The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley: Rocks

This sounds stupid, but when I lived in Sewanee, Tennessee, we used to throw rocks at each other for fun.  Maybe ‘fun’ isn’t the right word, but there was an adrenaline rush to it.  I was somewhere between 5th and 7th grade, and if you don’t keep kids in that age group busy, they’re going to do something stupid.

A lot of the streets in Sewanee weren’t paved, and so gravel was everywhere.  You could go anywhere and find a rock.  Back in the 1970s, there wasn’t much for unsupervised kids to do in the evenings after school or on weekends (except homework and chores), so we’d wander around the town and the surrounding wooded areas and throw rocks. 

We threw rocks at each other when we were walking (or running) through Abbo’s Alley.  We’d often be at opposite sides of the creek launching gravel or anything we found at each other.  We weren’t throwing hard.  It was more like lobbing.  We didn’t really want to hurt each other.  It was more for the challenge.  Could we hit moving targets while not getting hit ourselves?  It was like paintball but with a little more risk.  Kids rarely got truly hurt, but pain avoidance was enough motivation to try to not get hit. 

Even though we spent a lot of time in Abbo’s Alley, usually using it as a cut through to get from our neighborhood to the school or the store or the other side of town, it wasn’t the only wooded area in Sewanee.

Forests were everywhere.  I could walk outside my house and within two minutes be in the woods walking down the side of the mountain.  Some paths were obvious, but in a lot of places the trees were far enough apart that you could just walk freely in any direction.  Once I ran out of rocks to throw, I could either find more rocks just laying around or I could keep wandering aimlessly.

I never truly got lost while wandering the side of the mountain.  If I wasn’t sure where I was, I’d just walk up the mountain until I ran across a road or somebody’s backyard.  From there, I could eventually figure things out.  The views were entertaining enough, and you never knew when you were going to discover a small waterfall or stumble into a cave, so I didn’t need rocks most of the time.

Everyone’s favorite view was a place called Morgan’s Steep.  It was a cliff at the edge of a small neighborhood (with big houses, I think) at the end of town.  On the left side was a path of rock stairs that you could walk down and start wandering.  You could wander to the right as well, but I remember a path.  Some people loved staring at the valley from the edge of the rock cliff.

Some people liked to spit off of Morgan’s Steep.  I liked to throw rocks off of it.  Looking back, I hope I never hit anybody.  I just thought it was fun throwing rocks.

Even though we were kind of stupid for throwing rocks at each other, we had unwritten rules.  You didn’t throw rocks at little kids , and that was because they were helpless.  You didn’t throw rocks at adults because they’d tell your parents.  You didn’t throw rocks at teenagers because they’d beat the hell out of you and enjoy it.  

I saw one kid my age throw a rock at a teenager, and it ended just like you’d think.  Johnny hated a teenager (I think his name was Ronald, but I’m not sure), who had a couple mean yard dogs, and pegged Ronald pretty good on the head.  Ronald was pissed and chased Johnny down and beat him to a pulp (almost) in his own front yard.  Ronald was lucky that nobody else was home because Johnny had a couple older sisters that were meaner than Johnny, and that would have been a brawl for the ages if they’d seen Ronald beating Johnny like he was a redheaded step-child.

I can write something like that because I was a redheaded step-child.

Anyway, when Ronald finally got tired and left, Johnny hit him again with another rock and ran inside his house.  At that point, Ronald couldn’t do much else, so he left.  When I saw Johnny later (I don’t remember if it was that day or weeks later), he said that his dad (and his sisters) did worse to him all the time.  That explained a few things about Johnny. We’ll come back to Johnny later.

Johnny’s older sisters were 13 and 15.  The 13 year-old looked older than the 15 year-old and bragged that she could buy cigarettes by herself.  That’s what a lot of the teenagers did; they stood around and smoked.  I thought the teenagers were stupid for smoking all the time.  The teenagers thought we kids were stupid for throwing rocks at each other.

Now a bunch of those cigarette smokers probably have health issues.  But me?  All that rock throwing and getting hit didn’t cause any long-term damage.  I mean, sometimes my brain doesn’t click on all cylinders and my mind wanders all the time, but I don’t think that has anything to do with rocks hitting me upside the head.

Now that I think about it, I’m supposed to talk about dogs sometime in this story. Maybe I’ll get to that in the next episode. We’ll see.

To read this story from the beginning (where I at least talk about dogs a little bit), go to The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley.

For more of my childhood stories that took place in Sewanee, see the following:

The Tale of the Almost-Expired Milk 

Childhood Ghost Story- The Prologue  (This one mentions one of the dogs that will be introduced later.)

4th of July Story: The Box of M-80s

Even better, here is my ONE novel! It’s called The Sunset Rises, A 1990s Romantic Comedy, and you can find it here on Amazon!!

Or you can get it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’