Looking for people who lived in small US towns while in school!

This was not present day, so some (most) of my experiences won't fit.

I grew up in a mid-size town on a large river. There were no bluffs, though there might have been quarries, but we didn't swim there. We swam in a lake (which was gross) and the public pool (which had so much chlorine it made your eyes sting.) We had to wade through a little chlorine-rich foot pool before getting into the real pool, for some reason.

There was nothing much to do in high school. Some of the boys, when they got their driver's licenses, would race down the street taking out mailboxes with a baseball bat. Sometimes some kids (don't know who) would tee-pee the teachers' yards.

Marijuana was illegal and popular with some of my classmates--even the 'good ones.' i remember the attractive female senior class president smoking in a classroom after school one day. The sympathetic rumor was that because her younger brother was developmentally delayed, she really 'needed a break.' Most of the kids that smoked did not get a pass, but she did and the whole thing was so weird to me at the time, that she'd smoke in the classroom instead of going up the hill where that stuff usually happened. In hindsight I wonder if it was a thrill-seeking, push-the-boundaries kind of thing for her.

Any road trip or competition--with whatever school group you were in--was GREAT. Sports rivalries with whatever other high school--so those football games, against the rival, those were big.

There was so little to do. We would 'cruise' the local strip malls--strings of cars crawling past each other and checking out who else was there on a thursday night. To this day I don't really understand that sliver of 'americana.' It wasn't fun, but maybe I was doing it wrong. Heh.

I remember a dance club opening up. This was unlike anything the town had ever seen before, the real 'place to be' for teenagers. I went, thinking it would be so cool, you know, dancing, but there were too many drunk teenage guys wanting ... you know. And some teenage girls wanting that. So that was a bust to me, too, not my scene.

We got minimum wage jobs. Because money, which meant shopping. School dances were exciting. You know, something out of the ordinary.

There was a lot of outdoors stuff. I was a good kid, so I wasn't smashing mailboxes or getting pregnant or anything. I was working multiple jobs and being outdoors. I worried about my weight and jogged a lot (still do) and traipsed around in the woods looking for morels and thinking angsty teenage thoughts that seem to be more or less the same every generation.

I remember a hayride and some underage drinking house parties with no parents around.

When i was much younger, it was common to walk to school (if you didn't want to wait for the bus), and one of the girls I would walk home with wanted a cow for her birthday. Because calves are seriously pretty rocking pets.

Hmmm. I read a fair number of books. We took piano lessons, which meant going to another person's house or having them come to ours. We had chores. That kind of stuff.

Maybe your high school characters also do fund raisers? the sports teams where I live now seem to all have their annual fundraisers. Everything from door-to-door magazine sales to staffing a christmas tree lot.

Heh.
Grew up in New Knoxville, Ohio.
Sometimes we cruised the local cult outside of town and got thrown off the property. They had a nice big barn with a lighted dove that was nice to look at.
Sometimes, we took our Chevette's and ran/raced them through the walk paths of K.C. Geiger Park in the town over.
We liked to toilet paper teacher houses, and stole most the TP from the local United Church of Christ, which its steeple also made good cover for make-out sessions. There was a creek that ran through town, and we often skinny dipped underneath the bridges. We left town a lot to go to the movies, and the theater was a few towns over. We had a huge lake nearby and we did the bar loop around it, there was a specific name for that run but I can't remember off the top of my head. Lots of underage drinking. That's about it, really.

So I spent a part of my adolescent years in a small town between the vast swaths of suburban Northern VA and rural Middle VA. I can help by providing you with a sort of a transformative (?) experience for our town as more and more farmland was turning into cookie cutter McMansion neighborhoods (how I grew up). I had friends in both places. A lot of my high school years was going to friend's houses in either rural or suburban areas. My last year of high school we were all bored and acting out so there was a lot of drinking in rural places or at friend's homes in the middle of the woods - some surrounded by pastures. As you can guess, it was a mix of kids - popular, suburban, quiet, country-ish types who all united around drinking and wanting to graduate. To get the hell out. Some would shoot guns, but a lot of it was garage and outdoor parties with drinking games. Cops never showed up (usually). All of this was 2006-2010.

