I have forgotten this little series of anecdotes for too long, it’s time to come back to the stupid things I did as a teenager…

I grew up on a small island, with an equal mix of full-year round residents and cottagers. As kids, we always looked forward to the cottagers return as it meant that many more kids to play with… but when they left… it meant many more curious empty places to explore…

In the Winter, if I didn’t hang out with my cousins, I’d most likely hang out with my sister’s best friend’s brother, Eric. He was one year younger but we had a lot in common and always had fun together… Eric had an evil brother, one year older than me… he was a troubled teenager, smoking, drinking… oh and probably swearing too…

Eric and I loved to enter cottages and look around the places, we never stole anything, nor rearranged the furniture, we just liked the thrill of finding a way in without breaking anything, sit in their sofas, warm up a bit, look through the cupboards, see what records they had, what toys they had… and then go home again.

One particular Sunday afternoon in February, when I was 13, we decided to enter a cottage, there were 4 identical cottages on the lot and a big garage where they stored the boats and tools and shit. As we were leaving, the evil brother asked where we were going, and we stupidly told him. He decided to come along…

We arrived at the cottages and quickly realized that these ones were perfectly winterize, they had plastic stapled to all the windows and in between the doors too, there was no way to get inside without breaking these seals… That was it, we weren’t going to try any harder, it wasn’t worth it for us… but the evil brother had something else in mind, he wanted to get in… and he had his eyes on the garage.

We walked closer to the garage door only to find a huge padlock on it… once again, for Eric and me, it wasn’t worth it, but the evil brother produced a small axe from the inside of his coat, he was going to get in. We tried to stop him but within seconds the lock was lying on the ground, broken, and the doors were opening. We were curious of course, and the damage was done, so we walked in… There were two speed boats for water skiing, there was tons of fishing equipment, tools galore… and the sound of an engine running, a car parking into the driveway… HUH??? A quick look out the little window revealed that on this nice sunny Sunday afternoon, one of the four owners had decided to come in for a Winter visit, I guess to make sure everything was still alright… huh, no it wasn’t… not for us.

Little criminal minds thinking alike, we all knew we couldn’t run away, so we decided to hide… Eric jumped inside one of the boat, I hid under the boat closest to the wall and evil brother hid in one of the dark corner somewhere…

After a quick inspection of the cottages, they quickly realized someone had been around recently with the foot tracks in the snow, and it wasn’t long before they were lead to the garage to see the padlock laying in the snow on the ground… The father came in, I can vividly remember his shoes and small galoshes covering them, he wasn’t dressed for a snow walked, they probably had been to church or something else that morning and decided to venture to their summer place for a nice drive… Anyway, he came in, stood there for awhile, probably surveying the place for missing items… then telling the wife that everything seemed alright, that someone probably broke in just to get warm… He walked in some more, couldn’t see much with just the light coming in from the windows, and then walked out again and close the doors, using the broken padlock to hold the doors together… I never knew I could hold my breath for 5 minutes like this.

We could hear them talked for a bit and then finally the car doors shut and the engine starting. We heard the crunch of the tires on the snow and knew they were leaving… just a short visit for them… and a huge nightmare for us.

We thought for sure they were going to go to the police and come back… so we quickly got out of our hiding spaces and bolted for the door, which was now locked again… We shook as best we could to see if the padlock would just fall again… nothing… We had no other choices, either we broke the doors by force-kicking them open – or – we broke a window and made a run that way… We tried the doors twice, nothing, we tried the window just once, it shattered… We carefully pushed and pulled each other out of the place and then made a run for freedom through the thick woods surrounding us…

The evil brother said that we should take different paths in case they’d started looking for us… Personally I thought he was more scared than we were and didn’t want us to witness it in his face… so we parted, Eric and I one way and him on another…

We found out later that he did this because he didn’t want to share what he had stolen… a stash including some cigarettes… what an idiot… these cigarettes had been there since the end of the summer. Like they were going to be any good…

« »