One day Houston decided that he wanted to go calling upon
Amada. She was one of the girls who rode
our bus to school but lived several miles away from our neighborhood. Even farther away than Allie’s house. Houston was grounded from driving his truck
at the time and since he was the only one of us who had driver’s license it
looked like he was stuck paying basketball with us guys.
Houston, not being one that is easily deterred asked Adam if
he could borrow his dirt bike to ride over to Amanda’s house. Of course Adam said no, but he offered to
drive him over there if Amanda would put in a good word with her friends. Once again I was not involved with this short
adventure but heard all about it and saw the results once they got back to the
neighborhood.
A couple of hours later when they pulled up into the circle
where they rest of us were playing basketball they were both cut, scraped, and
bruised everywhere. As the recounting of
the story went the 12 mile drive down there went fine. They stayed on a few less traveled roads and
got to Amanda’s house and as she promised her folks were gone to town for the
afternoon.
The trouble began as Amanda and Houston where messing around
in her room and her parent’s car pulled into the drive way. Adam ran to the window to warn Houston and
said he saw much more of either of them than he had ever wanted to see. Houston started pulling on his cloths and
started for the door, but Amanda pushed him back to the window and said he had
to climb out or her dad would see him! Do with his socks and boxer shorts on he
promptly and gracefully fell out the window into the bushes where Adam was
standing.
The two of them rushed as quickly across the side yard to
where they had left the dirt bike, Houston scrambling to get dressed and move
quickly while Adam barked at him to hurry in a hushed tone. They walked down the road pushing the bike
trying to use the trees and bushes to shield the view of them from Amanda’s
house.
They were almost back to the main road and crossing the set
of railroad tracks that paralleled the road home when Houston thought he her a
car coming from direction of Amanda’s house.
The two of them decided to ride the bike down the tracks and avoid any
potential encounters with Amanda’s father.
Both Houston and Adam agreed that the tracks were way too difficult to
ride on quickly and was shacking them fairly severely.
As anyone who has ridden a dirt bike knows, they can be very
loud especially if you have “reworked” the muffler like Adam had done. They were jarringly riding down the tracks
when Houston thought he heard something and started to look around… that was
when he saw the train engine about 100 feed behind them and closing. He yelled a warning into Adam’s ear.
Adam turned to see the train engine. He quickly tried to jump the bike off the
tracks and found that he could get it leave the area between the tracks! Houston said he tried 4-5 times to jump the
tracks before he decided to abandon the bike and Adam and jumped clear, right
into a patch of blackberries! Adam final
was able to get the bike off the tracks when Houston’s weight was gone from the
bike, but he also wrecked into a creek shortly after getting clear of the
tracks and train which was now passing them.