My Family: Chapter 16

Since most of the children on Rum Creek were in similar circumstances, we had to be imaginative when it came to finding things to do up the holler. We had to play with what we had already like the creeks. During the summer we would dam up the spring in Slab Fork hollow which is at the end of Orville and make a swimming pool. Only three families lived up there. The water would run off of the mountain and make a stream - it would be so clean you could drink it. Someone tied a swing made with a rubber tire to one of the trees so it would swing out over the creek. In the spring the tree was a nest for snakes and there would be hundreds of baby green snakes hanging from the limbs of this tree. We would take the babies and throw them on each other. I‘m surprised my sisters or myself never learned how to swim seeing how we were around water all of our lives. Along the main road going up Rum Creek ran another creek but it was dirty water because all the mines would wash their coal in it. We could've never played in that creek.

We'd played with the trains, too. There was a curve above our house and the train would have to slow down as it came around it. When it did we would hop on and ride it until the train would pick up speed, or when the train was leaving the coal temple; we would hop on and take a little ride - again only until it pick up speed. Sometimes we would chase the train, grab hold, and pull ourselves up on the ladder to ride for awhile. The train always would go slow when going through the camp. We would have to watch out for the man in the red caboose car. We had to hop on the train so he didn’t see us. We always made sure to jump off before the train got to the houses in the coal camp - we couldn’t let any of the families see us.

We also invented games to play on the mountain side. I remember there were vines growing around the trunk of some of the trees. I don’t know what kind of vine but we called them grape vines. We would unwind them and swing from vine to vine. These weren't skinny vines they could be as thick as a Child's arm. Sometimes as you swing out the vine would break and you'd tumbled down the mountainside. We would play in the mountains most of the day, eating berries and pawpaw which tasted like bananas.

Once we got older, we'd play tag with the cars at night. There were no street lights only the moon and stars. We would put the boys in one car and the girls in another; both cars were usually borrowed from the neighbors. This one night, my girlfriend was driving

Ronnie and Bonnie

and we had the car lights off while we hid behind a building. We watched as the boys' car go pass us. We drove around without the car lights on. Shirley and I were babysitting my baby sister and Ronnie so they were in the car with us. Bonnie, my baby sister, was yelling to my girlfriend to go faster. She was only three and Ronnie about five years old. We were speeding around a three mile curve when Shirley hollered for my girlfriend to stop, she could hear a thump-thumping from somewhere. When we stopped and inspected the car, we found a big bubble on the tire. The boys came back to look for us so they changed the tire for us. If we had a blow out, my girlfriend could've lost control of the car and we might have went in the river and drown. We're all just fourteen years old while Shirley was seventeen.