Besides taking care of the animals, gardening, and running around the vegetable patches, us farm kids do have some other ways of entertaining ourselves. Quite possibly the most dangerous and most entertaining of these was messing around with the wagons. We had several large child wagons at tollgate that were used to move things that were too heavy to carry, like boxes of glass bottles and things like that. At least, that's what they were supposed to be used for. When we were really little, me and my friends regularly took these wagons out of the barn and played around with them. Do you think that we just rolled them on the grass, maybe pushed some toys around in them ? NOPE.
Those are things that normal, sane children would do, but were NOT normal sane children. We were
4-H'ers. Stupid ones at that. We wanted adventure, and so we took these wagons, climbed into them (as much as 3- 4 children per wagon at the same time) found the steepest hills on the entire farm, and launched ourselves down them. So imagine 3 or 4 small children rolling down a hill at high speeds in a wagon that looks like this:
(these are meant for 1 to two children of our size, so we were basically piled on top of one another.)
And if you thought this couldn't get any worse, the hill that we chose as first was in an arboretum that was right next to a large pond (I call it the peewee lake) and we were going down the hill that was headed right into the lake, and we didn't care because we figured that since the hill wasn't really steep that we would stop before we hit the lake, and for once we were actually right. But then we realized something terrible about that hill. It was too safe.😞😤😥 We were not falling out and tumbling down the hill, and that is a major problem. Since this was actually the 2nd steepest hill, we decided to try the
steepest one, a hill near the horse pasture. We rolled our wagon to the top of the hill, climbed inside, and pushed the wagon down. After going faster than we ever went before and almost slamming into the nearby fence, we decided that this hill was worthy. We did have a few minor accidents, including the wagon flipping over, launching us out, and landing on top of us.What did we do when this happened? scream? cry? reconsider our incredibly stupid behavior and stop? nope. we flipped the wagon over and went down the hill again. Looking back on this now, I can only think one thought: totally worth it.
