Flashback Friday #37

Straight as an Arrow

One of the things that Doug, Billy & I liked to do down at the creek was hunting for treasures. Now the treasures we looked for weren't gold, silver & jewels. They were stuff that people upstream had lost, and it had floated to our little corner of the world. Some of the things we found were fishing bobbers, a life vest and a pair of women's underpants/bikini bottoms (we never figured out which).

One of the better things we found after a severe storm went through was a fiberglass bow. This bow had no string, but it was a real bow, not a branch that we tied a string to during cowboys & indians. We now owned a real weapon. A bow that had no string, no arrows and nobody with common sense to use it.

We decided to make some arrows out of reeds that grew in a little tributary. We sharpened them, and notched them with my pocket knife. We used some sturdy string that I had to make a bowstring. We had fun shooting at milk jugs with the "bow & arrows".

We then made a discovery that changed our game. In the little tributary where we got the reeds, we found a real arrow. It was blue with orange feathers. It was a thing of beauty. The only problem was that the shaft was cracked. We figured that it was nothing that some scotch tape couldn't take care of. After the shaft was taped, we took the bow and arrow outside to shoot at the jugs.

We had set up the jugs between our houses, firing toward the back yard. I got to shoot first, since I was oldest, and technically it was my string. I notched the arrow, took aim, and pulled back with all my might. I let fly the arrow and it left the bow with a twang, but instead of flying true to course and impaling the jug that I had aimed at, the cracked shaft caused the arrow to fly awry. The arrow curved around the corner of of the Butcher's house and very nearly hit a goat that their outlaw biker neighbor had tied up near the property line. If that goat hadn't moved quickly, we would had a dead goat on our hands.

I made the suggestion that we throw away our "real arrow" and go back to using our home made ones. The vote was unanimous. A pierced milk jug is better than a pierced goat any day.