I was a good kid. I followed the rules and I got good grades. I took standardized tests seriously. So seriously that I’d get anxiety attacks beforehand.
But I remember a moment, some random day on my long, harsh road from little-kid-ness through puberty, I was maybe 11 years old. I was sitting in the back of the school bus having this revelation that, like, I didn’t have to follow the rules. Before that exact moment, it had seemed like all the things adults were telling me to do were somehow the only way. Their words were bedrock truth. And suddenly I realized that it was all bullshit. It was a weird, frightening and exciting moment.
I started to get into trouble. Nothing too horrible, but enough for me to be able to mark that moment as “before trouble” and “after trouble”.
Here’s the story of the “Worst Thing” I ever did as a kid. It’s actually not that bad, especially compared to stories I’ve been told by friends over the years of their worst things. But it’s pretty awful. For a pre-teen living in the backwoods of Vermont who’d never been in “serious” trouble before, this was top of the line, I think.
It was a slow weekend day, I was probably 12 years old. I have no idea where my parents were. Maybe they were working? Anyway, I had a group of 3 or 4 friends over. We were bored out of our minds. We decided to go for a walk. The town where I grew up is all dirt roads and forest. We used to just walk around for hours.
On this particular day, our first stop was a construction site - a house that was being built not far down the road from where I lived. The frame of the house was complete. It was all just concrete and two by fours. We trashed the place. We knocked stuff over. We broke some wood. We etched things into a metal tool chest. We spread nails out everywhere.
We left the construction site in search of something else to vandalize. At some point we got off the road and just started wandering through the woods. We came upon a sugar shack. This is where you turn maple sap into syrup. We broke all the windows. There were these little glass jars of syrup samples, grade A through D. We took turns throwing them at the side of the shack, syrup splattering everywhere. We broke some of the equipment.
Having gotten our pre-teen, testosterone boredom fueled jollies, we headed back to my house. Not long after, a police car rolled into my driveway. We freaked out. The cop rang the doorbell. We all hid, in closest and under beds. Still just little kids.
The cop came back that night when my parents were home. He said it was easy to figure out who was responsible because there were footprints leading all the way from where we had exited the woods straight back to my house. Dirt roads, after all. We were such idiots.
In my memory, I was being admonished by the cop and my parents for least two hours. I can’t imagine he actually stayed for more than 15 minutes. But my parents were predictably livid.
My friends and I had to collectively pay for the repairs and all the samples we destroyed. I don’t remember how much it was per person, but it was a lot for a 12 year old.All my weekly allowance went towards it for at least half a year. Finally, I saved enough money to pay, and I walked the few miles down to the house of the guy who owned the sugar shack. He wasn’t home, but his wife invited me in and gave me a brownie. She was so sweet. She said we were lucky we didn’t hang out much longer around the shack because her husband had heard us breaking stuff and had gone out to investigate with his hunting rifle. She sent me on my way with a little baggie full of baked goods.
This incident stands out so strongly in my mind partly because it felt so dramatic, but also partly because as I’ve gotten older and older, I find it harder and harder to understand why we acted the way we did. When you’re a teenager like that, you feel like no one understands you. And that’s actually true. I’m at the point now, near 2 decades later, where I’m just completely baffled.
