Failed efforts to become a juvenile delinquent

Growing up in Monticello, little boys like me had to work hard to find those unstated, but real, limits of what kinds of misbehavior our parents would allow. We had to travel hundreds of miles and across two or three states to reach big-city gangs full of criminals-in-training to teach us.
There weren’t even that many adult criminals we could look to as role models. But the lack of hardened reprobates didn’t mean we were without counsel on the different ways we might deviate from the innocent little boys our mothers thought we were. 
I had a neighbor for a while who descended from a long line of real cowboys and took on the responsibility of teaching me wisdom, especially as we sat next to each other in church.
One Sunday, the bishop stood pontificating on his dismay at our faltering attendance at church meetings. My mentor leaned over and whispered in my ear: “He’s right, we should attend every Sunday unless your ox is in the mire, as the Bible allows,” (Luke 14:5).
He went on to say that if we were unsuccessful in pushing our oxen into a mudhole on Saturday in search of an excuse to miss church, we should go to church anyway, then quickly added that we should sleep through the meetings so as not to become obnoxious. Missing or sleeping through church helped, but I knew I could do better. 
One day, my brother and I caught a live mouse in the field out back. We didn’t yet know our mom’s intolerance for the harmless rodents, so we picked it up by the tail, ran into the house, screaming: “Hey, Mom, look at our new pet!”
I had no idea she could scream that loud or climb a wall so fast–she didn’t even have a rope. That day, we saw a side of her we didn’t know existed. But from then on, we never missed a chance to launch her into a repeat performance whenever we found a mouse.
Mom’s squeamishness remained our main form of entertainment for at least a decade, but then it got old, and we began a search for something more exciting. 
My first real crack at juvenile delinquency happened on a Sunday afternoon in February, following a prolonged winter storm of the type that just missed the record books.
After the snow, the sun came out, bright and warm. The combination of warm days, nights well below freezing, and the meager resources of the county road maintenance crew turned the mountain road west of town into a mile-long sheet of ice, perfect for sledding.
Every kid in town showed up on the hill with a sled, along with a few older kids with their parents’ pickups. We would ride the sleds down, throw them into the back of one of the pickups for the ride back up.
Jimmy Broderick showed up with his dad’s old pickup. After taking a few trips hauling kids back up the hill, he asked if I would be willing to swap my sled for his dad’s pickup so he could have a ride down.
At 14 years old, my driving experience consisted of hauling trash from the back door of Monticello Merc to the chain-link garbage enclosure 100 feet away. With that experience, I had all the confidence I needed to drive safely down a steep, ice-covered road.
Aware of the slick road, I started slowly, but the truck quickly gained speed. I knew enough not to slam on the brakes, but also knew I had to slow down, so I shifted to a lower gear.
I had yet to learn that downshifting on ice produces a skid just as fast as slamming on the brakes. When I let out on the clutch, I felt the back end of the truck slowly try to switch places with its front. Not good. After a few seconds of sliding sideways and gaining speed, the truck rolled off the edge of the road and landed wheels up.
That stunt gave me a chance to punch my ticket in front of a judge, pay a fine, not counting the payment to Jimmy’s dad for the damage, who, I learned later, saw the whole thing through binoculars from his living room window a mile away.
I’d committed a crime, no doubt, but the overly compassionate juvenile court judge stopped just short of calling it a felony. 
After that lukewarm result, I tried my hand at vandalism with a bunch of other budding delinquents by buying some orange paint and attempting to paint the giant “SJ” on the knoll just outside Blanding.
Despite the extensive planning, organizing, and navigating through the pinon trees in the dark of night, that project won the prize of being our most miserable. In the end, we only had enough paint to cover about a third of the “J.”
The orange colorant we mixed with the paint resulted in a very stylish tint that would have worked nicely on a bedroom wall, but only left the impression that some Monument Valley sand had blown through at night and settled on the downhill few feet of the “J.”
No one noticed. So the next time you see an art show spray-painted on rail cars passing by, be assured, I had nothing to do with it. I’m not that talented.
These failed attempts at being a criminal are now only memories, and faint ones at that, and, like the rest of us, I slowly earned my inevitable fate – I became just one more boring adult.