Do you remember when you were younger - maybe not quite in your teens - and it seemed to you if you performed one more dumb stunt you'd kill yourself, or, if you failed there, then your parents would step in and perform the act for you?

I imagined my demise would go something like this..

It's a wee hour of the morning and I'm sleeping soundly in my cardboard box after having safely arrived home from yet another horrible escapade. My parents, looking haggard and stupified, are standing in the hall outside my door - they're both carrying knives and baseball bats. My Mother first looks longingly at Dad then glances up to the ceiling and says, "Forgive us, Dear Lord, but he's too damn stupid to make it much further on his own."

It was a good thing I booby-trapped the door because it allowed me plenty of time to skitter out the window before things got gruesome. Years went by and through no luck of my own I finally made it to puberty and turned my attention to other things. Since then, however, I'm happy to report that every so often I slip back to my old ways and miraculously perform another feat of sheer wonderment.

This was one of those moments...

It was mid-winter 2005 and I was closing in a porch to turn it into living space.

The existing beam supporting the porch and roof was severly understructured and had to be replaced. So, I called Hunt's Timbers, which is the best of our local sawmills, to order a beam. But, before I go much further you've got to know a little bit about Ernie Hunt.

Ernie's been in the sawmill business a long time. In fact, Ernie's been in it so long that he was old thirty-years ago. He's pretty much turned the business over to his boys now but they let him hang around the sawmill so they could keep a keen eye on him. Things never seem to change with Ernie - every time I go down there I find him sitting on his desk behind the counter.

"Hiya, Ernie! You got any 2 x 10's out there?"

"How long you want 'em, Joe?"

"Ohh, quite a while, I imagine. I'm building a...." He's getting a mite slower in his old age because now I can safely duck out of the way of the logging tape he throws at me.

So, there I am on the phone describing to Ernie what I intended to use the beam for....

"How long you need this beam, Joe?"

"Ohh, quite a while, I..." Then I flinched dramatically when I heard the phone being banged on his desk in staccato fashion.

"Uggh, let's see..." I said looking at my drawing, "...it needs to be twenty-six feet long, Ernie, and I don't want it in two pieces, either. If this porch and roof comes off the house then I just assume watch it come down all at once and not in halves."

"Alright, Joe, I'll have it ready for ya tomorrow morning."

When tomorrow morning came I was surprised when I woke up to a snowy landscape and it was still seriously throwing it down when I got to the sawmill and entered the office to pay for the beam.

"Hi, Betty! Say. who's out there to load my beam?"

"Jake's out there somewhere." She said, waving toward the log yard.

Jake Wright is the Son of a farmer and I know for a fact that in all his years growing up on a farm he's seen and done quite a lot of farmer-riggin'. However, on this particular day I think I topped anything any farmer's ever done in recorded history.

"Hiya, Jake! Say, how's about jumping on your forklift there and load my beam?"

"You bet! Where's your truck 'n trailer?"

"I don't have a trailer with me today, Jake. Or a truck either for that matter. I got my van, though."

He blinked his eyes then cocked an ear to me saying, "Come again?"

I pointed to my van, "Just put it on top of the van over there."

That was when all the fun started...it was like someone made an announcement on all the radio stations, "Hey y'all, Joe's fixin' to do something stupid again! Be sure to git yerselves down to Hunt's Timbers and watch his dumb ass pull another one!"

Folks walked out of the office and left the door ajar while they stood on the porch to gawk. The massive saw blades were shut down and their operators ambled over for a gander. Forklift drivers skidded to a stop in the deepening snow and turned off their motors to absorb the show. Birds flew in and loaded up the overhead electric lines to get their shocking view. Cops came from everywhere and started comparing notes and hastily flipped through law books to determine how illegal what I was preparing to do was. And, all the while this stuff was going on, I watched Jake place the beam on top of my van.

I got almost to the end of the 30-mile drive when I realized I was sweating for nothing - there weren't any cops on the roads!

They were still at Ernie's.