A Country Boy Can Survive... Boredom...

Mark and I at the 2012 CMA Awards... A long road from Daisy pump pellet guns...

By Marty Smith

Out in the country kids manufacture fun. They have to. There are no fancy playgrounds with recycled-rubber mulch inlaid around molded plastic tubes and slides. There are no summer sports camps or obnoxious inflatable bouncy-houses. The nearest city is 60 miles away. And that city isn’t really a city. It just seems like it, because it has a strip mall attached to the Roses department store.

The landscape is a string of dusty hayfields, bisected by a rural two-lane highway and an ornery double-yellow line. Weathered barns speckle the horizon, and serve to house crops and equipment and livestock while two-tiered gun racks house .22s and .3006s in the back glass of American-made pickup trucks. Even the preacher drives one. Most every home has Old Glory hanging off the side. Many are tattered. 

The old men down at the barbershop sip coffee on Saturday mornings – early -- and trade barbs about their hunting dogs as they analyze every decision and position from the previous night’s football game. Football is religion here. It is the Friday night social affair. Between barbs the old men reminisce about their respective playing days before the war, how great it used to be and how they’d whip the tar out of those little punks out there today. 

Incidentally, as the years pass, they were better and better as players.

Meanwhile there are grandfathers and grandsons at the foot of the covered bridge with cane poles at dawn, wetting lines as the dew glistens on the thistles. It smells like biscuits and bacon and fertilizer. On good days, sun-soaked girls in cutoff jeans lie on blankets on the bank by the creek that serves as the town pool, and giggle about boys they like, as you and your buddies ease by with flushed cheeks and a nervous grin, during a run for baseball cards and Grape Nehi, hoping you’re the boys they’re giggling about. You know you're probably not.

There is church. Lots of church. There is Wednesday church, when you stay late after Youth Group because momma is the choir director in the spare time she doesn’t have, and she has arrangements to make. There is Sunday morning, when you stay late because momma helps count the offering and prepare the Pot Luck supper for Sunday evening. And on Sunday evening, you’re among the last to leave the Pot Luck Supper because momma is left with a sink full of deviled egg goo and meatloaf platters to wash.

Your Sunday school teacher is your football coach. And it makes you nervous that your Sunday school/football coach has a cute, gregarious daughter that somehow managed to pick your name to holler in the halftime cheerleading routine. You feel like you’re one-up on him for that and he doesn’t realize it. And you’re wrong but you’re too young to know you’re wrong.

There is ball in the country, all kinds. And ball matters to you because it matters to your daddy.

If you’re lucky, as we were in my town, you have a pool. Our neighbors six miles to the west weren’t so lucky. They had no pool. Instead they had a community swimming hole that town management borrowed from Mother Nature. It was a manufacturing marvel: part Wolf Creek, part pair of concrete slabs on either bank, part picnic pavilion and part gaudy yellow caution paint.

They called it “The Boone.” It was as awesome as it was ridiculous, and it drew pretty girls by the dozen. I still remember most of their names. That should tell you something.

My best friend growing up was Mark Vinson. He was eight months younger than me and similar in stature – scrawny. We grew in the same neighborhood on Gale Road, five houses apart in those Wednesday-and-Sunday Christian homes with open Bibles on the coffee table, just inside the door.

Our parents were high school friends a couple towns over, so were friends by default. We were naïve kids; great kids; straight-A’s and three sports kids; Youth Group kids; vulnerable and caring kids.

We weren’t perfect. Far from it. There are plenty of mistakes I want back. I wish I were kinder to some of my schoolmates. I wish my own insecurities hadn’t led me to accept group heckling. Back then, the way I saw it, if I mumbled a few slights in someone else’s direction from the periphery then no one would be tossing any at me.

The thought of it now makes me sick. 

I wish I’d had the guts to stand up for others who weren’t as fortunate as me. I have that trait now, and I truly believe much of the reason why is because I didn’t have it back then. I take pride today in standing up for those who can’t. 

Not doing so as a teen is absolutely one of my life’s greatest regrets.

But comparably we were outstanding children. We never drank or tried a single drug. To this day, neither of us has ever even had a cigarette in our mouths.

Mark never even cussed.

