Do you remember when summer was a magical time?
For me that meant trees in full bloom up the mountain sides...
It meant that the scouting parties of those my age from the area numbering less than a dozen would mount our steeds...
I actually had one that looked a lot like that...
and one I rebuilt and would get teased about that looked more like this...
It would be when I was considerably older that those would momentarily become COOL again...
Our small town of 350 to 400 people would boom to 15,000 people in the surrounding area camping, hiking, etc.
It usually meant beautiful girls our age, and for the girls in our town it mean boys their age...
There was a lot of stupid strutting and showing off only as early teens can do...
If you happen to see the Netflix series Stranger Things, they did a wonderful job of portraying how we looked and actually how we acted.
In fact that fit me and my friends really well as we also tended to have very long Dungeons and Dragons binge sessions that could last entire weekends, and the summers meant everywhere was a potential dungeon, goblin land, or adventure waiting to happen...
That is also the only time our Movie Theater that played 1 movie a week was open.
That is also the only time the sound of arcade machines would bleep, beep and threaten us with GORF from the sides of the street with it's tantalizing siren song.
This would every summer become the hub for all young people.... during a time when a young teen running around town at midnight or one in the morning was not only normal, it was considered safe.
These insidiously popular things would milk us for any quarter, dollar, ten dollars we could scrounge up.
We were in bliss. Especially if we had a really good score while some beautiful tourist girl happened to be close by so we could strut around and high five our friends.
If we had spent our allowance, and whatever money we had from whatever jobs any of us might have had at that very young age, and we had exhausted what we could convince our parents to part with there was one place that could sometimes give us our next video game fix.
That board walk... oh you just had to love the board walk. This is in fact the actual board walk I would got to; the treasure horde.
It sat in front of an absolutely amazing soda fountain shop with ice cream. It had maybe ten flavors, but to our small town that was as good as 31 flavors.
With one of these...
and some of this...
You could fashion a treasure finding device...
As you got down on your hands and knees and peered between the cracks in the boards you would invariably find misplaced quarters.
With the gum applied to the end of the straw you had yourself a tool very useful for recovering these orphaned coins.
Enough for... one more game, just one more game.
When that supply too was exhausted we deployed our portable sound effect generator (some people call it a mouth or voice box) and made our own games.
Did you want to play pac man in the park, or in that forest over there?
It was likely there were enough people to make it happen...
Many wonderous things would happen during those summers and as time passed
all that remains is shadows of the past and fading but wonderful memories...