You just wait until your father gets home!

1972 was a great year. A gallon of gasoline cost $.55. To conserve gas, my three siblings would walk home from where the school bus dropped us off approximately 3 miles from our home. We lived on a small farm just two miles downstream from the Hanford Nuclear power plant on a 35 acre hay farm with 4-5 acres of fruit trees and an acre garden. Yes, an acre garden, and yes we do glow at night because of the radium leaks from 1970-73. Our dad built a nice beach for us to swim in once the chores were done. Most of our days during the summer were spent in the garden where we would each weed our obligatory assigned rows. 

On this particular day, our dad was away on business, trying to buy a real estate agency in Missoula Montana. We had been out of school for several weeks for the summer vacation. My older brother Mark and I were supposed to be changing the pipe, but we decided it would be more fun for kids our age to play "chase the rabbit". 

This fun game consisted of chasing a cottontail rabbit into a sprinkler pipe, then lifting that pipe high into the air and causing the rabbit to slide all the way down the pipe. You could hear its nails digging into the inside of the pipe as it helplessly slid all the way to the end. Then it would take off again and we would chase it. Way too much fun. The time went by pretty fast and soon we see our mother and our younger brother Doug walking towards us. Our mom says, just get out of here. So we did, we took off heading towards the nearest farm which was about 3 miles away. We hitched a ride with the neighbor into Pasco which was about 20 miles away from Columbia Basin. We rode around with the neighbor who had a son our age. When night came, we acted like we were going home, but instead sneaked into the neighbors barn and slept soundly all night. The next morning, we decided we had better head for home. So we played our way home in the foothills that run along the Columbia river.  As we got closer to home we could see several boats, and 30-40 people walking towards us. The sheriff and a few deputies took us down to the road and put us into their car. They drove us the rest of the way home. When we walked into the yard, our mom met us with tears in her eyes and gave each of us a hug, then whispered loudly in our ears. 

"You just wait until your father gets home!"

We never felt so bad when we found out that she had searched all night, and had called out the local church members as well as the police to search for us. They were dredging the river and searching through the hills above our home. We never pulled a stunt like that again.