On the Wild Nature of Childhood: My Guardian Angel Asked for Extra Vacation

There's a particular kind of freedom that belongs only to childhood in a small town - the kind that doesn't come with a manual, a warning label, or a responsible adult anywhere in sight. I grew up in Dairy, Oregon, population small-enough-that-everyone-knows-what-you-did-before-you-get-home. What I didn't know then, running wild through the dark Oregon nights, was that every stupid, dangerous, smoke-producing, federal-agent-attracting thing I did was quietly building the person I'd eventually become.

Let me explain. And please, do not try any of this.

The Kid Who Was Afraid of Disneyland

Before I became the boy who lit gunpowder next to a haystack, I was the kid who wouldn't ride anything at Disneyland.

I was six. My cousins were fearless. My big brother was fearless. They loved every ride - the drops, the speed, the shrieking plunge into manufactured darkness - and I stood at the edges, genuinely terrified, wishing I could dissolve into the concrete. You know how it goes when you're the scared one in a pack of brave kids. There's a kind of low-grade shame that settles in. Nobody has to say much. The looks do the work just fine.

I don't blame anyone for it. Kids tease. Siblings tease. But that shame planted something in me - a stubborn, reckless need to prove I wasn't afraid. To leap before I looked. To say yes when the smarter answer was clearly no.

As an adult, I've taken risks I probably shouldn't have. Some paid off beautifully. Some cost me. I've thought a lot about where that impulse came from, and I always come back to that little boy standing outside the Matterhorn, burning with embarrassment, deciding somewhere deep in his six-year-old bones that he would never feel that way again.

Character is strange like that. It forms in the most unexpected fires.

Running Wild in Dairy, Oregon

Dairy, Oregon at night is dark. The kind of dark that city people never really experience - no ambient glow, no streetlight orange bleeding across the sky, just a vast black dome salted with more stars than you can comprehend. I loved it. We ran through that darkness like we owned it.

Toilet-papering houses was a fine art. You had to be fast, quiet, and strategic about your target selection. The execution was everything. We moved like a small chaotic militia through the sleeping streets, and when we were done we evaporated back into the dark, breathless and electric with the thrill of having done something wonderfully pointless.

I look back on those nights and I don't see delinquency. I see kids learning to move through the world - to take initiative, to coordinate, to commit fully to something absurd and then execute it with everything you've got. Transferable skills, if you think about it hard enough.

The Gunpowder Incident

I want to be careful about how I describe this one, because I am a grown man now and I understand consequences.

What I can tell you is that if you empty a full box of shotgun shells, the powder makes quite a pile. What I can also tell you is that a haystack is not the most strategic thing to crouch

behind when you decide, with the confidence that only a child can muster, to light said pile. The haystack did not burn down. But it was singed. And somewhere, a guardian angel filed a formal complaint.

What I took from it - eventually, after the shock wore off - was a healthy respect for what I didn't know. The world has rules and physics doesn't care how brave you feel. That's a lesson worth learning. Ideally in a way that doesn't involve a fire department, but I'll take what I can get.

The Railroad Tracks and the Federal Agents

Deep in the Oregon woods, miles from anywhere that mattered, there were railroad tracks. And when you're a kid with coins and small rocks burning a hole in your pocket, the temptation to place things on railroad tracks and watch a train flatten them is roughly irresistible. I'm not proud. I'm just being honest.

Here is the thing about the woods: you think no one is watching. You think you are invisible, insulated by trees and distance and the general assumption that nothing you do matters that much. Then, miles away, someone actually derails a train. And suddenly federal agents are in your life asking questions.

I was not detained. I don't believe I was even a serious suspect - I was a kid with a flattened penny, not a wrench and a manifesto. But I will tell you that I have never placed anything on a railroad track since. Not once. The universe delivered the lesson with remarkable efficiency.

Swan Lake and Learning to Drive

My grandfather's Datsun pickup was small, ancient, and patient. I was ten. He trusted me with it on the back roads near Swan Lake, which either says something beautiful about the bond between a grandfather and his grandson or something deeply alarming about rural Oregon driving standards. Probably both.

I learned to pop the clutch in a series of violent lurches, the little pickup shuddering forward in that herky-jerk way that teaches you more about mechanical empathy than any manual ever could. My grandfather never grabbed the dashboard. He just talked me through it, steady as the trees rolling past on either side of those back country roads, while I tried to keep the Datsun from becoming a lawn ornament. He'd make me laugh. He had a kind wit about him that was a jab but made you feel okay through the joking admonishment.

He was also the man who sat with me at the Dairy Café, at the diner stools right up at the front counter, and ordered us vanilla milkshakes that came in those massive stainless steel mixer containers - the whole thing, not just a glass. We would polish off every drop. It was the kind of ordinary perfection that lodges itself somewhere permanent in your chest. I can still feel the cold metal of that container, still hear the sounds of a small-town diner doing its slow business around us. Remembering how proud I was that everyone who walked through the door to the sound of a clanking bell knew my grandfather and loved him.

Some of the wildness of my childhood was fire and mischief. Some of it was this - quiet, unremarkable, irreplaceable.

The Hole in the Woods

At some point I dug a large hole in the woods and filled it with whatever I could find and lit it on fire. In retrospect, this was probably less of a decision and more of an inevitability given everything else I've described. I remember being genuinely puzzled when adults came running toward the smoke. The way I saw it, I had dug the hole specifically so the fire would be contained. I had engineered a solution. I did not understand why this was not being received as responsible fire management.

I understand now.

Highway 140 and the Semi Trucks

This one I genuinely cannot defend on any level, practical or philosophical. Hiding in the tall grass along Highway 140 and flinging clumps of weeds - dirt-bottomed, projectile-ready - against the trailers of passing semi trucks was objectively stupid. The weeds made a satisfying thwack on the metal. Nobody got hurt. No accidents occurred. My guardian angel, at this point, had almost certainly submitted a formal request for hazard pay.

I include it here not because I'm proud, but because honesty matters. And because any account of wild childhood that only includes the poetic parts is lying to you.

What the Wildness Was For

I survived all of it. Singed, questioned by federal agents, and possessed of a deeply irrational relationship with risk, yes - but intact. And I've spent a lot of years thinking about what all of that actually meant.

I don't think kids should light gunpowder. I don't think anyone should put things on railroad tracks or fling debris at vehicles traveling at highway speed. I want to be very clear about that. In hindsight, perhaps a nice hike down the PCT would have scratched the same itch.

Cheryl Strayed found herself out there on the trail and wrote a bestselling memoir about it. I found myself crouching behind a haystack with singed eyebrows. We both came out changed, I suppose, though her book deal was probably easier to pitch.

There is something irreplaceable about the freedom to be genuinely, uncomplicatedly wild - to have unstructured time and unsupervised space and the latitude to make mistakes that are yours alone to own. Something happened in those Oregon nights that couldn't have happened in a structured program or a scheduled activity. I learned what fear felt like and what the other side of fear felt like. I learned that I could do something stupid and survive it and learn from it and carry the knowledge forward. I learned to read risk, even if it took me a while to read it accurately. I learned that the world is interesting and large and full of things that will humble you if you push them.

I became a writer who understands that characters have to be tested, that growth comes from friction, that the most interesting human beings are almost always the ones who took the wrong turn once or twice and made it back.

The wild childhood gave me that. The small town gave me that. My grandfather and his Datsun and his milkshakes gave me that.

My guardian angel gave me that, too - by sticking around despite every reasonable argument for quitting.