Afternoon Ride on a Dirt Bike

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.