i'm sure i've mentioned it,i grew up on a street on the edge of town,in mckinney,tx,caught between the country and the city,a one street housing development gone awry,somebodies dream that never took hold to have the area later rezoned industrial.well,all us boys on the street use to wonder the fields,there must of been 15 of us that ran together,not all at one time,but in various groups,some kids parents wouldn't let them run like we did and kept a tighter rein,i didn't understand that then,but as i grew older i could respect that.in a way i'm glad my dad gave me and my brothers a little freedom,sometimes i wish he would have been more involved.
i remember running through the groves and thickets that ran alongside the dry creek beds and the live ones too,don't remember many stands of trees that weren't next to them.this is a area in transition between the more heavily forested east and where the plains start to show up.we lived in the rich black clay of north texas,cotton country,but soon to be paved over by urban expansion.
well,one day while shooting the breeze over something on a lazy summer day,hid out somewhere where nobodies parents would see us smoking,someone said,hey,lets go to Fool's Gold Canyon,fool's gold canyon?where's that.well fools gold canyon was somewhere between the new part of u.s. 75 that ran west of town and the old part that ran through town that now had the designation hwy. 5.this got me excited,fools gold,never heard of it,what is it?well we decided to go the next day,i had to clear it with the higher ups,because i wanted to take the pump 20 gauge.
so i get the usually questions,is it on private property?,don't know.who alls going,give the list of names.the usually admonishions,BE CAREFUL!!and as always my dad tells me not to walk out front and stay back so i won't get sprayed by somebody else's shot gun.
fool's gold,iron pyrite,i looked it up in the encyclopedia,so what was the big deal,didn't matter,it was somewhere i'd never heard of and that i hadn't been yet,in MY town,whose been hiding this from me
.as i said the geography was in transtition,as the only rock around our area was shale,soft,white rock as it's called,used to pack down for road beds.
well off we go,across old highway 5,past pecan grove cemetary,down the road aways past the meat packers and meat lockers and on to a stretch of land i'd never been on,pretty well full of trees and thickets,with clearings here and there,i noticed that the ground started getting more hard packed with little rocks and gravel,and that we were starting to walk downhill with washouts and rolling terrain.
all along the way shooting a bird or just blowing the crap out of something,as much as could be blown with birdshot.then it appeared,a bunch of gullys and rutted ground,we had come up on a bench of hard small rocks and then i was shown what was suppose to be the iron pyrite, fools gold,i was unimpressed,but i was impressed by the change in terrain,here in the big middle of all this black clay i was use to was the bench of rock,an outcropping,probably a couple of hundred acres or so.
deep gullys,but more than that a place i'd never seen,an oddity.well other than my new discovery the highlight of the day was when we were standing in a clearing a good sized owl swooped down and popped another kid on the head as we approached a grove of trees,it must of had a nest near by,he ran and found where it had lit and shot it.even then i kind of thought that wasn't necessary,but we were 13 to 15 years old and we usually don't have good sense at that age,he took the owl home,i think his folks had a chest type freezer in the garage and he kept it there for a while.
hope you enjoyed my little boyhood adventure,i learned a little,and found out about iron pyrite,something that made an impression on me.
i remember running through the groves and thickets that ran alongside the dry creek beds and the live ones too,don't remember many stands of trees that weren't next to them.this is a area in transition between the more heavily forested east and where the plains start to show up.we lived in the rich black clay of north texas,cotton country,but soon to be paved over by urban expansion.
well,one day while shooting the breeze over something on a lazy summer day,hid out somewhere where nobodies parents would see us smoking,someone said,hey,lets go to Fool's Gold Canyon,fool's gold canyon?where's that.well fools gold canyon was somewhere between the new part of u.s. 75 that ran west of town and the old part that ran through town that now had the designation hwy. 5.this got me excited,fools gold,never heard of it,what is it?well we decided to go the next day,i had to clear it with the higher ups,because i wanted to take the pump 20 gauge.
so i get the usually questions,is it on private property?,don't know.who alls going,give the list of names.the usually admonishions,BE CAREFUL!!and as always my dad tells me not to walk out front and stay back so i won't get sprayed by somebody else's shot gun.
fool's gold,iron pyrite,i looked it up in the encyclopedia,so what was the big deal,didn't matter,it was somewhere i'd never heard of and that i hadn't been yet,in MY town,whose been hiding this from me
.as i said the geography was in transtition,as the only rock around our area was shale,soft,white rock as it's called,used to pack down for road beds.well off we go,across old highway 5,past pecan grove cemetary,down the road aways past the meat packers and meat lockers and on to a stretch of land i'd never been on,pretty well full of trees and thickets,with clearings here and there,i noticed that the ground started getting more hard packed with little rocks and gravel,and that we were starting to walk downhill with washouts and rolling terrain.
all along the way shooting a bird or just blowing the crap out of something,as much as could be blown with birdshot.then it appeared,a bunch of gullys and rutted ground,we had come up on a bench of hard small rocks and then i was shown what was suppose to be the iron pyrite, fools gold,i was unimpressed,but i was impressed by the change in terrain,here in the big middle of all this black clay i was use to was the bench of rock,an outcropping,probably a couple of hundred acres or so.
deep gullys,but more than that a place i'd never seen,an oddity.well other than my new discovery the highlight of the day was when we were standing in a clearing a good sized owl swooped down and popped another kid on the head as we approached a grove of trees,it must of had a nest near by,he ran and found where it had lit and shot it.even then i kind of thought that wasn't necessary,but we were 13 to 15 years old and we usually don't have good sense at that age,he took the owl home,i think his folks had a chest type freezer in the garage and he kept it there for a while.
hope you enjoyed my little boyhood adventure,i learned a little,and found out about iron pyrite,something that made an impression on me.
