Relative Danger

I am dangerous…to harmless scraps of paper with the unfortunate luck to have bull’s-eyes imprinted on them. What Olympic sport would you have been really good at had you had all the training, support and opportunity as a kid? For me it would have been one of the shooting sports, maybe archery or standard pistol.

When I was a kid I used to spend a lot of time in the garage building all sorts of things, including bows, crossbows and even air guns. The rest of the time I spent dumpster diving for materials behind such places as the bathroom cabinet factory (source for hardwood strips) or the injection molding shop. I flatter myself by thinking these were actually pretty well made, accurate and powerful little gadgets. Being as I’d long ago dismissed such favorite when-I-grow-up careers as firefighter and teacher in favor of physicist, I regularly put my little creations through all manners of accuracy and energy experiments. One of these, for example, involved a weight hanging from the rafters in the garage with a device for measuring how for it moved when struck by an arrow/pellet/bolt.

Ok, you get the picture, but here’s the rub. I was constantly afraid of nosey people calling the cops. I couldn’t shoot across the back yard, I couldn’t take my gadgets to the park, I had to be careful who I shared my stuff with. Several times I did have the cops knocking at my door. Consider these two examples: in the first example you have a pimply-faced teenager trudging to the public library where he receives a gold star, a pat on the head and the admiration of parents, teachers and peers for doing no more than reading the latest Harry Potter gibberish for the summer reading program—which he would have read anyway; in the second example you have a kid designing, building and conducting physics and statistical tests in his garage, constantly looking over his shoulder lest someone call the cops, constantly afraid he’s on the verge of getting in trouble for indulging his curiosity.

I remember the 1984 Olympics that were held in LA. They did this human interest athlete profile of one of the archers who happened to be a young kid not much older than me who had the good fortune to grow up in Orange County, have good equipment, supportive parents and neighbors. Those are the only distinctions I could see. Oh, but what a difference they made! They showed how this poor kid made the best of his circumstances (living in a crowded urban area, like me) by shooting his bow from the curb in front of his house, through his open garage and at a target sitting at the far end of his back yard! I would have been arrested on the spot for shooting my crossbows in the same fashion.

And the world lost another Olympic champion. But I’m not bitter.