MALCOLM’S MOMENTS

BY MALCOLM SMITH

My mother and father wanted to buy and run a motel in Palm Springs when we moved to Southern California, but there wasn’t nearly enough money. So when we settled in San Bernardino they went to work — mom teaching elementary school and dad working odd jobs.

For me, San Bernardino was pretty close to heaven on earth. Instead of the ocean being right outside the door, and the weather typically cold and wet, there were mountains — big ones! — right in our back yard. And the weather was usually warm and dry, too. There were also citrus groves, trails, canyons, flood-control ponds, fire roads, lakes, snowy peaks higher up and, beyond them, the amazing Mojave Desert, which I’d come to know and love intimately in later years.

After school and during the summer there was plenty of adventure to be had, and 99% of it was outdoors. Always outdoors. Whether it was Cub Scout outings, little league baseball, horseback riding, canoeing in the flood-control ponds, fishing the local canyons, riding bicycles or building go-karts with my friends, we spent every waking moment we could outdoors. I have very few recollections of sitting in front of a TV, at least during daylight hours.

By the time I was 10 or 11 vehicular pursuits became a much bigger deal. Bicycles came first…fat-tire onespeeders, mostly, which could take a lot of abuse. One day my friend John Moreland figured out that, if you pedaled hard enough, you could put some air under your tires if you hit the berm on the edge of the road just right. We both got really excited about this new discovery, and after pedaling up the hill to get a good run at the berm, I was able to get some air, too.

We immediately wanted more… more air, more speed, and more distance. We found nirvana in a nearby flood control area, where we built a jump that got us 10 and, later, 20 feet of distance! We ended up breaking our bike frames at the crank housing, but it was great fun.

One time a bunch of girls was watching us. Wanting to show off, I pedaled furiously and sailed into space…just in time to see my front wheel fall off and the fork legs plunge into the soft soil. Scrapes and bruises did not compare to the thrill of impressing girls, and I was hooked.

We built several plank-and-wheel push karts during those years, none of which had brakes (except for our feet!) and most of which put our lives in danger at the bottom of some pretty big hills. But it was our bulldozer exploits that really took the cake for living dangerously.

The nearby flood-control dikes were in a constant state of construction, and there were always earthmoving vehicles there — with

no one using or watching them on weekends. After an always-hungover operator taught me to start and run his one day so he could sleep in his car, I had enough knowledge to begin “borrowing” various ’dozers on weekends…which me and my friends did, pushing dirt around, building jumps and messing around.

One Sunday my mother heard one of these heavies “working” in an adjacent area and walked over to check things out — and discovered our secret fun. She was not amused, and I was warned to never play with big diesels again. I disobeyed, of course, and a while later got into trouble when a D7 Cat I tried to start began running backwards and belching black smoke. I jumped off and ran away, but a neighbor saw and reported me, and I was busted the following week when the cops visited my school.

My mother and father ended up divorcing when I was 13, which was very hard on me. I was depressed and began to not care about school or anything besides being outdoors, and moving around and changing schools was traumatic. Luckily, Mom was a rock, working hard to help me see that things were going to turn out okay.

And she was right. Because little did she or I know, but very soon something quite special was about to happen to me, something that would change and focus my life in a wonderfully positive way. AMA

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