There was another place, a creek in the back of my neighborhood where my friends and I would go kayaking and just hang out. Throw rocks and play in the water. No drinking here but I have a lot of fond memories of it.

Hopefully that might help!

Another small-town childhood here.

What age are your characters? That will make a big difference, as will their personalities/social standing.

I read a LOT, just a ridiculous amount. I'd basically check out a stack of books up to my chin and be ready for more the following week (the school libraries restricted the number of books you could check out at once, but the city library was like "eh, go nuts").

When I was younger, I remember a lot of time spent visiting my friends' houses, or having them visit me, and we'd play whatever games struck our fancy. I can go into detail if you want, but you probably have plenty of your own memories to pull from - pretending to be this or that, playing tag or hide and seek, standard fare.

When I got old enough that my parents trusted me to go off on my own, I spent a lot of time walking/biking/roller-blading. Wheels took me along paved roads and into town. On foot I'd let my dog off the leash and we'd wander along dirt roads that meandered out into the desert.

Oh, I also spent a ton of time training my dog (read every dog training book I could find). I had a paper route for a couple years, and I built him a little cart and he'd pull the papers for me.

I lived just inside the city limits, so we were restricted to dogs and cats and things, but a lot of kids who lived a bit further out were big into 4H. They got to raise sheep and goats and stuff, and some of them even had horses, which I envied.

My brother was big into skateboarding for a while.

The closest thing we had to a teenage hangout was a local video-rental/music store (it was the hangout by default, because it was one of the few places that wouldn't run you off for loitering).

One nifty thing in high school was that we had an archological dig about 15 miles away, and anyone could volunteer. My social studies teacher issued an open invitation to all his students to join in, and for maybe a year, I spent most of my Saturday mornings riding my bike out there and running buckets of dirt through big sifters and picking through the rocks in search of pieces of bone and ceramics and the occasional bead. (I once found a piece of a bracelet carved out of seashell).

Weekend trips were the topic of envy and endless discussion. The closest mall was about 90 minutes away, in the nearest good-sized city, and it was a BIG deal - a high-schooler's mecca. Upon hearing that someone had gone to that city, the first thing they'd be asked was "Did you go to the MALL?!" We also lived close to the southern border, so the cool kids would sometimes scrounge up a car and sneak down to Mexico to drink.

My town was bigger than what you're describing, and we were lucky enough to have some really talented musicians who had retired there, so I did a lot of singing/performing. The local community college put on a show every summer, and while it was mostly for adult actors, kids 12 and older were allowed to audition and occasionally got roles in the chorus. I got to perform in a few of those shows, and my older brother got really into theater tech.

I also spent what is, looking back, a massive amount of time teaching myself random things out of books. I got really good at origami, making balloon animals, playing string games, that sort of thing. Also, the kitchen was always a useful way to kill an afternoon. I wasn't super-duper into cooking, but I'd occasionally get a wild hair and bake a cake or cookies. If I needed a bit of extra cash, as a teenager I'd sometimes make fudge and sneak it into school to sell to my classmates.

Boredom was an everpresent spectre, but we were pretty good at finding ways to fill the time.

And, as stated in other posts, everyone spent a lot of time plotting their escape from the boring, crappy little town. The above makes it sound like I had some idyllic childhood, when actually I was miserable for most of it. I was a bullied social outcast, and spent a lot of my time alone as a result (protip - if you're going to be around the same people for your entire childhood, be damned sure you make a good first impression in kindergarten, because that bad start will really stick). I don't recall ever actually enjoying life until I went away to college and discovered that, miracle of miracles, without old enemies hanging around to inform new kids of your reputation as a loser, I actually WAS capable of making friends.

My hometown was somewhat bigger, but when I met my first wife her kids were preteens in a tiny town in Mississippi. Although the Big Muddy was just a few miles away, we never went there, as over the levee it was overgrown, swampy, and true or not it was rumored people wanted by the cops in Memphis hid out there, or the landowners would shoot you and get away with it. Most of the outdoor activities were fishing, playing in the creek, or just walking around. Inside was watching TV at grandma's house or at friends, and of course video games. Neighborhood kids (neighborhoodlums, I called them) were always around. Boys especially would build things--forts, skate ramps, etc--with scrap wood they found laying around. Once older, especially driving age, they would hang out "in town," which was 10 miles away but still only 8000 or so folks but vrowing rapidly as a bedroom community for Memphis. Popular hang outs were the Walmart parking lot, the school grounds, or friends' houses.

