Future Pilots in the '70s!

Someone said something the other day that sparked a memory and I had to write about it.  This was one of those times when I realized that we did a lot of simple things growing up and had a lot of fun doing them. 

We lived on the west side of Washington state, and we often vacationed on the east side of the Cascades.  It was almost always warm and sunny over there and we would go stay in campgrounds and state parks.

We often went to a place called Entiat, a beautiful state park on the Columbia River.  We would spend hours as kids playing in the river, playing frisbee, playing on the camping playground and generally just having a lot of fun being kids.

One thing that was a real treat was when we would go to the little general store in town and buy those little balsa wood airplanes that had the wind up rubber band to power the propeller.  Entiat was a nice park and had a huge green grassy area which was perfect for playing with these planes.  If I remember correctly, they came with an extra rubber band which was good, because that ended up being the limiting factor on how long the planes lasted.

The whole length of the park had a row of huge Poplar trees that acted as a windbreak and were cool to climb in.  Sometimes we had to climb the trees to retrieve our planes and we weren't always able to find or reach them.  I bet to this day you can still find 40 year old balsa wood plane skeletons in those trees.

Sometimes, we would splurge and spend a little bit extra to buy the planes that had the little set of wheels on them.  While the grass wasn't ideal for take offs and landings, it was really cool to have them and made us feel like we were running our own little airport.

These were really awesome and gave us hours and hours of outdoor, fresh air fun.  I bet kids to day would love to play with them, too.

Old Fashioned Fishing

I grew up in a family that loved the outdoors. We camped, we hiked, we went to the beach, the mountains, a local lake… anyplace that we could enjoy the great outdoors.

We spent a lot of our weekends hiking and fishing. There are a lot of things that we did a bit differently back then. To begin with, we didn’t have the latest and greatest in fishing tackle and gear. Our rods were made up of two or three sections and when they weren’t assembled, we held them together with rubber bands, not in handy little plastic protective cases. This also meant that they weren’t necessarily all together when we grabbed them. More than once, it made for a bit of last minute scrambling. Our reels usually required a few minutes of attention to get the tangles out and everything set up. We put weights on our lines using our teeth and tied hooks with clumsy knots.

Why in the world would we pay for something we can get for free? That was the philosophy of my dad and uncle, and meant that me, my brother and cousin were out in the yard at night after having the sprinkler on all evening so that we could get night crawlers. It was a fun job for a kid, and did teach us that we could provide for ourselves… we didn’t always have to pay for things you could put forth effort to acquire.

We drove to trailheads late at night and slept in our cars with nothing more than a blanket and a wadded up coat for a pillow and leaning on each other.
Up at the crack of dawn, we did not eat some fancy nature trail bar thingy or drink a high energy drink. It was coffee from the thermos and maybe an apple or a candy bar… just something to get us going. We’d hike through dew soaked meadows and fight off mosquitoes the old-fashioned way – we’d SWAT ‘em. We’d spend the day fishing and would almost always come home with a mess of fresh mountain-lake fish. Limits were like 8 or 12 per person, so 5 or 6 of us would get quite a haul.

I don’t know – do kids still do these things today? It seemed like all my friends growing up fished, hunted, or did something outdoors most every weekend. It’s something the kids of today need to experience for themselves, and, NO, swinging around a Wii does not an outdoor experience make!