colusa

Colusa was a very small town, so if you wanted some excitement you usually had to create it yourself, and being that it was so small, that wasn't always easy to do. During the week it was just dead.It perked up a little on the weekend,but still there was nothing happening there.You could go to the show, but they ran the same movie for a week. You could go around the town cruise,but that was about 2 miles long.Half the people would cruise one way and the other half would cruise the other way and they would honk at each other every time they past each other.That was pitiful.
We used to do a lot of hunting back then it seams like everyone had a 22 rifle in there car. If your out in the country and you see a pheasant and you had a clear shot at it you took it and it didn't matter what time of the year it was.Shoot it, cook it, eat it,and nobody said a word about it.Try doing that now and see what happens.
We used to go up to the Sutter Buttes, they say it's the smallest range of mountains in the world.Might be true,seams like everything around Colusa was small,There's also a smaller town right close by ( Grimes ) that has the smallest church in the world.It's about six foot by six foot. I went there a couple of times to check it out just to say I'd been there. It's actually kinda neat as far as I'm concerned.
My brothers and cousins and I used to take some pieces of cardboard.plywood or whatever we could get our hands on and head on up to the Buttes on rainy days and we would climb the grassy hillside up as far as we could go and then jump on the cardboard and ride it all the way down to the bottom.thats what i mean by having to create your own fun.
I remember sometimes we would walk to my friends ranch out in the country ( we used to call it the ponderosa ) it was probably a good 6 or 7 mile walk. We used to go swimming in the Sac. river over there. This one time we walked over there and we swam for about 3-4 hours and we started getting hungry, so someone came up with the idea that we could kill some bullfrogs and have some frog legs. So there we go looking for bullfrogs,there was about 5 of us and we probably got about 30-40 of them critters, so my friend says lets take them to my house ( the Ponderosa ) and see if mom will cook them,well thank god for his mom cause she was a really cool lady and she says sure i'll cook em if you eat them and we said o.k. so she puts them in the pan and these are just the legs of the frogs and they start kicking like there alive. ( ask anyone that knows about frog legs and they'll tell you that it's true.they kick when there getting fried ) she brings us this bowl full of fried frog legs,salad and some home made tortillas. We dug in and i'll tell you what ,it was almost like eating fried chicken.those things were delicious.
when i was about 10 or 11 my folks bought me a brand new bike.I was so proud of my new bike, I just couldn't wait to take it to school and show it off. That morning I got up to take it to school my mom told me I had to give my little sister a ride to school, this is not what I had in mind,but I said o.k.,I really didn't mind giving my sister a ride,but the problem for me was my mom always made her this egg burrito to eat on the way, so I always had to smell that egg on the way to school after awhile I got to hate that smell. That bike lasted about two weeks before i broke the frame on it and my mom took it back and told the guy she wants a new bike,well the guy at first refused because he said i must have really been doing something that i shouldn't have because bike frames just don't break like that.He said in all his years he never seen a bike frame break. My mom finally convinced him that he needed to give me a new bike. A few days later i got my bike back, with a new frame.How did I know that three guys on one bike couldn't go riding down the side of a levee without breaking it.One time we had 5 guys on one bike.sounds hard to believe doesn't it.Well it's true cause we did it.There was one guy on the handle bars,one guy on the cross bar,one guy on the rear axle and one on my shoulders,yes thats right i said shoulders,my friend Eddie's brother seen us when we were riding by these big hedges and he got mad and started cussing us and pushed us over into the hedges.thats the bike frame that should have broke.
We used to give our cousins a ride home from school on the handle bars, when we got to the park we would go real fast and then jump off and see how far they could go until they crashed.They got pretty good at steering from the handle bars. sometimes they got hurt when they crashed into a tree or something,but the next day they would be right there waiting for there ride on the handle bars.It's strange how we hardly ever got hurt real bad considering all the crazy things we used to do.We did get hurt though, i remember one time i was giving my cousin a ride home on my bike and he was riding on the handle bars and we were going real fast down the sidewalk.When we got to the end of the sidewalk there was this bump and when we hit it the front of the bike went in the air and apparently the front tire wasn't tightened down right because it came off when we were in the air and when the bike came back down the front forks went into the front wheel spokes and we flipped over. We both got banged up pretty bad on that one.
There was this one time when we went walking to the show and there was these kids that lived down the block from us.They were our friends but then again sometimes we would be feuding with them. This one particular day when we walked by there house we noticed they had a donkey out in front of there house and they were trying to ride it and it kept bucking them off. this was one of those big donkeys. Back in them days a donkey in front of someones house was no big deal.There was this one guy who used to ride to town on the weekend on his horse and he used to take his pet skunk with him riding on the back of the horse ( i think the guys name was sunny )anyway we see these guys trying to ride that donkey and we just laugh at them and just keep on walking.Well across the street from these boys house there's this corral where they load the livestock on the trains and we were about twenty feet from it,we liked to walk through the corral because we would climb up on the fence and walk on top of it. There was about five of us. All of a sudden I hear someone say watch out and I turn around and I see that big ol donkey running full speed right at us,well nobody had to tell me anything, I ran and jumped on the fence. when I looked back my cousin Leo had just turned and seen the donkey and I swear it looked like it was going to trample him.That donkey couldn't have been more than a couple feet from him when he seen it,My cousin was off like a shot.You ever see those movies and they fire a gun and you know that sound the gun makes,well I think my cousin made that sound when he took off running, he was at the rear and he beat the others to the fence.That ol donkey ran right into the fence, were lucky he didn't crush us.When we looked back those other boys were rolling on the ground laughing. I think we laughed all the way to the show.I think the times we almost died and didn't get hurt were the most fun...stupid,but it's the truth.