Mine is a tale of two cities ... towns ... villages ... whatever you want to call them.

From 4-13, I grew up in a small town in the Ozarks. The population was 1600 from Sept to May and 100,000 from May to Sept as all the vacationers came down to hang out at the Lake of the Ozarks in the summer. We lived on the cemetery road, and there was a huge plot that was set aside for expansion that hadn't been used yet and it was turned into a ball field by the local parents. We had a good backstop and it was great for baseball and football. What we usually lacked was enough players, so we had to make up our own rules (only hits between 1st and 2nd counted - hits on the 3rd base side were auto-outs, etc.). Behind our house was a large wooded area that dropped off into a dry creek. One of the walls of the drop-off was covered by boulders that had been removed when they were constructing the houses on the other ridge - so of course, it was known as Boulder Mountain and a great place to hang out.

We'd built tree houses out in the woods, forts, went cave crawling more than was probably safe (the Ozarks are lined with limestone caves), went to the Lake to go swimming, hit the library (advantage of living in the county seat), walked or rode bikes EVERYwhere, chased and were chased by the neighborhood dogs who were never chained up, visited each other's houses to get water when the afternoons got too hot. We had Little League baseball in the summer too.

Those were the fun times.

At 13, we moved to a small farming/bedroom community in Mid-Missouri (pop. 490). Even though there was a town of 120,000 12 miles away, it might have been 1200 miles away. This is where I threw myself into school activities because there was little else to do. I played baseball, basketball, track, did speech competitions, was in the drama club, choir, band, jazz band ... anything to keep busy. We used to joke that in my high school there were the kids who had to work after school to help their families, the ones who were so stoned out of their minds they didn't care, and a small majority who did every thing at the HS.

Summers were the worst, because there was a two-lane highway between our house and the town with 18" shoulders (not a good road for biking), so to get into town, we'd ride through the soybean fields behind the house and ride in on the train tracks (luckily, the "Tries-Daily" only went past the house around 8:30 and 5:30). Even then, that town only had about eight roads to ride bikes on - one stop light, literally. About my junior year, they put in a park in town with a tennis court. I wasn't much of a tennis player, but it was about the only thing to do in the summer outside of working. Most of my summers were spent just sitting around the house until I got my license at 17. Thank goodness one of my aunts let me have her "Reader's Digest Best-Loved Books" collection or I would have gone crazy those summers. I remember one summer I actually read the World Book from A-Z because there was literally nothing I hadn't read in my house. (I have to admit, that did help when it was time to take the ACTs.)

Speaking of work, I mowed lawns, bucked hay bales, worked at the local Dairy Queen (once I got my license), and eventually moved up to working at the local Montgomery Wards before I left for college. Unlike the first town where I had a great time and had great friends, I never fit in at all where I went to High School and honestly, I specifically chose the college I went to because no one from my high school was going to go there.

So, growing up in a small town can be good or bad.

Where I grew up was weirdly both this and that--it was rural and small-town, but within 40 minutes of a small city (Wilmington, DE) and an hour of both Baltimore and Philly.

I don't think you're right about every town have a swimming hole, etc. Really depends on the place.

In elementary school, we mostly went over to each others' houses after school if we wanted to hang out. I'd get a note from my parents to ride a different bus or get off at a different bus stop, and I'd go home with Melissa or Jessica or Brooke, or whoever. I spent a lot of time running around outside in my yard or the woods. My brothers and I would ride our bikes down to the creek and build dams and kick around in the water a bit. Once, we built a good enough dam to create a pool we could kind of swim in. My family had a primitive cabin on the river, and we would go down there on weekends. We would fish, have a bonfire, swim, go out on my dad's boat, go hiking in the woods with the dog (with plenty of tick repelant), and so forth. My brother built a "raft" and a platform up in the tree. My dad worked on the cabin. We listened to oldies on the radio.

The neighbors had goats and chickens and a horse and a scad of kittens at various points. The people across the road bred really nice Arabian horses. My friend's family had cows for funsies. One of my classmates was big into raising cows and 4H/ag stuff, and was one of the more popular kids in school. One of my dearest friends raised goats for 4H.

