The Hill
When I was a little boy living in Beaver City, Nebraska I had lots of experiences with the "Hill".
At the bottom of the hill was the commercial area of the town built around the one block square park. At the top of the hill, three blocks away, were the grade school and the high school.
We lived just a half block off the town square so every school day the hill was traversed in the morning going up, at noon coming home for lunch both ways, and when school was over for the day coming back home.
Of course there were other boys using this hill for the same purposes.
Going to school one might be by himself or herself as not everyone left for school at the same time. If you saw a kid you liked, a holler of, "Hey, wait up" might work and you wouldn’t be by yourself for that long climb up the hill.
Coming home from school was different. All the kids who lived at the bottom were coming down the hill. Sometimes this resulted in fun and games; and sometimes in TROUBLE.
The games were usually simple: kicking a rock or pinecone all the way down without letting it get in the grass; trying not to step on the cracks in the sidewalks; "skinning the cat" on the railings of the Courthouse; or bumping each other off the sidewalk.
The latter could cause TROUBLE as the bumps sometimes got hard and turned into fights. This happened to me one time and I was getting beat when one of my high school age cousins roared up in his old car. I thought he would save me but he just cheered and clapped!
As I got older and got a bike the experiences with the hill changed. The challenge now was to ride the bike all the way up the hill without having to get off and push it. Bikes didn’t have gears in those days. Weaving from one side of the street to the other, making the distance twice as far but the slope less, solved this problem. Coming down the hill was still TROUBLE. What boy doesn’t want to go as fast as possible down a hill on his ‘sleek racing bike’? At times this resulted in tumbles, skids, and skinned up knees and elbows. At other times it caused near misses with cars and losing bike riding privileges when Dad found out about them from the drivers!