He lived with his older brother Peter, his mom Judy and his father Jim
We weren't even real cousins to tell the truth. But you know how it is when your little and your parents have close friends and hang out with them a lot, you called their friends, aunt and uncle and by default their kids became your cousins.
My cousin Richard and his brother Peter had a big farm.
My sister and I used to stay there during school holidays - if we were lucky.
I loved it.
It was a frigg'n huge farm!
We used to roam it.
They had.. waffles, mushrooms, frogs and opossum's, cats and chickens, pigs and gigantic corn fields and cows, calves and goats, puppies, tractors and motorbikes - guns and swearing, tree houses and real bows and arrows, lots of roast dinners and grandfather clocks, a ballroom and an organ...
You never got bored there - you got tired!
.. and when you got tired there - you got fed.
It was uber awesome!
My mom was pretty cruisey when it came to letting kids be kids - but aunt Judy made her look like a strict disciplinarian.
Aunt Judy was way cool.
She had eyes that twinkled at you when she smiled and she was always smiling.
She giggled too.
I didn't know any other grownups that giggled.
And when she laughed she could go from a chortle to a guffaw.
Aunt Judy knew how to laugh out loud.
Uncle Jim, on the other hand, was taciturn and serious.
He was always working on the farm, up before the sun for morning milking and home again about lunch time, then back out on the farm for more maintenance work before afternoon milking.
We never messed with him, he could swear real loud.
There was always little jobs to do like getting eggs from the chicken coop, putting feed out for the cows and feeding the calves, but when that stuff was done we were free to do anything we wanted.
So Richard and I roamed the farm - shooting things and riding things. Talking rubbish and seeing how long we could hold on to the electric fences. Chasing the chickens and seeing if we could tackle them. Cuddling the piglets and trying not to get bitten by the sows. Shooting at the cows from long distance with the .22 cal and subsonic rounds! Boy stuff Hell yeeeeah!
One day during our meanderings in the very furthermost paddocks from the homestead we happened upon a very large, very old tractor wheel, It was laying on it's side covered for the most part with overgrown grass and weeds. The tire was flat and the steel rim was quite rusty but after pulling back the overgrowth it was obvious it was intact.
It had been abandoned I assume by my uncle Jim probably 30 - 40 feet from the top of a ridge on the southwestern side facing towards the farm house but several miles from it.
After several attempts to move it we figured that uncle Jim had most likely fitted a spare one to his tractor when this one went flat and as is the way with farmers, drove off in his repaired tractor and never bothered expending the energy required to go back and get the flat one.
At the top of the ridge and looking down the opposing north eastern side it was clear paddock for four or five hundred yards before a fence line bordered the grazing paddock running parallel to the ridge. On the other side of the fence was what is colloquially known as a "bush block". This consisted of five or six acres of native bush which lined the remaining several hundred yards of the north eastern side of the ridge we stood on top of and ran all the way to the gully and creek at the bottom. The other side of the creek was where the nearest neighbors section met uncle Jim's farm.
Five hundred or maybe more yards yet further down, we could just make out the roofs of several of the neighbors utility sheds and the top of their house but from our position it was much too far away to make out any people.
Richard and I decided that being as we were so far away from any prying eyes it would make great sport to roll the old wheel down the hill and watch it crash into the bush block. We didn't really give much thought to the damage it would obviously do to the fence surrounding the bush block as many of uncle Jim's fence's were in a continuous state of disrepair and one more wouldn't really be noticed.
It took us the better part of the day and all of our combined ingeniousness to release the wheel from the firm grip mother nature had taken hold on it over the many years the wheel had been abandoned. But by prising with old fence posts and propping it with large chunks of concrete we obtained from an unused and crumbling cattle trough we eventually managed to get the wheel to the top of the ridge.
Between the two of us we struggled to stand the beastly heavy bastard upright and attempted to align it so it would obtain maximum speed before crashing as deeply as possible into the bush below us.
It was a no brainer really. The slope on the north eastern side was very much steeper than that on the side where the tyre had lain, so basically all we had to do was point the wheel anywhere at that bush section and it would connect!
