Ahhh. Crazy but the first time I fired a rifle I was aiming from maybe twenty five or so feet at a target of some sort at the base of a 15 to 20 foot mountain of dirt from a construction site. The bullet struck near the top. I was too young to figure out what I did wrong, but stuck to my BB gun after that and it was about another decade before I picked up another rifle. I wasn’t allowed BBs for the BB gun, but there were plenty spent ones in the woods around home, so I collected enough from trees and obvious targets to satisfy myself and was careful not to bring the collected BBs in or near the house.

Boy, those were the days. You could walk literally for miles and not see a soul. The house was near and with a view of a river...where we caught and steamed crabs with plenty of Old Bay seasoning. When I was 13 or so commercial fishermen and crabbers ruined it for regular folks. We went from a bushel of crabs caught by string before church to less than a dozen in eight hours on the water. Today along the same river where there was more than a mile of nothing but woods there are homes and piers every sixty feet. UGLY!