My Extraordinary Ordinary Life by Sissy Spacek, Maryanne Vollers Page A

surface. We carried that salt around like a badge of honor and would suck on big pieces of it for days, proof that we were big enough to go down in the salt mine and come up alive again. Eventually the school district realized that sending little kids down into a slimy old mine wasn’t a great idea, and the class trips were canceled. It was a sad day.
    There were no government safety rules back then. No seat belts or bike helmets for kids. The world was a precarious place, but somehow more fun. My brother Ed tells a story I vaguely remember about a little boat trip our family took on Lake Lydia. It was a small private lake about five miles from town, very beautiful and peaceful, with tiny wooden cabins all along the shore. Our father’s friend John Morse had a place out there and had been building a boat in his garage for months. It was a small thing, more like a large rowboat with a motor. When he was finished, he offered to take both of our families for a ride. Daddy stayed near the shore, fishing in his waders, while Ed, Robbie, and I piled on board. I was just a toddler. Mother, who was pregnant with one of the babies she later lost, was also in the boat, along with John’s wife Emily, daughter Elaine, and son, Tom. None of us was wearing a life vest. It reminded Ed of a life raft from the Titanic.
    It was getting to be dusk and everyone was having a big time. Daddy was casting a fishing line nearby, and John was speeding along at a nice clip over by the dam when suddenly the boat hit a submerged stump that tore a gaping hole in the bottom. “This cannot be good,” Ed remembers thinking as the overloaded boat started taking on water. By some miracle, John was able to gun the engine and reach the shallows just as the boat sank. Nobody made a big deal out of it, but the adults seemed pretty quiet after that. John Morse patched the hole and was back on the water by the next weekend.
    My dad was an avid fisherman, and Lake Lydia was where he could escape for a little peace and quiet. But sometimes he brought the whole family to share this most tranquil place, and we proceeded to shatter the silence. Before there was a public pool in town, the lake was the only good place to swim, and the best place to go was the spillway. Daddy would point our 1949 Pontiac sedan down a steep hill to a place where the lake drained into a creek, then parked the car on two raised concrete strips. On one side, the water flowed from the lake and ran underneath the car. On the other side, the water rolled down a steep embankment covered with moss. When Daddy opened the doors and we got out, water rushed around my legs. We waded and squealed and splashed, sliding on our bottoms down the spillway and into the creek.
    Mother brought a picnic, peanut-butter-and-jelly and bologna sandwiches. We sat at a picnic table next to the creek with a gallon of milk and ate our sandwiches. When we were finished playing and picnicking, we loaded up the Pontiac and the next phase of the adventure commenced: Would we make it up the hill? The incline seemed much steeper driving out than it did driving in. The car chugged and coughed. Sometimes it chugged and coughed and rolled right back into the middle of the spillway. For me, that was the best part.
    The only thing our parents really seemed to fear was polio. The disease had always been around, but by the early 1950s the epidemic was at its peak, and its victims were usually young children. It could cause paralysis and even death, and there was no known cure. To add to the panic, nobody knew how polio was spread. The worst waves of it seemed to come in the summer months. Mothers who thought heat might spread the disease kept their children inside in the afternoons. People were afraid to use public swimming pools. The fear didn’t end until the mid-1950s, when scientists finally developed a vaccine to prevent polio. The medicine was administered through a hypodermic needle that opened up like a shotgun, the