So sweating and swearing we gave the behemoth a final shove and watched fascinated as it quickly began to gather speed...
It took us about five seconds to realize that we were much too young to understand the laws of physics, we were nine years old, what do nine year olds know of potential and kinetic energy or about mass, inertia and gravity. What we did understand and what soon became abundantly clear was that we had entirely underestimated the monster we had released!
Our fascination quickly turned to disbelief as we watched the wheel gather ever more speed despite its flat tyre until the speed of the wheels descent completely overcame the handicap of the flat tyre and the whole abominable heap began to bounce, striking the little ridges that cows make when walking across the side of steep hills. Due to the ever increasing pace that the wheel was gathering the bouncing soon turned into leaps and while still at least only half way to the fence the leaps had changed into gigantic bounds!
One particularly evil bounce saw the barbarous brute land awkwardly and to our despair the angle of decent began to change and the hideous monster, now bouncing nearly twice its own height, was given another clear two hundred yards of paddock to roll down and was now beginning to run parallel to the fence instead of directly at it!
It was at about this stage that we realized how far out of our depth we had quickly become and I know that I personally wished we hadn't had the stroke of genius that saw the wheel begin rolling..!!
By now the wheel had reached a truly horrendous speed and wasn't so much bouncing anymore as much as it was flying!
When it finally reached the fence bordering the bush block it was nearly at the very bottom corner of it, where the neighbors fence met uncle Jims.
With a gigantic and spectacular vault it completely hurdled the remaining bush section without even the least of contact and at a guess I would estimate it was probably approaching fifty odd miles per hour and bouncing a good fifteen feet into the air whilst covering more than twice that much ground!
To our discomfort it continued steadily at an ever increasing rate of velocity down the gully towards the neighbors homestead half a mile further down the hill.
It was a strange time from memory, the wheel had become so distant now that it appeared to be going quite slow however as Richard and I were both painfully aware - this was an illusion!
The Gargantua was gaining speed every second and we could easily see that some bounces would have it at least four or five times it's own height above the ground and we, or at least I, wanted to run away, as if not seeing what would happen next, would mean that it didn't...!?
People I shit you not - given the mass of that bastard and taking into account the square of it's acceleration, the amount of energy that it could unleash on ANY stationary object would be dynamic to say the very least!!!
Seriously this thing would smash a house into kindling!
..and so with the clarity that can only occur in the face of inevitable disaster we watched horror struck as the bouncing colossus smashed through a fence surrounding the neighbors buildings of which we could only see the roofs and disappeared. I can only assume that it had jumped/rolled into the main driveway area for the homestead but an instant later we saw it leap clear over one of the half round corrugated iron utility sheds before it vanished from our view altogether. It was much too far away to hear any noise or screaming but we weren't hanging around to listen for any - I can tell you that much!
We scuttled off home like a pair of beaten dogs, ears back and tails tucked firmly between legs! We were pooing ourselves - the power of that wheel had been truly awesome!
We spent the afternoon being very helpful to aunt Judy volunteering to do all the crap chores hoping that when the crunch came aunt Judy might come to our rescue - the whole time crapping our pants waiting for the neighbors car to arrive...
..nothing!
Uncle Jim came in at dinner time and we trembled our way through the meal waiting for the explosion that would signal our discovery and a thorough whipping of our asses - but it just never came...
This is complete conjecture on my part but I can only assume that by some freak chance the Godzilla wheel missed all of the neighbors structures, careened off into their paddocks and came to rest without destroying anything that attracted their attention to it. Lord knows.
I live in hope that two small boys don't come upon it one day and decide it would be fun to watch it roll down a hill...
I actually read this one before, but I read it with even greater delight today. It's wonderful to experience your adventures vicariously. I simultaneously want to BE Aunt Judy (the adult who giggles) and be with Aunt Judy. It's a wonder one of you didn't accidentally give yourselves away in sheer curiosity by asking one too many dangerous questions. Of course, there is the youthful relief at a "bullet dodged." lol
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