The hubris of my youth combined with its commensurate ignorance conspired against me for a belief of invincibility. Or so I thought…

Around 1970 when I was 9 years old, my dad rented a single-story 4-bedroom farmhouse on 40-acres of pasture in rural Capay Valley which is about 30-miles northwest of Sacramento, CA, and moved the entire family of six into it. This was boondock living before it was cool. Nothing but silos, cows, and alfalfa fields as far as the eye could see.

I was the 3^rd of four children. My half-brother Marc was the eldest by several years, followed by my sister Lisa, followed by me, and our little brother Scott was the caboose of the baby train.

The property also had a scary old, dilapidated 2-story 19^th century Victorian farmhouse about 50-yards from the main house. We convinced ourselves that it was haunted, so we mostly avoided it.

Living in the boondocks like we did, Lisa, Scott, and I found unique ways to entertain ourselves often in the form of dares. A dare from an older sibling was a way for us youngsters to prove our worth and stay in their good graces by demonstrating our mettle. Or so we believed.

The first standout dare in Capay Valley was that Lisa challenged Scott and I to climb over the fence of the cow pasture and touch a cow, which we boldly accepted. The problem was that it had recently rained, and the cow pasture was a massive muddy quagmire. This, however, did not stop us boys from proceeding. Scott and I slowly slogged out to about 50-feet from the fence when a bull far off in the distance spotted us and began trotting toward us. The bull had to be at least 200-yards away, but it was making good speed in the mud. Scott and I quickly turned around and began running for our lives back toward the fence. Scott stopped in mid-stride and yelled out, “My shoe got sucked off of my foot; I have to try and find it!” This was a bad idea. I kept heading toward the fence while Scott was hopelessly groping around in the mud with his hands as the bull, now picking up speed, was quickly closing in on us.

I got to the fence and climbed over it and turned around to see Scott on all fours, now covered completely in mud, and still frantically feeling around for his shoe. Lisa and I yelled out to him, “RUN SCOTT, RUN – THE BULL! THE BULL!” as we pointed behind him. He looked back at the bull and realized that we were not kidding. He jumped up and began to run as fast as he could toward us and the perimeter fence of protection. As he continued to run for his life, his sock got sucked off his foot, then the other shoe, then the other sock. By the time he got back to the fence, he was barefoot. Lisa and I helped him get over the fence and by this time the bull was only about 50-feet behind him, which, in my opinion, is as close to a bull as you want to get unless you are a matador.

When we got back to the house, I was half covered in mud and Scott was fully covered in mud. The look on my mom’s face when we got to the mudroom at the back door was priceless. Then the inquiry began. “What were you boys getting into this time? How did the two of you get so muddy? Scott, where are your shoes and socks? Lisa, what do you know about this?” As my mom was stripping us boys out of our extremely wet, muddy clothes, the truth spilled out. A dare. A couple of willing little brothers. A muddy pasture. An angry bull. A near death run for our lives. A lost pair of shoes and socks.

As was typical of my mom, she spoke in matter-of-fact tone. “What were you two thinking would happen? You boys are lucky that you didn’t get gored by that mean old bull. Lisa, stop daring your brothers to do such dangerous things.”

One day not too long after the bull incident, I noticed a swarm of bees under one of the lower eaves of the presumably but probably haunted old farmhouse. It was maybe about 8-feet above the ground. I watched it for a while and was mesmerized by it. I showed it to Scott and Lisa. They too, were mesmerized by it.

Then my sister said something familiar to me that I could not resist; “I dare you to knock the beehive down!” Well, a dare is a dare (it is a personal level challenge, really) so I took it upon myself not to wimp out. I knew where my dad kept some lumber and walked over to the carport and grabbed a 2-by-4 stud and walked back with it. “I’ll use this!” I said triumphantly as I thrust the slightly warped wood stud forward.

I lifted the 2-by-4 up by one end and put the other end along one side of the beehive and gave it a shove. It didn’t come down, but it got the bees riled up and they started buzzing around me as honey started to drip out of the hive. Scott and Lisa took a few steps back. I shoved the beehive again, this time with a little bit more force, and most of the beehive came down with a plop about 3-feet in front of me as I jumped back. Now the bees were very angry and swarming around the beehive pile and darting toward us.

Then my sister dared me to run through it. I knew this was a bad idea, but I accepted challenge #2 anyway and I ran through the swarm of bees not once…but twice.

The first pass was a full-speed run through the cloud of swirling bees and although a few bounced off of me and a few landed on me that I quickly brushed off with my bare hands, I did not get stung. Now, I was feeling invincible, so the next pass was a slow walk through the tornado of angry bees. This was another bad idea. The bees were now landing on me en-masse, and I was brushing them off as fast as I could as my pace quickened because I was sensing that maybe I overestimated my invincibility. Then a bee landed on my lower lip and immediately stung me as my siblings stood there in the distance, gawking. This stinging of the lip was certainly not the fault of the bee that sacrificed its own life for the sake of the colony; I was, in fact, an existential threat.

I’m going to assume that you, dear reader, have never been stung on your lower lip by an angry bee so I’ll explain to you what it was like in an attempt to dissuade you from doing anything foolish with a beehive. You can thank me later.

The initial sting on such a tender part of my face was extremely painful and the rush of the adrenaline induced fight-or-flight reflex shot through my body like I got struck by a bolt of lightning. I panicked and tried to brush the bee off of my lip while also spitting and running away from the swarm as fast as I could. This is when I noticed that my lower lip was already starting to swell up. I started to panic and ran to the house without breaking pace.

By the time I got inside the house calling for my mom with tears in my eyes and a panicked, trembling voice hoping that she could somehow triage my lower lip with some old timey remedy, my lip had swollen considerably to the point that when my mom finally got a look at me, she started laughing. My siblings, who were hot on my heels, also got a fresh look at me and started laughing. They couldn’t contain themselves. Let me tell you, trying to talk when your lip is so swollen that it’s hanging down preventing you from closing your lips to pronounce letters like B, F, M, P, U, V, and W, makes for a very cartoonish Elmer Fudd like voice.

Then my mom started with another inquiry. “What happened?” I was trying to explain but it was hard to talk with my inner tube sized lip. It also didn’t help that everyone was still laughing at me. My siblings gave an abbreviated version of the incident skipping over the part about the dare, but I didn’t care. My mom put together a baggie of ice and told me to hold it on my lip. This is when I rushed to the bathroom mirror to assess the damage. My god! How can my lip balloon up like that? Will it ever go back to normal? Am I permanently disfigured? What will the kids at school say? Will my family ever stop laughing at me? Questions like these raced through my mind. Also, now I understood why my family was laughing at me – I had a freakish appearance with my big, puffy lip hanging down revealing my bottom teeth, looking a little bit like a Shih Tzu with a bad underbite. I could have been hired as a circus sideshow attraction.

For the next several hours, I held an ice pack to my lip while struggling to talk or eat. My mom eventually administered an antihistamine, and I don’t remember the rest of the night. I woke up the following morning and my lower lip was almost back to normal size and by the late afternoon you it was as if nothing had happened.

The only consolation that I had was that I technically “won” the dare, but I definitely lost the battle with the bees.

Boy 0, Bees 1.

IM: @m.snarky

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