When I mentioned on my last Birthday that I wouldn’t have taken odds I’d ever have made it to sixty-four………….

Here’s one of the reasons…

……………….one of my earlier recollections of a good reason those odds could have been stacked against me………..but, what a great time!!!

Here’s the working formula…………….

……………….my faithful friend & cousin—-Betty Joe Bob and our sturdy steeds (the donkeys——Phineas Quigley Tewilliger and Amanda, Phineas’ Mom).

Add to that a good splash of boredom, a hefty imagination and time to burn………………….

What to do?  Where to ride?  Where to ride?  What to do?

Orchards?…………………….Nah.

Sugarbush trails?………………….Nuh-uh.

Let’s go down into Penitentiary Gulley!

 

Now that’s the ticket!………..Yup.

Let’s do that………..!

 

 

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Now, here’s a little history…………….as I remember it…

Penitentiary Gulley was this cool, sometimes chilly, place to play in the summer…………..or really any time…

Vertical sides?…………………………….maybe………….(for sure)…

Hemlock trees growing parallel to the vertical sides…

Dangerous potential falls………………………….probably…

Slippery/slick slate as the stream bed at the bottom of Penitentiary Gulley.

All the right props for on-going dangerous adventures!

Good fun?……………………………..endoobidubbly…….

*************Penitentiary Gulley got its name because it was easier to get into than out of………..*************

Betty Joe Bob was always game…………………Phineas and Amanda were capable………………….donkeys can do anything……………..I was sure up for it!

And away we went……….

 

My Dad had fitted our saddles (glorified bareback-pads) with breechings so that the donkey’s saddles wouldn’t fly over their withers and down their necks when they would go downhill…………………..and going down the sides of Penitentiary Gulley was a sure-fire way to test the donkey’s back-straps.

 

 

I should point out that the Penitentiary Gulley of my youth has been re-named to a more palatable Penitentiary Glen(????) and now it is a part of the Lake MetroParks System in Ohio.

***     Penitentiary “Glen”    ***

Beautiful.               It really is.

Back in the sixties it was our own personal, immense, echoing, remote, dangerous play-ground.

 

It was the BEST!

 

 

Apparently now, the only way you can get down to the bottom of the “Glen” is with scheduled, qualified, guided tours.

Pshaw & Piddle…

…………HEY, Phineas & I made short work of “that” on a regular basis………………well, mostly Phineas.

I vividly remember us falling & pin-balling off of Hemlock tree trunks to break our momentum on our way down.

 

And on the way back up, I would hang onto Phineas’ back-strap (breechings) and he would scramble (what seemed like) the two or three stories to get to the top of the gulley, and then the trails back home.

I would just bounce around behind him while he jack-rabbited his way back up the vertical sides…

Easy…Peezie!

And what fun!……………………It was the best of times!

While down there, what would we do?……………..

Important stuff, of course………………like turning over rocks to catch crawfish and salamanders and look for fossils.

 

To this day, the only souvenir of that dangerous childhood playground is a permanently smashed toenail on my left foot…

I dropped a big, flat piece of slippery slate on it and it smashed right through my tennis shoe (that was a long/dusty/bloody walk back home).

……………..I can cover it successfully with three or four coats of nail-polish………and a top coat.

Easy…Peezie!

My memory snapshot of Penitentiary Gulley is all green & dark & cool & moderately scary.

Where were our parents?!!!?

Did they know?………………………………………….?