As older kids, we'd still usually just congregate at people's houses. I was far from a party animal, so who knows what other kids did. But we just, like, sat around in someone's living room or back yard and chatted or messed around. Bonfires were popular. I suspect some kids snuck off into the woods to hang, or went down to the river/bay to swim/whatever. There was no hang-out place because . . . there was no hang-out place. No mall, no real place worth congregating at. I mean, when the McDonald's finally came to town, it became kind of a hang-out place, and the new food store became the place to see and be seen, haha. We'd gather in a group to go to the movies, which was about 40 minutes away across the border in Delaware. Especially as older kids and when we came home from college, we'd go to Newark, DE, because it's a college town and has places to go, but, again, it's like 40 mins away.

If we really wanted big-city stuff, like to go to a show or museum, we went to Baltimore, Philly, or DC, though in elementary school we went every year to the local Natural Resources Center (a big ole park with educational facilities) on a field trip.

I teach high school in a town of about 600 people. Out here on the southern plains we don't have swimming holes. We do have sand pits. Our entire school from Pre-K to 12th grade is in one building. In tornado season we drill by sending the whole school-- staff, custodians, admin, even the cafeteria ladies, into the English Room because it is steel reinforced. We all fit although it is a squeeze. As soon as the siren sounds the biggest kids begin stacking the desks against the wall. As the little ones file in we teachers keep shouting "don't step on the small fry!" --s6

I live in a town with a population of about 5,000. Downtown is essentially a couple blocks on main street with the middle school, the library, a few restaurants, a bakery, a board game store, and a few small businesses.

Outdoor things:
-I live walking distance from my elementary school. Well, kinda. You have to jump over a creek (it used to have a bridge, but it broke, so we used a big branch instead), cut around a farmer's field (which he was cool with), go across this field with really tall weeds, and duck through a barbed wire fence (which was the edge of the elementary playground). We usually didn't walk to school because it was dark, but we'd walk home when it was nice. My sister's and I liked to go to the playground over there during the summer.

-There's also an abandoned and overgrown lot across the street from our neighborhood with a big pond. We'd hop the fence and walk around over there.

-We also have a pond in our neighborhood and we liked to catch the baby catfish that hung out under people's paddle boats. My older sister hated them, so we released them in the big pond mentioned above.

-Biking distance from my house is a nature park with a bunch of trails. I liked to go there and wander the woods by myself. Still do. There's a couple awesome climbing trees and a great creek off the path perfect for walking barefoot. I found a fox jaw there.

-In high school, my boyfriend and I used to go to this bridge on the end of main street. We'd climb over the side and through the weeds and walk around in the river underneath. There was this great tree with exposed roots right by the edge that acted as stairs. And the branches hung over the water, which was perfect for hanging shoes from. The river had a bunch of big rocks and got deep pretty quick. We talked about going swimming there, but it was never warm enough. There was a huge wooded area over there and in early spring is wasn't too overgrown, so it was fun to walk around, climb trees, and "explore," I used to find crab claws in the woods. We had a couple picnics down there.

-I didn't live in downtown, but bike-riding, roller-blading, all the usual kid activities were common there.

-On my high school boyfriend's street was a under the road pipe. He said he used to play in it with his friends as a kid. There was a creek that led to some of the other roads and they'd catch snails and minnows there.

As far as non-nature things:
-The middle school is in the middle of downtown, and there's a restaurant about a block away. Old-fashioned place, only takes cash, known for hot dogs and milkshakes. That was a pretty popular after school hangout. So was the bakery next door.

-The ice cream place was about a half mile away from the middle school, so it was more of a commitment to walk there, but a lot of people would. Because you have to pass the dollar store to get there, a lot of kids end up stopping and hanging out there.

-There was an after-school club on the same block. I didn't go, but a lot of other kids would hang out there until their parents got out of work. The local Pizza Hut sent over the leftovers from the lunch buffet (Pizza Hut is across the street from the middle school), there was Foosball and pool tables, and a mentoring program as well.

