The searing hot sun beat down us relentlessly that August, but we didn’t care because we were on a boyhood adventure.
August in eastern Washington, where I grew up, is time for farmers to begin the wheat harvest. But for my cousins, Rick, Mike, and I, it was two weeks of carefree fun exploring and playing on grandpa’s farm.
The Grand Adventure Begins
I was 10-years old, which means Rick and Mike at 11 were older and wiser when the adventure began.
We knew Grandpa had a graveyard of old farm implements down in the gulley about a half-mile away from the main house so off we went. Grandpa’s graveyard of old farm tools was a veritable treasure chest for three boys on an adventure.
Our first find was two sets of iron wheels. We were thrilled to find they rotated freely on their axles. The wheels themselves were open-spoke steel and at four feet high were about as tall as we were.
We attached a rope to the first pair of wheels and slowly pulled them uphill through the soft farm dirt to the main barnyard. Returning in the afternoon, we repeated the process to retrieve the second pair of wheels.
With scavenged pieces of wood, we crafted a magnificent chariot! It was about eight feet long, five feet wide, and set about two feet off the ground.
It was time for a test ride!
We pushed our chariot out of the barnyard and down the gravel road that ran in front of grandpa’s farm. With some effort, we pushed it all the way to the top of the tallest hill on the road. We climbed aboard and off we went. Gravity did its job. We picked up speed, and soon we were flying down the hill on the ride of our lives.
It was at that point that I realized our chariot had no steering mechanism.
It didn’t have brakes either!
No matter these design deficiencies. At this point, we were fully committed!
Unfortunately, our chariot started to veer to the side of the road as we approached the bottom of the hill at top speed.
To make matters worse, there was a gully on the side of the road with a ten-foot drop to the field below.
There was no escaping; our chariot was about to become an airplane with a glide path of a rock.
Jumping off our chariot onto a gravel road didn’t seem like a practical solution to our dilemma, so we held on as we went airborne off the side of the road.
Happily, we landed right-side up, still on our chariot, and the soft dirt of the farmland brought us to a slow stop.
What a grand adventure! Being boys, we were ready to repeat the ride but wisely determined to make some modifications to our chariot before attempting a second test run.
We pushed our chariot all the way back to the farm, planning to make the needed modifications the next day.
At dinner, Rick, Mike, and I regaled grandma, grandpa, and my uncle Dick with the story of our grand adventure of our chariot turned airplane. For some reason, they failed to appreciate the wonder and excitement of our adventure.
The adults expressed, in no uncertain terms, that no further test runs would be allowed. Our chariot was to be hauled back down to the implement graveyard the next day.
Important Life Lessons
A lot of valuable life lessons occur in our formative years. Here are five lessons I took away from my boyhood adventure that hot August week on grandpa’s’ farm.
Life is an Adventure
Our day began as an adventure. We didn’t know what we would find or what we would do. Not having everything determined in advance made the adventure all the more fun. Kids seem to know how to experience the joy of adventure, but as adults, many of us have forgotten how to experience daily life as an adventure.
Create Alignment Around a Vision
As soon as we found those wheels, we all envisioned our magnificent chariot. Most truly breakthrough discoveries are the result of a team of people aligned to a shared vision.
Live your Passion
If we hadn’t been passionate about the prospects of riding our chariot down the hill, we would have found a million excuses for why we wouldn’t be successful. That negativity would have doomed us before we even got started.
Determination
We would never have struggled to pull those wheels up through the dirt, build the chariot, or get it out on the road for a test ride if we had not been determined as a group to see the work to completion.
Courage/Risk-Taking
You never know how things will turn out when you’re doing something you’ve never done before. Living life as an adventure takes courage and the willingness to risk failure.
More Articles on Vision
I’ve written other articles about vision over the years. You can search for “vision” to find them, or you can check out the links below for two of my favorites.
- #097: Is It Important to Align Our Life to God’s Vision For Us?
- #342: Are Vision Statements a Complete Waste of Time?
Join the Conversation
As always, questions and comments are welcome. What life lessons have you learned through childhood adventures?
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Category: Personal Development | Vision
Ron- Your adventure reminds me of those Calvin and Hobbes cartoons where they hop on their snow sled and end up careening off some cliff into a brook below! As a boy I liked to build tree houses with my pals, and we installed rope swings throughout the woods to play “Tarzan.” It was terrific fun until one day the rope snagged, and thus I plummeted to the ground, ending up with a broken wrist. Ten weeks in a cast! Ah, but the adventures were worth it!
John, I remember the Calvin & Hobbes cartoon you mentioned 😉 !
I built a couple of treehouse with my cousins on their property but happily none of our efforts ended up with broken bones. But looking back, I would say we we more lucky than proficient!
Your story sounds like something that me and my brothers would spend out time doing in the summer, often with similarly disastrous results. I really like the 5 point summary that you talked about at the end. I really connected with the fourth point in the summary that talks about the importance of determination. As a kid I had several, well lets just call them “projects”, that I devoted my time to and if I hadn’t gotten over the initial hump, they never would have succeeded. I think my takeaway from this is that if you do something that you are passionate it is easier to be determined when it comes to the completion of a project. Whether it is something as light-hearted as constructing a structurally unsound chariot, or trying to get a start in your professional life, determination is detrimental to success.
Your story was easy to identify with and even took me back to some of my own childhood shenanigans. I agree, as children it is easier to find the adventure in life. I think this is due to the fact that we are not bounded to many responsibilities. However, it is still important to learn this lessons young so that you can carry these lessons of adventure, passion, determination and risk taking in to your adulthood.
I loved the story from your childhood–and was slightly worried while reading about a high speed chariot ride down a hill with no breaks. Like your grandparents, I would not have let you go back down the hill. However, I loved reading your important life lessons and appreciated the reminder that life is an adventure and we need to remember to enjoy it, instead of fearing it.
Your story about riding the chariot down the hill was very entertaining! I liked how at the end you gave important life lessons to learn from the story. The one that stood out for me was the “live your passion”. We so often doom ourselves before we even get to do something that we really want to do because we let doubt and negativity beat our passions.
I really enjoyed your story and your key points- especially the point about remembering to make every day an adventure. I’m a naturally pretty scattered person- so I’ve learned that to get things done I have to keep a record and a plan of what’s on the list. Sometimes I notice it feels more like I’m just doing things to check them off than for the adventure- which is, and should be the main point of doing a lot of the fun things in my schedule. A good reminder to not be so guarded that I miss out on the adventure!
Reading about one of your childhood adventures brought back many similar exciting childhood memories that I have had myself. I found your story to be quite eye opening because I never thought about how many lessons could be taken away from a childhood adventure. But what you say is so true ~ kids can create the happiest adventures and success stories all because they follow their passion. This reading has been such a great reminder to me to never stray away from the things that bring you joy because passion leads to determination, hard-work, fearlessness and, the most important thing, happiness.