I shouldn’t have, but I did

As we get older, we are supposed to get smarter, and I’m sure in many ways this happens. Of course, as we age, problems like less physical ability keep us from doing some dumb things. It’s a bit of a setoff.

I was thinking of my younger days and some of those things that I probably wouldn’t have done with my more cautious thinking, but I did them at the time and they worked out.

Think of choices you made in your young life that you probably wouldn’t have done had you considered all the possibilities that could go wrong. As I think back, it becomes clear that the ones that had the potential of a bad outcome actually turned out OK and were special parts of my life.

Let me share some of my decisions that were bordering on stupid but gave me some incredibly neat experiences and memories.

I was 14 and was at the Illinois State Fair. My father would join me for that fair to help clean and trim my sheep before the big show. We had a pickup truck and a 24-foot trailer to transport the animals from fair to fair. As we were trimming one of the ewes, my father looked at me and said “What is in your shirt pocket?”

It was a pack of cigarettes that I had got and forgot to hide it better. He was furious.

For show day my mother and sister would come down to Springfield in her car. After the show, my father turned to me and said “So, if you are so damned grown up, you get the animals home.”

With that, he left with my mom. There I was with 15 sheep, a trailer and truck, and no driver’s license. Also, I had no Siri to help me navigate the way. Well, I made it and the anger had passed when I safely got home. Probably dumb on both our parts, but no loss.

Later, I was enrolled in a fairly expensive college. Between summer jobs and scholarships, I could financially make it. After my freshman year, we sold the sheep and I needed a summer job. I got that job at the steel mill Kankakee Electric, now known as Nucor, as it just opened. I was to work there four straight summers.

In the third summer I learned that one of the melters was a sky diving instructor at the airport. As we chatted, he told me how cheap it was and that we needed no equipment other than coveralls and a football helmet, as he would provide the parachute.

This was not tandem but solo jumping. I had 13 jumps that summer and loved it after losing the fear of the first jump. But what if I had broken a leg or ankle in those 3,000-foot falls? No job. No school for that year. Maybe drafted into the military if I lost my college deferment. Hmm. But what an experience.

My junior year was spent in England at Durham University on an exchange program. Before the year began, four of us traveled some and agreed we would all meet in Athens, Greece, for Christmas as we had several weeks free.

All went well as one of the boys and I hitchhiked most of the way through France and Italy before taking a boat to Athens. On the boat I met a young man studying in Madrid, Spain. This Texan asked me where I was going to next. I told him that I wasn’t sure as my traveling partner had to head back, and I had another two weeks.

“How about going to Egypt?” he asked.

I decided that it was too good of a chance. We bought a return ticket on a boat that traveled between Athens and Alexandria, Egypt. A train would get us the rest of the way to Cairo, home of the pyramids.

It was a fantastic trip with pyramids, the Sphinx and a view of the Aswan Dam just being built. But when we arrived back at Alexandria, we learned that our boat had sailed the day before and wouldn’t return for 10 days. They had marked our ticket wrong.

We went to the local U.S. Consulate, and a man there told us that there was a boat leaving every other day from Tunis to Marseilles, France. We would travel from there through Libya to Tunisia. We decided to give it a try. This meant crossing Egypt and the Sahara Desert.

We caught a train to the border of Libya, but no more trains. We tried to hitch a ride at the border, but few cars went through. Then we started taking small vans from point to point and finished by riding a cart pulled by a camel into the center of Tripoli.

There we learned that the boat from Tunis didn’t sail every other day but every other week. After all the stress of passing across the Sahara, we decided to fly from there to Rome. I sold a pair of my Levis to add to my depleting funds. We made it, and I got back to school just in time.

As I reflect, grabbing rides through those areas was probably the most dangerous time of my life. It could have ended in a number of disasters. We made it, and I have never had such an experience to match it. Dumb but what a story to tell.

Another one that I will never forget occurred in October 1967. I had moved to Washington, D.C., and was rooming with three fellow law school graduates. They had various job in D.C. but I had joined the CIA and went into McLean, Va., each day. As I could not disclose where I was working, I told them I was at the local Bolling Air Force Base, as I was scheduled to enter the Air Force in January.

Protesting the war in Vietnam was raging. The Kent State shooting had happened. My roommates informed me that there was a huge protest planned at the Lincoln Memorial and we were all going. I cringed as the CIA would not be happy with me attending such an ordeal.

They insisted and I went wearing a large hat covering most of my upper body. Of course, that turned out to be the incredible gathering with almost half a million participants and Joan Baez only a few feet away from us atop the Lincoln Memorial.

Nothing bad happened, and that protest was later featured in the movie “Forrest Gump." The only thing wrong with that scene was that in the movie the reflecting ponds from the Lincoln to the Washington Monument were devoid of people.

In truth, there were so many peaceful protesters there that the water was filled with people standing knee-deep just to see the stage atop the Lincoln platform. Perhaps the movie people couldn’t get enough extras to truly portray the scene that day. I will never forget that day, the stars we saw, and the rush of such a protest. I guess we are back there now.

I’m sure I had other such decisions that could have ended in bad ways, but none like these four. Think about it and I’m sure most of my readers can remember a few similar choices in their lives.