In August, 1968, after a year of apartment dwelling, our family moved to a newly built home in the growing suburb known as Southwest Little Rock.
There were no parks near us and relatively few kids in the neighborhood. There was never even enough breeze to fly kites. I sometimes tried tying a kite to the back of my bike and pulling it behind, but results usually involved a destroyed kite, a bike crash, or both. I never understood how Charlie Brown could get his stupid kite high enough to get stuck in a tree.
Without sufficient kiddy TV, convenient parks or nearby friends, and given the finite number of comic books that I had not read to tatters, it was inevitable that some days involved searching for something interesting to pass the time.
My younger brother Randy and I owned a large chunk of unremarkable modeling clay. It was dark blue and it never hardened, so it was no good for making toys like batarangs or useful household items like ashtrays.
Now, Carlyle Drive was one of only a couple of access roads into the Windamere subdivision, and people would drive down the street at astonishing speeds. The straight and nearly treeless street could be a dangerous place to play if not for the fact that you could see cars coming long before you were in mortal peril.
One day, Randy and I realized these two seemingly unrelated circumstances of clay and street could be combined to produce novel and potentially interesting mischief.
We fashioned a dozen blue clay 8 inch spikes, striking in their similarity to hardened steel implements of death. With an attention to detail rarely seen outside of the military, Randy and I placed our spits all across the road in front of our house. As we had planned, no car could possibly avoid them by driving in between. We then stood in our yard, quite plainly the architects of this road hazard, waiting for unsuspecting motorists.
As the first car turned off the main road of Geyer Springs, Randy and I steeled ourselves for imminent chaos. The road offered no encumbrance to unsafe driving, and the car roared towards us gaining speed. To our disappointment, the driver either never noticed the spikes or just decided that maybe it was a good day to die in a fiery crash; he drove over them without slowing.
Disheartened by our first victim’s nonchalance, we reformed the nails and waited for another car. It was not long. The next driver was barreling down the road even faster than the first when he saw the spikes. With admirable reflexes, he slammed the brakes, leaving black rubber marks and screeching to a halt mere feet away. The car sat there idling long seconds. The driver looked down at the spikes, then at the two young troublemakers waiting to see what he would do next. Cautiously, he inched his car over the spikes, gently flattening them to blue smears on the pavement. I have no idea why he thought puncturing his tires slowly would be better than just getting out and moving the nails, but then people were always in a hurry on our street.
Randy and I were thrilled by our experiment. Before another car could venture into our neighborhood, we ran into the street and quickly reformed the skewers.
The next driver was doing the usual bat-of-out-hell routine when he spotted the spikes and two idiot kids lurking nearby, supervising the action. Without touching the brakes or even letting up on the gas, he drove up into the lawn across the street from us, fishtailing around the potentially life-threatening road hazard, and on down the street. As he rounded the corner, he never even looked back. His car had left impressive 30 foot long ruts in the recently planted yards across from our house. Randy and I cackled with delight, totally satisfied with our mildly evil handiwork. Now THIS was entertainment!
Subsequent cars produced variations on these outcomes until there was not enough clay to remake barbs, having been ground into the asphalt or carted away wedged in tire treads.
That evening, we did not tell anyone about our adventure, realizing we were lucky that nobody yelled at us or just drove over us for payback. Thereafter, whenever we were gifted more modeling clay, Randy and I would grin at each other, silently making plans for our next adventure.
