Midnight in the Cut

This story takes place in a small town in Iowa... You are thinking all towns in Iowa are small but this is not true.. there are big towns and little towns. I know what you're thinking but people actually do live in Iowa.. This is not, I repeat, NOT a state that you drive thru to get somewhere west/east. Iowa- where the corn side is crispy..... Iowa- if you build it... they will come. IOWA! I have lived in both a big town in Iowa, Cedar Rapids, and a few smaller towns, Swisher, Spirit Lake, Okoboji, and Lake Park. This story takes part somewhere around these parts...


Growing up, I lived in the country on a 13 acre farm surrounded by cornfields with a quarter mile driveway that I would have to walk up and back to catch the school bus. Everyone who went to my school rode a school bus... everybody! 1st rule of the school bus- if a bus couldn't make it down just one gravel road to pick up a kid for school in the winter- we weren't going! As kids we loved being home extra days for snow, but we also hated going to school til June 13th! We wanted ALL of the three months it was hot in Iowa to enjoy, and not to be stuck in a classroom.

I had lots of friends who also lived in the country and we would often convince our parents to drop, or pick us up, so we could all hang out at someones house together. When this didn't happen my friend Sam lived a blacktop road away, and I could call her and she would walk her long driveway, as I would mine, and we would meet halfway so to speak ( all though I may have walked a little farther, depending on where we met.) We got good at this, me and Sam, always meeting and then going to wreak havoc in the countryside. We explored for fun! We would find cricks and creeks which, depending who you ask, are probably the same thing. Sometimes her brother would sneak up on us and scare us but most times it was just us! When we were younger we would explore and get away to gossip in the middle of the woods where no one could eavesdrop. As we got older this ritual became more of "what time were we meeting in the middle of the night" at the corner.

Sam and I both convinced our parents to let us get a job to keep us out of trouble... however it very well may be what started getting us into trouble looking back. Most of my mischief was with Sam, but we sure did have fun. We got really good at going to work at the same restaurant together, in a neighboring town, and our parents picking us up and bringing us home. We would always be so tired after work and ready to head off to bed, only to really go to our own rooms, at our own houses, and start getting ready for the evening. We were 15 and 14, young and ambitious, and at least three times a week sometimes more we were sneaking out and hanging at the corner.....

It sounds bad when I say it like that but that IS what we would do! We rarely left the corner... and to some it didn't even look like a corner, just a place where a gravel road came to a blacktop and to this day I bet no one else has ever met at that corner, it was our spot! And we, as conniving girls who think of everything had marked our territory. We had a Bud Light case box of beer at this corner, buried in the high grass of the 7 foot ditch, and every night before venturing to the spot to hang with my girl, I would get dressed in my baggiest, yet cutest jeans and stuff the legs of my jeans with beer bottles that Sam and I had took from our place of employment and snuck home with us that day. If my parents, or her parents for that matter, knew that we stole beer from that restaurant we worked at we would of been grounded, maimed, and never allowed to go back but they never caught on. I could fit three bottles down each leg and sometimes a couple in the front. Eight, that was what I was responsible for, and I'm sure Sam could do the same. At the stroke of midnight or sometimes a few minutes earlier or later, I would slowly venture downstairs to the front door... quietly, not stepping on the third step that creaked and missing the sixth step on the left because it made a noise too sometimes. Slowly to the front porch door, which was a screen door. I would detach the spring so it wouldn't slam shut and be on my way using moonlight and the shine of it off the gravel to make my trek. I would be so slow and cautious, not to stir up a rock or any dust until I got over that first hill in our driveway and also not to mention trying to walk without bending my knees the whole time because the beer bottles in my jeans would not allow this. The adrenaline from the risk always allowed me to sneak away quietly, so as not to get caught and leave my friend waiting. From the end of the driveway, I ventured down the gravel road our driveway met to the blacktop, where I would meet Sam. I always tried to hurry once I got to this point because I worried about Sam walking on the blacktop from her long driveway to meet me, and I also worried that a car may come barrelling down this gravel road at any minute and I, who is trying her best to make it down this gravel road by moonlight with beer bottle lids cutting into my legs, may have to roll for the ditch so as not to be seen OR get run over..... and what if it was my parents! Worse fear but it never happened... at least not on my nights sneaking out with Sam. Once over the final hill of the gravel to where I could see the blacktop road and our corner I would get excited! Looking back I'm not sure why. It's not like there were 50 people waiting and music playing, never happened, we were meeting in the middle of the night in the middle of no where, where a gravel road met the blacktop road we both lived off of. Once there, we would quickly unload all of our party favors into the case box we had waiting. Then we would count... almost to determine how long we had and how many we would each get. We would sit on the side of the gravel road and drink. Two young girls, under the stars, drinking beer bottles one after another, laughing and giggling and all the while not caring about rules or where we should have been or what we should have been doing. We would talk about work that night, or customers, or the boys at school that we liked to flirt with. We were in our own little worlds at that corner and no one ever knew about it but us! It was our spot.