--The stadium was across the street from the high school, and there was a tunnel under the road so it was walkable. Sports teams used it, mostly. The marching band used it to march from the band room to the stadium on Friday nights, that was always a lot of fun, we’d do chants the whole way. Apparently (I never did this) that tunnel was also a great place to smoke weed during lunch and after school.

-As it is with most small towns, we have a LOT of churches, and there were usually after school/Wednesday night programs there. Most of them did family events and some kind of dinner before the kid's Wednesday night program.

-The library was also a good place to go after school. They had reading clubs sometimes. They also had a nice area upstairs with some of those giant beanbags. However, the book selection for middle grade and young adult was a joke. When I went, I brought my own book, usually requested from a different library.

-Other than that, people joined after-school programs. Middle school had an art program every Tuesday. High school had sports, art club, marching band practiced on Monday nights, drama rehearsals, robotics, all the typical stuff.

-people didn't hang out here, but this is a great only-in-small-towms addition. Across the street from the middle school was a yellow house and in the backyard of the house was what looked like it used to be a garage, but it had been renovated into a small shop. However, they only sold scuba gear. We don't live in an area good for scuba diving, so I have no idea why it was there. I think they also sold home brewed beer, but that may have just been a rumor.

Just went to a memorial service for a guy who lived in a Texas coal mining town, population ~600'ish when he was in high school.

He was really big into the outdoors. He and his friends would go fishing, duck hunting. They'd shoot bullfrogs and jack rabbits (and eat them) and varmints (like coyotes). Several of them got jobs with a local muzzleloading gun works outfit while they were in high school. During summer break, they'd go camping-- just a canvas lean-to next to a creek in the middle of nowhere, shoot squirrels and stew them, etc. Think like a mountain man who was born 150 years too late... When I was in junior high in a Texas town of 15,000, we called the cowboy-wanna-be's "kickers". (The FFA kids, the kids who listened to country music, etc. They all wore skinny jeans, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats.)

I substitute teach in a Texas town of about 3,200. Sports are super-big and keep your time booked solid, from sunup to sundown. In the fall, there's football, cheer, and basketball (boys and girls). In the spring, there's basketball, baseball, and softball. In between, there's track. If you're an athlete, you're probably involved in at least one fall sport and at least one spring sport, possibly two. If you're not an athlete, you're in the band, and you're rehearsing before school and after school. Because there's only about 50 kids per grade, some of the cheerleaders and football players also do double-duty in the band, and will hurry onto the field for the halftime performance, and then get back to playing or cheering once the clock resumes.

In the summertime, the football kids will often get jobs with local ranchers baling hay as their exercise regimen. The baseball kids will try to get into All Stars (?), which I guess is sort of a summer league for kids who are anxious to be noticed by university scouts. Wednesday night is usually event-free, because everyone goes to church/church youth groups on Wednesday night.

Summer jobs in my Texas town of 3200 are generally going to be things like Subway, Sonic, and Dairy Queen (all three are small-town staples, and go where the larger chains fear to tread... a lot of franchises require a minimum population). Likewise, a lot of them are sackers in the grocery store; a few babysit; some kids do yard work.

In my previous town of 15,000, I didn't do any hanging-out at all, apart from the local church youth group. I started working when I was 15, to start earning money for college-- foodservice. The only real difference was that I had more and better restaurants to choose from than kids who live in a smaller town.

Rural small town of about 1500 here, I recall a place where teens and young adults in their early twenties would go to have bonfires, smoke cigarettes and pot, and drink alcohol. It was on Gregg's Crossing road at the river where there was an old trestle bridge that had been taken out due to disrepair, and the fact the road flooded terribly every spring and washed out, so few traveled that section anyway. The neighbors at the end of the road there tolerated the occasional parties for several years until kids started going onto their property and stealing things and ruining things (I was friends with these people for a while, so that's how I know this). Strangely, I think even the cops tolerated it to a point. Eventually the neighbors got tired of the parties and called the cops at every instance and the county has since put up more barricades to keep people out of that area. I don't know if anyone tries to sneak down there anymore, the neighbors kept a strict eye on the area for people who went down there. I went once to one of those parties, wasn't my thing and I never went back.

lonestarlibrarian said:

They'd shoot bullfrogs and jack rabbits (and eat them).

