Free Time Bandit by Andy Hillstrand

airport and clean out lockers for free rides. If I had become a pilot, I would be dead now. I would have pushed the envelope too far, like I still do with motorcycles. When I was a teenager, I slid my first motorcycle under a Toyota. I raced motorcycles full throttle. I knew no other way. I drove my next bike, a street bike, through a stop sign at ninety at a T-bone intersection and went right under a car. Today, I own a Harley Fat Boy with a nitrous boost that generates 300 horsepower. I took the Harley out with a crabbing buddy, Phil Harris, who rides with no wind-screen and no helmet. He was going ninety miles an hour down the highway lighting up one cigarette after another with a powerful butane lighter. That is what I call dedication. This spring I discharged the nitrous and was going 130 mph when I hit a turtle crossing the road. It scared the hell out of me but the rush cleared my mind of life’s usual bullshit.
    Like Andy says, “When we were five years old, Dad taught us everything about how to ride bikes except how to use the brakes.” We thought of danger merely as a higher form of fun. A popular book today is titled The Dangerous Book for Boys; we did not need to read about danger. We lived it without knowing what it was; we knew how it felt, and it felt fine. Andy found a beehive one time that I wanted to set on fire. I was ready to douse it with a coffee can of gasoline, when he ran past me and slammed the hive with a two-by-four. Of course the bees buzzed after us. They could fly a whole lot faster than we could run, which surprised me at the time. And they were mad. We were running down the road pulling bees off our faces.
    We also battled, nearly constantly, with rocks. We used garbage can lids for shields. We threw so many rocks at each other I think we changed the shape of the Spit. Inevitably, some rocks hit their targets. One summer, our mom was continually driving us to the Homer hospital’s emergency room for stitches. On one visit, the doctor asked her, “Mrs. Hillstrand, you’ve seen this done enough times. Why don’t you do it and save yourself the trip?”
    We laid claim to my grandfather’s old boat, Try Again, to play on. It was wrecked and listing on its side in the mud off the Spit, and we waded to it at low tide. When the tide flowed we were at sea covering continents in our dreams. We were pirates. With wooden swords, rocks, and garbage can lid shields, we ruled our imaginary world. We fended off anyone who dared to challenge our supremacy. Other boys liked to join our gang. Even as kids, we had reputations that worried mothers, especially mothers of girls, but our bad ways drew kids like drunks to an open bottle.
    That reputation may have started when word got around that we had nearly drowned. Three of us, Andy, my youngest brother Neal, and I stole a twelve-foot, fiberglass, pumpkin seed sailboat that my dad had run over when someone parked it and two others like it illegally in his slip; the one that survived his rage had hairline cracks in its hull, and those cracks were soon our undoing.
    We had spied the boat earlier in the morning, and as the day wore on, the thought of taking it for a joyride became irresistible. We talked about what our dad would do if he caught us, but the more we talked, the more certain we were that we would take the boat for a spin. It did not dawn on us that we did not know how to sail. And we set off. We were wearing jeans and T-shirts and baseball caps, and no life jackets. We pointed the bow in the direction of the other side of the bay, where we hung out in secret coves, sometimes camping for three or four nights at a time living off mussels, crow, squirrel, Dungeness crabs, and fish.
    Two hundred yards off the Spit, the cracks started to leak, then gush water. The boat capsized. We were thrown out. We treaded freezing cold water. Our baseball hats floated away. We wanted to scream for help but we did not want anyone to find out that we had capsized