Sometimes after about 3 or 4 bottles each, we would wander (Sam may say we stumbled) on down to the Brown residence. You could see their house from the corner and I guess as two young girls do once they get a few in them and then decide to wreck havoc, off we went. At the Brown's, we would tap on their boy Nick's window to awake and invite him into our party. Nick was a grade older than me and two grades older than Sam. Nick also worked with us, as did his older brother, at the restaurant we got the beer from. They had flower boxes below their windows and we would lean on them and sometimes leave beer bottles in them while we woke Nick and got him to come outside. They had a brown picnic table outside of their brown and white house and we would lay our drunk selves on the picnic table and watch the stars spin around. Most nights we wandered down to the Brown's, we woke Nick or his brother up, but some nights we just used the picnic table as a place to brace ourselves from the spinning that always took place. I apologize now for any damage we may have done to the outside of the Brown residence. Litter, with the beer bottles we left, (but sometimes we threw them in their outside trash), and that flower box we were leaning on one night, it kinda hung lower than the other after that. Most times, the boys would come out and drink a beer and laugh at us but we never stayed long and we never offered more than one beer a piece, for it was that many more we would have to replenish. The picnic table and the walk, would bring on the drunkenness, which would bring on the spinning stars, and later the wooziness to where we would both get a little combo of tired/scared/ready to pass out syndrome, and would decide to return home. It all depended on how much talk we needed to talk, or how much fun and laughter we needed to get out, and how tired we would end up, before we went home each going our separate ways, until morning when one would ride with the other's parents to work, where the cycle would continue. Sometimes I'd be home by 2am other times 4am but never after the sun, I always beat it home.

We both now would never let our children do such a thing and can't believe how stupid we were and how dangerous and unsafe it was. We could of ended up like those missing paperboys, but we were only there to get away from parents, to do what WE wanted to do and to not get caught. We never left with the few truck drivers that stopped, we knew better, and we never did anything wrong except drink a few beers in the middle of the country in the middle of the night and we had never gotten caught!

After months of doing this cycle and sliding out in the middle of the night, we decided to push the envelope a bit, and Sam and I arranged for boys we knew with a car to pick us up and take us into the big town to "cruise the avenue". Once again, thru the house like a mouse and out the door to the moonlit path of the driveway, to the gravel road, to the blacktop. By now I was a professional. On this night we brought few replacements for the box because we knew we weren't staying. The boys picked us up in a big Monte Carlo I think, I wasn't big on cars, and off we went on our first adventure. Up and down the avenue we drove, screaming out the window and singing to lyrics of our favorite heavy metal bands. Yelling at people parked along the side of the avenue in various parking lots. We would even talk to cars we pulled up next to at red lights. Enjoying the freedom, enjoying the music, at this point the boys we were with really didn't matter much either, it was the moment and we were living in it. Two teenage girls, partying like rock stars! We had loud music, boys, and beer and when they stopped cruising the avenue and pulled up into the peep show parking lot we were like "WHAT???" We had no idea what went on behind these doors in this building but we knew our parents would not approve and it was this moment I wished we hadn't of left our little corner in the middle of nowhere.

One of the boys went inside the building, and as we waited in the car it started to rain. I told Sam if we were on our corner right now, we would of been heading home so as not to get wet, and she agreed. When he came back to the car we would have him drop us back off at the place he picked us up. A 20 minute drive back to our blacktop. As I said before, as teen aged girls, we had no clue about what went on at a peep show, only that our parents wouldn't of allowed us there, and when he got back into the car and had a tiny bottle that had liquid and a little ball inside and said to Sam, "here sniff this", we both said we should probably get home. I found out later what that bottle was and it probably wouldn't of killed us, but still we were all ready freaking out about the rain, and if our parents caught us on the avenue, in cars with boys, we were surely dead. As he drove us home I was getting nervous, we had stayed out later than this many of nights, but never had we left the corner. He stopped along the blacktop and Sam jumped out and I told her I would see her in the morning for work, and then he dropped me off at the corner and I ran up the gravel road, trying to avoid any puddles. Slowing to catch my breathe once I reached the driveway and nervous as all get out. The rain had slowed to a drizzle by now and I wasn't much worried about being out in it, rather just leaving the corner. We had struck out on an adventure and all I could think about now was getting into my warm bed and knowing I was safe from grounding. As I headed over the last hill on my driveway, I noticed the house looked as still as I had left it. No lights on.... relief... once again I had successfully snuck out and not gotten caught, and the adventure was fun. I stepped onto the porch and reattached the spring to the screen door and avoided the third and sixth step on the way up. First, I headed into the bathroom and washed my hands and face and then quietly tip-toed to my room so as not to wake my parents whose bedroom happened to be below. Once I had made it to my room, I turned on the light and started to take my shoes off. I looked over at my bed and thought to myself how I sure did do a good job with those pillows because it actually looks like someone was in my bed. When I pulled the covers back, there he was! Sound asleep in my bed! My FATHER! I had no choice but to wake him and when I did it was over.....

Apparently, dear old Dad was awoken to the rain and decided to be a sweetheart and go throughout the house and shut all of the windows. When he got to my room he thought I must be sweating to death with my face all hidden under the blanket, and when he went to pull the blanket back so I could breathe he noticed it was a pillow and not his daughter. So because he didn't know the first place to search in the countryside, and also didn't want to awaken my mother, who would have panicked and had the national guard out searching before the sun broke, he climbed into position and waited for Joy to arrive. I was in trouble and no longer safe from grounding.

It was the last night Sam and I would ever sneak out to the corner. I fessed up after four previous excuses they didn't buy mostly, and told how we met at the corner and when it started to rain we headed home. I could not explain why I was home so late, nor did I mention the adventure we had taken. For all I know my father searched gravel roads for us, but I was betting he didn't. The next morning my parents took me to Sam's and I had to tell her parents what we had done and she was mad at me. She too, also ended up grounded. I know I was a snitch, but I knew my parents would be more pissed and not believe me if I had told them I was sneaking out to be alone. They were not stupid.

Months later after we had gotten ungrounded and earned back our parents trust, Sam and I ran into those same boys at a Whitesnake/Great White concert. We sat way up in the top section and I think by the end of the night we realized those boys weren't for us. We did not go to their car with them and we did not get their phone numbers to stay in touch. We never saw those crazy boys again but Sam and I continued on our many adventures,this time staying in the countryside, and avoiding nights at the corner.....