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OMG yes, and squirrels.

lonestarlibrarian said:

When I was in junior high in a Texas town of 15,000, we called the cowboy-wanna-be's "kickers". (The FFA kids, the kids who listened to country music, etc. They all wore skinny jeans, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats.)

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Lol, we had wanna-be cowboys too, but we called them "goat ropers," and they always had massive belt buckles as part of the outfit (hats weren't permitted at school, so maybe the belt buckle compensated? I dunno).

We also had our share of real cowboys, which made the wanna-bes kind of hilarious because it was sooo obvious which ones were fakes (the real cowboy kids generally didn't wear "cowboy gear" to school).

Tazlima said:

Lol, we had wanna-be cowboys too, but we called them "goat ropers," and they always had massive belt buckles as part of the outfit (hats weren't permitted at school, so maybe the belt buckle compensated? I dunno).

We also had our share of real cowboys, which made the wanna-bes kind of hilarious because it was sooo obvious which ones were fakes (the real cowboy kids generally didn't wear "cowboy gear" to school).

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Ooo, I'd forgotten the big belt buckles. You're totally right about that.

Some of the FFA/4-H kids (like the ones with horse and cow projects) did dress the dress, but most of the kickers just liked projecting the image without embracing the life. I don't know if their schools allowed hats to be worn on the premises, but you bet every single one of them would have known that it's good manners to take your hat off as you come inside! So there's a good chance they would have left them in their truck or something. They would wear hats to sporting events (outdoors, like football) but know to take them off at the pre-game invocation. Flipping through photos of indoor sporting events (like basketball), I see plenty of ballcaps in the audience, but no cowboy hats on the head.

My friend who died-- I don't know if his school had rules about footwear, but he always wore gumboots (Wellingtons) rather than cowboy boots. He also always wore a funky necklace made up of various animal parts-- I always thought they were claws of some sort, but it seems he had taken off the points from the antlers of his first buck and threaded them together with a bunch of beads. I was also told there was a raccoon penile bone that made its way on it... since I'm not well-versed in raccoon anatomy, I had to look it up and hope it didn't affect what Amazon and FB think I'm interested in. The string was always breaking, and he was always reassembling it in different ways with different pieces.

Eventually, he grew up to be Head Mammal Keeper at a decently large city zoo (pop 500k) for a decade or so before coming to our teeny town of 3200, which is just about 15 minutes up the road from his teeny town of 600. One of his best friends-- huntin'/shootin'/campin' buddies-- had grown up to take care of the family grocery business, and it did well enough for him to buy a ranch and raise buffalo and offer hunters deer-and-turkey hunts. My friend had buffalo-raising experience from the zoo, so it made perfect sense to take him on as a ranch hand, and he also acted as a hunting guide. A bunch of the other guys from the huntin'/shootin'/campin' group ended up in cattle ranching, hay, and cotton. One's an awesome cowboy poet on the side.

They were colorful and interesting in high school, and grew into colorful and interesting adults.

I always thought "kickers" were the cowboy boots ("shit kickers") and not the wearers.

In Mississippi, those who actually worked on the farms usually wore Carhartt jackets, canvas jeans and Red Wing steel-toe workboots. Cowboy wear was for non-work social situations, and dress-up occasions ("Blame it all on my roots/ I showed up in boots/ and ruined your black tie affair"--Garth Brooks). We did have our share of poseurs, but farm kids wore cowboy gear when the situation called for it. Starkville, Mississippi even had a "cowboy church." I never went there, so I'm not sure what made a church a "cowboy church," except that baptisms seemed to take place in a watering trough. Don't let NOBODY say cowboy folk and country music don't have a sense of humor .

Hi, I grew up in a pretty small town, about 50 people. Going "to town" meant a town of about 2,200 people, where I went to school.

For fun, we generally found ourselves outdoors, roaming the country and getting into general mischief. We built forts and had rock fights. For the teens in your age group, the big thing was "dragging Main". Basically, you would drive from a car wash on one end of town, down Main St. and turn around at a Sonic at the other end of town. Often people would find themselves parked in cliques and generally chatting. But, that was the big thing. We didn't have much in the way of movie theaters and the closest was over an hour drive away.

A darker side of things is that the boredom all too often drove many into drugs.

