My Redneck Jungle Gym

I grew up in upstate New York. Yes, there are cows. No, that’s not all. Yes, you’re very funny with the cow reference. No no, I’m laughing on the inside. Yes, really. You slay me.

I did the vast majority of my growing up living with my mom and step-dad in the suburbs of Albany, which is not actually such a bad place to grow up. Boring as hell once you reach college age, but kind of a nice place to be a kid. And it seems to be getting better. Each time flarf and I return home (as he is also from said area), there’s at least one new store or restaurant between his parents’ house and mine that wasn’t there the last time we wandered into town. So, while I’m still not ready to go all suburban with the minivan and dogs, I at least don’t mind going there any more.

Yes, I left out my dad. You see, my dad lives in Columbia County, which is a rather rural county located between Albany and the Massachusetts border and a bit south. Yes, there are cows there. Yes, that’s about all.

Columbia county is an odd place. As far as I know, it can claim only two celebrities – Martin van Buren (yes, the president.) and Oliver North (who likes to pretend he’s from Virginia.) Once upon a time the county was pretty much all farms with the city of Hudson in the middle. Then yuppies from New York got tired of people and wanted to mingle with the cows and go antiquing, so they started building houses. Now it’s a strange place where 3-toothed pick-up driving rednecks regularly cross paths with latte-sipping LL Bean-wearing folks in Volvos.

My family has traditionally been from the former group. My great grandparents ran a dairy farm and my grandfather started a septic tank business. My father learned to drive on a tractor. No, I’m not kidding. Now he drives Mack trucks and works with concrete so don't mock him because it'd be pretty easy for him to have you disappeared.

I grew up around my grandfather’s business, now run by my dad. I had dolls and tea sets. I just played with them on a mound of dirt and would happily abandon them if one of the workers offered me a ride in the bulldozer. (Actually the bulldozer always scared me just a bit – I was afraid the treads would suck me under. But, the loader or backhoe – oh yeah!) I climbed trees, dug in the piles of dirt and rocks they used to do people’s driveways and always begged to go on deliveries with the guys so I could ride in the passenger seat of the big trucks. (The passenger’s seats didn’t have a whole lot in the way of shocks. Remember what it was like to go over a bump while sitting on the back of the school bus? Multiply it by 10 and you’ve got it. Of course, it was less fun as I, and my chest, grew bigger.)

As I got older, the company started doing less and less pumping of septic tanks (and therefore, less and less constantly smelling like poo at the dinner table) and more building them. They built the concrete kind and kept them in rows in the back, in the area called the “gravel bank” (where all the gravel for driveways was also kept, as I’m sure you sherlocked out).

For those who have never seen a concrete septic tank, which I’m sure is pretty much all of you, I shall describe. They come in different sizes, but the two kinds my dad made the most were cylinders about 3 and 6 feet tall and about 6 feet wide. (I’m sure I’m a little off, but I’m just going by a 10+ year old memory here.) They had notches all around the sides and a big hold in the top with a lid.

The notches fit 9 year old feet fantastically! I could climb right up those things and scurry all the way down the rows. They also usually left the lids off which meant if I was careful I could climb down into the 6 foot ones and have my only little secret cave (cause who cares about the 3 footers? It’s no cave if your head sticks out the top!) I was like a little wack-a-mole game on my football sized jungle gym, running about and popping in and out of the different tanks. I loved it. Of course, I learned one day when I tripped on the lid of one tank and fell just how hard and sharp concrete is. I made my own little blood fountain in my knee. But I didn’t care, I was always banged up back then, much to my prissy mother’s dismay. (She used to pick me up at my grandmothers (behind whose house the business was located) and freak out in the special way that only my mother can when she saw how dirty I was because I would have to...gasp...sit in the car that way! I would have understood the freakouts if she hadn’t been driving a 10 year old Sapporo at the time. Yeah, I never heard of that car either.)

Anyway, the point is, I had some kick-ass things to play with for a little tom-boy. I wonder if the person who bought that one septic tank noticed all the blood on it before burying it in the ground...