What we did catch at night, my dad and I, was nightcrawlers (large earthworms, for you non-anglers) for our Sunday fishing trips up to my uncle’s house on the lake out in the “country”. Caught everything from bluegills to the occasional northern pike on ‘em. My various aunts would then cook them for dinner. To me, this seemed like the most natural way to spend a summer–fishing, playing ball, doing crazy stuff like catching potentially dangerous stinging insects, all with just enough adult supervision to keep it from getting completely out of hand. Don’t know how many kids get to have that experience these days, but my guess is not that many.

VERSE

I’d travel the plains.
In mountain streams I’d paddle.
Over the Rockies I would trail.
I’d hark to the strains
of cowboys in the saddle-
not very musical but male.
I’ve roamed o’er the range with the herd,
where seldom is heard an intelligent word.

REFRAIN

Git along, little taxi, you can keep the change.
I’m riding home to my kitchen range
Way out west On west end avenue.
Oh, I love to listen to the wagon wheels
that bring the milk that your neighbor steals
Way out west On west end avenue.
Keep all your mountains
and your lone prairie so pretty,
give me the fountains
that go wring at Rodeo City.
I would trade your famous deer and antelope
for one tall beer and a cantaloupe
Way out west On west end avenue.
Yippee-aye-ay!

Note that your beloved cantaloupes are featured in the song. Concidentally, my roommate my freshman year in college was born and raised on West End Avenue.

The times i didn’t have that on i was Little Joe Cartwright.

You knew it was a productive summer day when you left a big ole ring in the tub after being forced to take a bath.

I still see lots of them in early summer (June & July) but not so much now that it’s August.

I’m sure I caught them in jars when I was a kid, but I don’t remember doing anything else to them. Nor would I condone it.

I hadn’t noticed a drop in their population here in Pennsylvania, but I’d have to compare pictures taken today with ones from 20 years ago, which I don’t have.

Unfortunately, I do have a mulching mower. Hopefully, through natural selection, they’ll “learn” to rest in bushes or trees instead of in the grass.

Anyone else catch June bugs? Dad would capture one, tie a thread around a rear leg, and we would fly it helicopter-style around our heads. Great buzzing noise.

We had the best woods you ever saw (this was in South Carolina): a wide expanse of some hundred acres between old neighborhoods with trees. Within, a creek with a log bridge, an earthen dam and a small lake, swinging vines, an abandoned apple orchard that had vines growing over the trees making them look like green beehives (you could slip inside and climb the tree, and watch through the scrim of leaves, unseen by all passersby on the trail). The creek banks had clay you could make things out of. There was a creeper-draped cathedral of very tall trees, surrounded by lower bushes that were canopied with creeper vines, so low that only kids and dogs could follow the labyrinthine trails beneath. That was the only way into the woodland cathedral. It was like the scene in The Wind in the Willows where Ratty and Mole found the god Pan in a glade.

The swinging vine we loved the best was attached so high up in its tree, some 60 feet, that it gave you a real flat arc, and would fly you waaaaay out over some low-growing bushes. Closest I ever came to feeling like Peter Pan.

And we ran free all day long, and the neighborhood moms would keep a weather eye out the window on us, but never let us know. It was divine. I really ache for the kids who are supervised to death and plugged into the damn video games and ipods all day long. You go on a trip with them and they don’t talk to you or look at the scenery. Pitiful.

My dad told me a funny anecdote about his boyhood in Atlanta. They lived in a big old house on Peachtree Road, and there was a basement dug into the side of the hill. He and his cousin Jimmy discovered a rat hole down there.

“We took our .22s and decided to deal with the rat problem,” he reminisced the other day. (Boys in the South were routinely given a .22 rifle as a rite of passage at age 12, and taught responsible gun handling by their fathers.) “Jimmy and I sat by that hole, watching the cheese bait for the longest time. Finally a rat showed up and we popped it: but it disappeared so fast we thought we’d missed it. But pretty soon it staggered out and died.

“You know, we never did see another one,” he chuckled.

Now that’s how you deal with varmints.

You must either be female or lived in a city, I can easily recall how much fun poking sticks in the creek was

We (Tennessee) also call them Lightning bugs (or, more properly we call then “lightnun bugs”).

“We used to catch our fireflies and tear the light off the tail of the little buggers, then put them on our ring fingers and pretend they were diamonds.”

We smeared them in streaks across our face to have glow in the dark camo. I guess glowing faces weren’t really a god way to hide but at nine or ten it wasn’t much fun unless you actually shot each other in the BB gun wars so we weren’t really hiding anyway. I shudder to think what today’s nanny state would think of that one (especially since we usually started off in the day by blowing things up, cutting down a few trees in the woods behind the house and “sword fighting”, and then having an all out bottle rocket battle).

Sadly one of the things that has really hurt their population is the multitude of mulching mowers in use now. They rest during the day in the grass and the suction on the mulchers is enough to suck them up and kill them.

It’s unusual to see them like we did even back in the late 80′s and early 90′s. In the late 80′s at the gun range when we would turn the lights off there would be several hundreds of the things out in the fields. Nowadays if there are 50 of them the kids that are still around make a comment about how many there are.

By the way, your parents knew. The olden days were not nearly as good as we remember, but I think we might have been a little wiser then,