I bet I know you. I grew up in Biltmore. When we moved in the two grain silos were still there and the "Pits" hadn't been dug yet. I even climbed up one of the silos on a dare. There was a starling nest up there and the momma attacked me. When the sewage ponds were dug my friend's big brother hot wired one of the bull dozers and drove it in to the canal. My group of friends are the ones that named it "the Pits".

Biltmore is at the intersection of Sullivan and Wax roads. My dad told my brother and me "If I catch your butt crossing Wax or Sullivan, you're dead. Other than that, go explore. And we did. We roamed from the woods in that corner that is now a Wal Mart, out to the fields that became the "Pits" and beyond. Over behind the Baptist church was "Pete's Pond". He had the most badass tree house I'd ever seen.

We had BMX bikes and Benjamin pump pellet guns, and we were lords of our wild wide world. What else did we need?

We would take perogues up and down Beaver Bayou, and I was there when Timmy and some other dude destroyed the beaver damn and flooded the canal. We once floated so far downstream that we had to knock on someone's door and call one of our dads to come get us because it was dark and we were still miles from home.

We shot robins in the woods where Biltmore II is now and cooked the breasts over an open fire with butter, salt, and pepper. We shot snakes EVERYWHERE. We even popped a rabbit or squirrel every now and then. (If you had the .22 caliber Benjamin you had a better chance of a kill).

I laughed at someone mentioning nudie magazines. I think those things have a magical ability to just appear from now where in the tree houses and club houses of adolescent boys. It's like the universe wants to teach you some things that you need to know but don't have access to. I never once brought any to a tree house but there always seemed to be some there.

It was a wild, exciting, and by today's standards very dangerous childhood. We once built a tree house so high up in a red oak tree that when we showed one of our dads (not mine) how proud we were, he freaked out and made us tear it down. My dad would have patted us on the back and said "good job son". THat kid always a pussy though.

That was back in the late 70s and early 80s. Times have definitely changed and kids today are worse for it. Those were defining experiences for a lot of boys and I fear we've lost that. Too bad really. Nothing compares to cold wet sneakers trudging through gumbo mud with a brace of rabbits slung over your shoulder that you and your buddies bagged with your air rifles. Cooking them up over an open fire, telling dirty jokes and trying to stick your lockblade in a big sycamore tree from 10 paces. Sure, we fell out of trees, skinned knees, cut fingers and stepped on nails. We got ticks and chiggers on us, got stung by wasps and pinched by crawfish. Hell, I even stepped on a catfish fin once. That shite HURT. And we never seemed to tell our parents exactly how wild it was out there.

I'll be in BR next weekend and dammit I'm taking my truck to go mud riding in the Pits.

This post was edited on 2/15/15 at 7:42 am