For my little 50 person town, we had "The Bottoms". Basically it was farmland around the Canadian River. The sandy stretch along the river bank was very popular for those who took ATV's for general goofing off.

Hope that helps. Please let me know if you are interested in more.

I grew up in two towns in Oregon, one of about 2000 and the bigger one of about 17,000 (when I was in high school). That part of Oregon is pretty wet so there's plenty of streams. The town I went to high school was and is growing, not declining, but there were others around the area that weren't.

Is there a bigger town nearby, in driving distance? Or is your setting really isolated. In terms of what people do, that makes a difference. The town I grew up in was within driving distance of Portland, but not everyone had a car, a fact that more often than not split people up. There was a lot of drinking and pot smoking, neither of which mix well with cars.

But even with Portland semi-close, the kids I grew up with did a lot of pot smoking. It's been like forty years and I'm still high. My friends and I spent a lot of time just hanging out, drinking, smoking pot, and not a lot else.

Sometimes, there were keg parties out in the sticks, way out of town. Being on someone's property wasn't much of a problem because there was a lot of country roads and land that, for all we knew, didn't belong to anyone. You could have a party out there, complete with bonfire and not be bothered.

We didn't have anyplace called, The Bluffs, but people did skinny dip in the many creeks in the area. The larger rivers were muddy and that made them too spooky to swim in. It being Oregon there were a lot of logging roads in teh backcountry where one could go four-wheeling (even if all you had was 2-wheel drive). A great way to kill a weekend. I did that a lot by myself during my senior year (just to be alone). When with others, we'd often go fishing or occasionally river rafting on inner tubes or anything else that floated.

We had ice-storms in winter sometimes. To entertain ourselves, we'd pour water on the patio, wait for it to freeze, then spend half a day bruising our butts on it.

People just invent ways to kill time. One thing I would add though is that time is best killed with a little bit of risk, either by breaking rules or laws or risking injury. Hope that helps.

stevebargdill said:

Heh.
Grew up in New Knoxville, Ohio.
Sometimes we cruised the local cult outside of town and got thrown off the property. They had a nice big barn with a lighted dove that was nice to look at.
Sometimes, we took our Chevette's and ran/raced them through the walk paths of K.C. Geiger Park in the town over.
We liked to toilet paper teacher houses, and stole most the TP from the local United Church of Christ, which its steeple also made good cover for make-out sessions. There was a creek that ran through town, and we often skinny dipped underneath the bridges. We left town a lot to go to the movies, and the theater was a few towns over. We had a huge lake nearby and we did the bar loop around it, there was a specific name for that run but I can't remember off the top of my head. Lots of underage drinking. That's about it, really.

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From St. Marys, Ohio here. I remember kids would try to mess with the people at the Way in New Knoxville and get chased off by the members. I never did it myself, but had friends who said they would get chased by the security in white vans until they were out of the New Knoxville limits and heading back to town.

To add to the post, anything doing with underage drinking, drugs, and sex will work. I had a friend that lived on a farm right behind the local drive in movie theater, so we would all go to her house and watch the movies for free. All you needed was the local radio station that would broadcast the sound and you got to watch the big screen and get the sound for nothing. We would drink beer, smoke pot, and screw around until early in the morning. I once almost tripped over my best friend and a girl having sex on the outskirts of the corn field that surrounded the house. We would also go to the lake, steal fire wood from the surrounding houses, and build giant bonfires. I had a buddy - stoned out of his mind - think it would be cool to jump over the bonfire. It didn't go well, and he ended up diving in the lake to put his pants leg out after catching it on fire.

I lived in the country, near a town of just over 2000 people. The only thing close enough to bike to near my house was a continence store that also sold fish bait, so we spent a lot of time hanging out there, eating junk food that was probably contaminated by the raw minnows they kept in the same section of the store. Other than that, we had a creek near my house with lots of large carp swimming in it. We would go wading in the water on the hot days, and we hang out on top of the drain pipe (there was no bridge) the rest of the time. That drain pipe was my favorite place to write as a teenagers.

I did have one friend who lived off the town main street, so when I visited her, we would walk the street, buy junk food from different places, looking in touristy gift store we had no plans to buy things from, and buy things from the bakery, diner, or ice cream parlor when we had actual money.

This was all in West Central Minnesota, for a sense of geography.