.

As the boys proceeded to the next town, a pact was made to hitch to Florida, where they could hang outside all year in the warm weather. No thought was given to any productive process, only survival to the next day.

Around three in the afternoon, they approached a house that sat beside the tracks. The third boy knew who lived there and was certain that everyone was at work in the afternoon. So, he proceeded to approach the house, jimmy the back door and walk into the house, with the other two boys following sheepishly behind.

They found the kitchen and voraciously cleaned out the refrigerator of all of the food fit for a teenager to eat, and then left immediately.

Bob felt badly about breaking into the house, but he was hungry. It was a good life lesson for him. At that instance he thought that he understood that desperate times sometimes call for desperate solutions. He had only been without food for a few hours and had broken the law to suppress his hunger. He instantly had an epiphany and understood how other people could commit unlawful acts in desperation after only hours or days of suffering. The weak ones, anyway. He still hadn’t learned that to sacrifice in the face of hardship is a noble pursuit.

To be continued…