We only really feared three things in the dark of night

Growing up in the country around here we really only feared three things when it turned dark. None of those things was the boogey man and none of them involved hunting snipe — we were almost fearless.

You sometimes knew where any of those three things were located, depending on whose house you were playing at and how kind they were to visiting playmates. Sometimes even when you knew where these things were, it didn’t matter when a good game of tag, kick-the-can, football or baseball got started.

One of those nighttime dangers was the clothesline. Run out for a long pass in the dark as you’re looking back intently to make sure the ball wasn’t inches from your nose and you might learn why they named a famous tackle where some guy sticks his arm out to stop you getting clotheslined.

It happened to me more than once. It was dangerous, you couldn’t see that black piece of wire hung throat-high in the dark.

The second worry for country kids in the dark involved a wire strung a bit lower, about crotch-high to be exact and electrified. The kid you were visiting knew where all the electric fences on the place were located and he might or might not let you in on the secret before you lit up the night by walking into the dang thing.

Even if you had visited last week in the daylight and thought you had the lay of things, chances are his old man had moved that fence recently and all of you were in the dark, so to speak.

Stepping across a hot wire in the dark was a new challenge. Footing had to be perfect and when you could barely see the wire measuring where you could cross was hazardous. Crawling under in the goatheads and cockleburrs wasn’t a lot of fun either.

The worst nighttime hazard was the dreaded cesspool. That’s right, back in the day they were cesspools and not septic tanks. Basically this was where the household sewer waste drained. It wasn’t enclosed in concrete and buried like a septic, it was a big hole that was usually covered in some way, often by an old barn door if you were lucky or tin off a barn roof if you weren’t lucky. Either in all likelihood wouldn’t support a kid’s weight.

I remember a couple of disasters and lots of close calls but mostly it was just the fear of what it would be like to fall into a cesspool that gave us all nightmares.

My wife, who really wasn’t much of a country kid, always told the story of playing at a cousin’s house one night after dark and watching as one of her cousins went into a shallow cesspool of some sort. Her brother immediately hollered, “Don’t worry Kenny, I’ll save you,” and jumped in to the knee-deep muck. The parents of both boys were not happy at all.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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