Do you remember when you were younger and your friends always tried to talk you into the stupidest of things? Like on "A Christmas Story" where the kid gets his tongue stuck to the frozen poll because his friends triple dog dared him to? I think that every kid has to go through this kind of stuff at one point.
The one I remember quite clearly, is the time that I was dared to climb up a fallen tree onto the roof of a garage.
See, I don't know about you, but when I think back on this whole idea, I think that the words "fallen tree" make the whole thing a bad idea. What you don't know--because I haven't told you yet, obviously--is that the fallen tree had landed on the roof of a garage that was on an abandoned property.
When I was younger, all of my friends and I loved to play in the creek. We built a "clubhouse" on one of the banks on the creek (which consisted of the flimsy wood from cheap entertainment centers that we found thrown out with the trash), caught frogs in the creek and brought them home, and would spend long periods of time covered in poison ivy and mosquito bites because we played in the creek.
I guess you could have called me a tom-boy. You can also assume, based on this information, that the fallen tree's base was in the creek. This same tree also happened to have destroyed the clubhouse that was right next to it.
As we are contemplating the wreckage of our dearly departed clubhouse, one of my friends happens to notice that the tree that caused the problem was propped up by the slowly decaying garage of the abandoned house nearby. This friend also happened to be a couple years older than the 7 and 8 year old girls that he hung out with and, perhaps because of this, had a habit of tormenting us girls.
And so it began. The dare was put in place and I was the only girl out of the three of us that didn't chicken out. I was steered right in front of the diagonal base of the tree and had my jaw set. I started to climb up the large tree, having trouble because it was almost completely bare of branches and bigger than I could wrap my arms around.
Basically, I looked like a mentally challenged monkey trying inch my way up this giant fallen log.
As I got to the top of the tree and stepped onto the roof, I noticed three things.
1) The part of the roof I was on was the only part that hadn't completely collapsed with decay
2) My friends had gotten bored with how long it took me to climb to the top and had ditched me
3) The only way back down was the tree, and the drop was a long way down which made me too nervous to try it.
So I was stuck. I couldn't climb to any other part of the roof for fear that I would fall onto the rusty metals that had been left behind in the garage. I couldn't climb down the tree for fear of falling onto the rocks in the creek below (and at some point I was terrified of getting a splinter from sliding down the tree). And, as I grew up in the 90's before cell phones were popular (my sister had a pager in high school), I had no way of getting help.
Now, this abandoned property was actually right in the middle of my neighborhood--and everyone had a close next door neighbor, so getting down or getting attention shouldn't have been as hard as it was. However, it was a hot summers day in the middle of Illinois, and no one was dumb enough to stay out in the heat--but the parents were all smart enough to kick their kids out in it so that the wreckage of playing indoors wasn't an issue.
But my friends had ditched me to go get their lunch, and I was alone. I started doing the one thing I could think of--yelling for help. But, for some reason, nobody could hear the sound of an 8 year old girl sitting on top of an abandoned garage. Perhaps it was the whir of their AC or the cable turned on inside of the house.
When yelling for help didn't work, I thought of what annoyed people in the neighborhood the most. I remembered that my father always complained of two things: people driving by with the radios on too loud, and the next door neighbor's dog howling all the time. As I didn't have a car, and I couldn't think of any good songs to scream, I decided to play pretend.
I started to howl like a wolf.
From my previous post, you have probably guessed that I have always been obsessed with Animal Planet and animals in general. So, naturally, I had practiced these sort of noises to mimic the animals I saw on TV. So I howled, and I howled, and I howled some more.
It was two hours later before I heard anyone respond, and that was the neighbor yelling at me to "SHUT UP" before slamming his glass door shut and going back to whatever he had been doing previously.
By the time I had howled for 4 hours, I was tired, hot, thirsty, and my throat probably couldn't take much more howling. I curled up and whimpered for a few minutes before I heard my friend's mother, "Amanda? Is that you, up there?"
She was livid. Her daughter, Sam, had just finally gotten around to telling her mother what had gone on while they were eating dinner. She grabbed the ladder from her garage and propped it against the garage, climbing up and, after glancing at the caved in green tile of the roof, started to freak out.
She couldn't get me down, there was a creek on the back side where I was at and no one had a long enough ladder for that, and the only other side where the roof wasn't caged in was inaccessible due to that neighbor being a jerk and having a privacy fence.
So Sam's mother decided to call 911 and get a fire truck there.
It took forever, but finally the fire fighters were there, the long ladder from the truck allowing one guy to get over to me. I remember, distinctly, the man looking at me and saying, "You're not a fire." before he pulled me down to safety.
That house has now been completely renovated and a nice young family is living in it. I doubt they will ever know the story about the girl who howled at the sun.
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