Old Dirt Road : Playing Hooky
By Phill Senters
11/18/2009

One mile from where the pavement ends stands the old homestead where my hooky playing tale begins.

 Just a few hundred feet from our house, there is another old dirt road which has no name that I have ever been aware of, except of course, for the name that us kids always called it. This is the road that leads to no where. Thus the name: The road to Nowhere.

  If you keep going south a few hundred yards past Nowhere, you’ll find that the road ends and all you can see is orange trees. Take a south east track through the grove, and after about a mile you’ll find the remains of someone else’s old homestead. This place was old and deserted even way back then when I was just a little kid, so I have doubts whether it is even still there.

 My friend Joe and I happened on it one day when we were skipping school and wandering around through the woods and orange groves. We had  gone to school on the bus that morning just like always , then we decided we didn’t want to stay there, so we just left. We thought we’d made a clean getaway, but unknown to us, a couple of girls had seen us leaving and told some teacher. We were already headed for trouble and didn’t even know it.

 We wandered around in town (Apopka) for a while, then decided it would be best if we were to go closer to home so we could show up there at the usual time as if we’d been at school so we wouldn’t get into trouble for skipping.

 We checked things out at Nowhere, but nothing seemed to have changed since the last time we’d been there, and it was still too early to head home so we thought we’d  take a short cut through the groves to the nearest store at Clarcona cross roads to get something to drink. That’s how we found the old deserted house and dilapidated barn way out in the middle of an orange grove.

 We had gone about a mile or so from Nowhere when we came to a big clearing in the orange trees, and in the middle of this clearing sat an old frame house with an old barn off to our left and a little pond just a little way beyond the barn.

 ”Wow!” Joe said. “I never knew this was here, you think anybody lives here?”

 ”Nah, I don’t think anybody’d be livin’ in a place that’s fallin’ apart this bad.” I told him. “It don’t look like anybody’s even been here in a long time, let’s check it out.”

 ”You sure? there might be somebody here even if they don’t live here.”

 ”C’mon Joe,” I teased “anybody can see nobody lives here, what’re you afraid of?”

 That did it, “Okay, okay” he said.

 There was a big front porch that went the whole length of the house, and in several places floor boards were broken and some were missing entirely, so we had to be careful where we stepped.

 When we got to the front door, it was hanging  about halfway open and cobwebs were strung all through the opening. I used one of my crutches to push the door fully open and remove some of the cobwebs and we went on inside.

 The walls of this place were covered with webs, there were a pair of book shelves on one wall which had a few old books and magazines that were hard to see because of the spider webs. This must’ve been what spiders consider heaven! I was sure I’d never seen more cobwebs anywhere than there were in that old place! What little furniture was in the house was totally covered in webs and the doorways and hallways looked very uninviting because of them.

 The room we were in must have been the living room, but the only furniture in it was a huge cobweb covered couch and a really old looking wooden rocking chair with part of one of it’s rockers missing. It stood upright, but I wouldn’t want to try rocking in it!

 I went to one of the bookshelves to check out the books, I wanted see if I could find out how old they were. Joe asked “What’re you messin’ with them ol’ books for? I wannna go see what’s in the barn.”

 ”C’mmon, Joe,” I said “I wanna  look at some of this old this stuff. Don’t you?”

“Nah, you can have all them ol’ books,” he said “let’s go check out the barn first, you can look at the books later.”

 ”All right,” I said “let’s go see the barn”

 When we got to the barn, the big double doors were already partly open which was a good thing because they were huge and looked like they might fall off the rusty old hinges if we tried to move them. We had to squeeze through the opening sideways, but we managed to get in without moving them.

 Once we got inside, it was amazing what we found. This place was packed with stuff. On one side against the wall there were stacks of wooden ladders, they were about fifty feet long and there had to have been more than a hundred of them. They were ladders the pickers used for picking oranges during picking time, but these were so old looking I thought they would never be used again.

 On the other side, rows of wooden orange crates were stacked from the floor to the rafters and looked like they might come tumbling down at the slightest touch.
 
 Scattered through the rest of the place were more orange crates stuffed with pick sacks big, heavy duty canvas bags with a shoulder strap.

 An orange picker “wears” the bag when he’s on the ladder and puts the fruit he picks in it. This keeps the fruit from ever touching the ground.

 After seeing everything of interest inside the barn, we decided to check out the little pond. On the way around to the back of the barn, we came upon an old tractor.

 This was a really old  tractor with a big disk hitched to the back. We were used to seeing these tractors in use every summer before picking time, but this one was older than any I’d ever seen disking the groves. The tires were flat of course, and they weren’t nearly as wide as the ones we were used to seeing. It must have been many years since this thing had been in use.

 After checking out the old tractor for a while, we went on down to the pond. It wasn’t very big, maybe a couple of acres, but looked like a good place for swimming or fishing, or both.

 Walking around the edge of the pond, we came up on an old wooden rowboat almost completely hidden in some brush. “Wow, look at this” Joe said. “You think it’ll float?”

 ”Well, there’s only one way to find out.” I told him, “Let’s drag it out and shove it in the water.”

 It did float, but we weren’t sure what might happen if  we got in the thing, so we let it sit there in the water and watched for leaks. Only a tiny bit of water seemed to be seeping in, so we decided to go for a ride but  we didn’t have any oars.

 ”How’re we s’posed  to go for a ride in this thing without oars?” Joe asked. “That’s easy if you don’t mind gettin your shirt wet.” I said. So we tied our  shirts around the upper ends of my crutches and made a matching (almost) pair of oars. A little crude maybe, but they worked pretty good.

 We had a great time rowing that old boat around for quite a while till we were way out near the middle of the pond and noticed it was getting harder to row and the water in the floor of the boat was getting deeper much faster than it had been at first.

 ”Let’s head for shore, this thing’s sinkin!” I yelled.
We started rowing as hard and fast as we could toward the closest shore, but by now the boat was filling with water so fast we knew we wouldn’t make it. Finally, when we couldn’t row the thing any further, it was time to swim for it.

 Swimming in your boots and jeans, and trying to bring a pair of crutches along is nearly impossible. Joe was lucky, he was barefoot. He had left his  tennis shoes on the shore, so he took the crutches for me. But that was still the toughest swimming I’ve ever done. By the time we made it to the shore I was totally exhausted and just had to lie and rest while we tried to let the sun dry us a little.

 It wasn’t too early to head on home now, so we took off toward my house, trying to make up some story to tell about why we were late and how we got all wet.

 All that planning and making up stories turned out to be a waste of time because the first words I heard from anyone when we got there was my mom saying “Why didn’t you boys go to school today?” 

 ”We did.” I told her, “We just didn’t stay there.”

 ”Well, you’ve got yourselves in a whole mess of trouble, the sheriff’s been here asking about the both of you.”

 Wow! Now we were really in a lot of trouble.

 ”What did the sheriff say Mom?” I asked.
 
 ”He just asked if I knew where you two might be.” she answered. “I told him I didn’t know, but I was sure you’d turn up by suppertime. He just laughed and said ‘Probably.’”

 That’s all that was ever said about it, except Mom told me I’d better not let it happen again.

  I didn’t.

 I never left the school grounds to play hooky again, but I made many trips back to that old