Nate Finn and the Missouri Shenanigans

I want to give more pretext to our years in Missouri. In 1985, my family lived in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest. My father worked as a night watchman at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center known as Abraxas for women and men. The facility offered housing for its workers and their families in a trailer court connected to the grounds. To say that there were a lot of colorful individuals who lived there would be putting it mildly. It was in 1984/85 that Dad had begun to look into what it would take to go to college. If he succeeded, he would be the first person in his family to do so. In doing this, he was selected to attend a college in Springfield, Missouri. With that, we packed up our few belongings from the trailer we had lived in and made our way toward the Mississippi. Shortly after we had moved, on May 31st of 1985, a category F5 tornado, the largest that Pennsylvania has ever seen, tore through the trailer park. It is essential to give a bit of perspective on how big the tornado was. The tornado ended up being two blocks wide and ten blocks long and was estimated to have traveled 56 miles. Part of the path that the tornado followed traveled next to where our good friends Tom and Jean lived on Pigeon Hill, in Tionesta, Pennsylvania. Tom had stood outside and watched as the tornado went through.

We traveled back later that summer, and I remember seeing our trailer. It had been completely gutted, as if a massive force had grabbed it by the diaphragm and ripped everything out from within. One of the families that had lived across the road ended up having their home explode while they were in it. This was related to the pressure inside because the windows were all shut. In many ways, our departure from Abraxas was impeccably timed.

After a short time of living in the Pink ‘Pepto Bismol’ House, we moved into the white house on campus. Though, to be clear, it was not the white house that immediately comes to mind when heard. Oh, the trouble I would be destined to get into with the new area I could explore.

 It was in Missouri that I learned invaluable lessons, including how to ride a bike, that boys should not try to balance on horizontal poles, a person should only balance on nails only if maybe they have a side hustle in the circus, that while it is crucial to be able to see the landscape, that people tend to frown on you climbing up their cars and standing on their roofs, and so do the police. Whenever the parents have a waterbed that they are filling up, it is rude for you to take the hose out even if it is to see what level the water is at because, yes, it will flood the room.  And that the best way to get back at your parents when they tick you off is to take a needle to their waterbed (oh yeah, I went there and did that. It took them a very long time to figure out why they were unnecessarily sweating profusely finally.)

My parents knew I tended to go on adventures whenever I was not involved in such shenanigans. One of my buddies was a young girl named Chauncey. I did not realize it at the time, but she and her parents had come to the United States as refugees from Cambodia right after the bloody war between Vietnam and Cambodia. Some people might know it from The Killing Fields. Chauncey and I got along well and were best friends through thick and thin, except when I dropped her cars down inaccessible drains. Sigh, I may not have had the best self-control. Today, we call it impulsivity. 

Amongst our adventures was the time that we decided that we would blaze a new trail for young people and ended up a half mile away. Again, remember that we were five or six at the time. Down around two ponds we went; how we didn’t end up in them is a wonder. We began to get a little bit nervous when we walked up a long set of stairs and discovered a whole new world where all of these people were going in and out of buildings. At this point, we realized that we had found an entirely new world, and honestly, it was more than what we could handle. Then, we both could not hold our composure anymore and completely melted down. Picture the image you may have seen in a comic strip where the character’s face or faces point to the sky, and tears shoot out as if someone was holding down the button for the water fountain.  Little did we know that what we had discovered was simply the school's main campus, and the people who found us were students and cops, again. Yeah, you got it, the cop that escorted me home from my ‘sightseeing atop cars’ adventure. After this particular day of exploration, I think Chauncey’s parents told her she could not hang out with me because I was a bad influence. My parents informed me that they were terminating my journeys of exploration indefinitely. They said that I had bankrupted their trust. 

At this time, I began to direct my focus entirely on learning to ride my bike. Yep, you got it. I was finally able to get a replacement for my beloved bike that had been mangled, at the hands, well, I guess not the ‘hands,’ but maybe more appropriately, the ‘teeth’ of the jaws of life. Slowly and cautiously, I would swing my leg up over the frame of the bike. After a good push from an adult, off I would go. In my mind’s eye, ‘Look out France! This boy was gonna win some Tour De France medals!’ I think for all the on-lookers, there may have been varying degrees of horror on their faces as they watched me attempt to ride the bike. They may have more aptly described it as watching a drunk little person on a high-wheel bike. One thing that took a long time for me to get over was the idea that ‘it did not matter how fast you pedaled your bike, it would not help with keeping the bike balanced.’ No, all that the unnecessary pedaling did was accelerate the eventual bike crash. So the weeks passed by. I would make it a little further each time and then crash and burn. Honestly, Mom should have bought stock in Band-Aids during this time. If she had, well, let's just say it would have allowed her and my dad to retire at a very, very young age. 

Another time that stands out in my memory was when we went to the circus. We only lived a couple of blocks from the fairgrounds in town where the circus was performing and Dad and Mom had been able to get tickets. I was so impressed. The lights flashed before my eyes. The elephants and lions. The motorcycles going full-throttle inside a round enclosure. The men and women doing awe-inspiring acts with the flying trapeze. I was completely sold! I was most definitely going to join the circus.

The following day, having been so inspired the night before, I began practicing for when I would audition for Barnum and Bailey. I knew that I did not have the best balance, especially after the time when I attempted to walk across the bar that the teeter totter was built on, falling suddenly, and then painfully straddling the bar; but hey, with enough work, I would most definitely succeed. I decided that the first thing that I would have in my repertoire was showcasing my ability to deftly stand on one foot while balancing on a nail. I did not nail it, though some might argue that it nailed me. Through screams, wails, and lots of tears, I attempted to explain the situation to a horrified and exasperated mother. The oncore for the act was getting a tetanus shot in the ol' bahookie. I attempted to explain to my mother my aspirations. She simply shook her head. Bluntly, she told me that I should maybe consider being an escapologist, starting with being in a straightjacket. Boy, did that get my mind going! 'An escapologist! A straight jacket,' I thought to myself, 'Now that would definitely bring down the house!' Thinking back, it's probably wise she didn't mention anything about attempting to be a fire breather or fire dancer.

'One year they asked me to be poster boy - for birth control.'- Rodney Dangerfield