I missed that memo.                                                        

Not that we weren’t subjected to scary situations that inevitably accompany peer pressure. But when we were, we always had each other. Sure, maybe we were “dorks” for not puffing Ricky’s daddy’s Marlboro Red, but we’ll be dorks together.

And rest assured, we were full-blown dorks. We couldn’t talk to girls without stammering, couldn’t look them in the eye. Not that we were necessarily concerned with their eyes. The very thought of a discussion with the popular girls was nerve racking. And again, we were dorks. So by “discussion” I mean a basic hello.

During the summer before seventh grade I was invited by a buddy of mine to ride bikes over at the country club. This was a very big deal. It’s where the real estate agent’s daughter and the state trooper’s daughter and factory foreman’s daughter baked like Tostitos from dawn-to-dusk every day. We weren’t members so we couldn’t get inside the hallowed chain-link confines of the pool. Those girls were untouchable. So we’d ease on over there past the golf clubhouse and towards the pool.

The idea was to remain inconspicuous if not invisible, and pretend not stare at the girls while staring a hole through them. 

Somehow, on this particular day, Paige saw us. And for some reason Paige decided to say hello. And for some reason Paige asked us to come over to the chain link fence and chat. 

And so, certainly, I pedaled that bike as hard as that bike would run. Unfortunately, I did not see the yellow towrope that separated the parking lot from the grass surrounding the fence. I close-lined myself. Right in front of Paige. I was George McFly.

It hurt like hell and I tried to shake it off. Paige laughed. The other girls laughed. My buddy tried unsuccessfully to stifle his laugh. I tried not to cry as I hopped on that bike and high-tailed it home, the rope burn across my arms and chest pulsing with each heartbeat.

Instances like that reminded us it was best to keep to ourselves.

Hence, we found fun in all manner of random places. Take my basement, for example. I had an extensive collection of G. I. Joes and Matchbox cars. We’d go down there, grab Snake Eyes or Sergeant Slaughter by the leg, and head out to the backyard, armed with a Daisy pump air rifle -- purchased from the Maxway by my daddy just in case the neighbor’s dogs needed a reminder not to poop in the yard -- some lighter fluid and a BIC disposable lighter we snuck from Daddy’s dresser drawer.

First, we’d display Alpine and Barbeque and Blowtorch in a lineup about 50 feet away, then commence to blow them to smithereens. It was necessary of course, to cock that pellet gun following each shot. We’d give that pump all it could handle with the right arm, until the feeble little twig hanging off the dominant side of our chests couldn’t muster another pump. 

Then we’d switch to the left for a couple more. I figure that was about 10 or 12 pumps, all-in, which was about six or eight too many. Once Alpine and Barbecue and Blowtorch were shot all-to-hell, we’d ignite them with the lighter fluid and the Bic for good measure, and sit and revel in the stench of smoldering plastic while pounding a Mountain Dew.

Speaking of burnt plastic… another of our ingenious pastimes included the plastic oars that come in the box when you purchase an inflatable raft. We would saw the oars in half, sneak around the corner of the house, shove a bottle-rocket inside, aim an unassuming friend shooting basketball or mowing the lawn … and light it. 

Watching your buddy damn-near crap his pants provided ample hilarity, until one such bottle rocket hit a guy in the neck. And stuck. And he grabbed it and tossed just before it exploded. That ended that little escapade.

On a daily basis there were myriad other foolish decisions. Innocent, but no less foolish. We mostly played ball all morning, chased the Atlanta Braves’ futility with Mountain Dew and Little Debbie Snack Cakes all afternoon and played more ball all evening.

Despite all that we turned out all right. By our early-30s we were both living the dream, almost literally. Mark is an athletic trainer with the Tampa Bay Rays’ Major League Baseball organization. He made it to The Show in 2011. The Big Leagues, man. That was his dream since we were five years old.

And me, I’m a sports reporter for ESPN. The dream. I have experienced more in the past decade than I even knew existed back then. I am blessed beyond measure and do not forsake it.

Not bad for a couple of bumpkins from Nowhere, Virginia.

I reminisce so fondly now of those lazy days that seemed so boring. Amid the responsibility of adulthood and the chaos of parenthood, the concept of that boredom is absolutely wonderful.

It’s a funny thing when, what was for so long The Dream becomes reality, and we find ourselves yearning for the dream that was reality.