Happy Times with Asperger Kids and/or Parents

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Favorite memory:

Sundays were ALWAYS days off. That was one of the perks to working in the coal mines-- you might work six twelves with a half-hour drive to work and change shifts at the work face (meaning another 30 to 90 minute wait for the next shift to relieve you, depending on how far the longwall was from the personnel shaft), but you ALWAYS got Sunday off (or else it paid doubletime, if you were crazy enough to volunteer to work Sundays).

So Sundays, when I was in high school, were OUR days. Sometimes we went into Morgantown and went shopping downtown. Sometimes we went to the grocery store. Sometimes we hung around the house reading books and watching movies.

Plenty of Sundays, though, we ate breakfast and checked the weather...

...and if the weather was fair (even if it was cold sometimes), we gassed up the 4-wheeler and lit out for the ridge tops. Saint Alan driving, me on the back. Illegal?? Absolutely. Unsafe?? Well, all the tags on the machine said so...

...but everyone we knew did it, and nobody rolled the machine unless they did something stupid like try to drive it across a steep grade (narrow wheel base-- prone to roll-- you can go up the hill or down the hill, but not across the hill) or on very uneven ground (I saw him almost roll it once-- we tried a road nobody knew in late fall, and it turned out to be badly rutted under all those leaves) or put the heavier person on the back.

So there we go-- the crazy coal miner and his crazy daughter, helmets strapped to their heads, tearing across the ridges for miles and miles and miles (and hours and hours). In all weather. Singing David Allan Coe at the tops of their lungs. Stopping to watch animals, and pick berries, and follow old gas lines. Once we found the remains of an old town from the gas boom back around the turn of the 20th century. Several times, we went up to the old Highland Church and wandered around the graveyard. Once, somebody left an access gate unlocked and we ended up behind the main portal for Loveridge mine-- not Saint Alan's pit, but the same type of operation. So we spent hours looking at retention ponds, and slag ponds, and watching bulldozers on the stock pile, watching them stir the stock pile (which I learned they did to prevent the coal from spontaneously combusting), watching them load a train...

I guess it sounds not all that special, and kind of stupid and irresponsible. But I really don't think we were ever in any more danger than, say, driving to the grocery store. We had a lot of fun out there. Talked about a lot of things-- friends, environmentalism, politics, relationships, observations on life, school, jobs...

...general stuff that you HOPE parents and kids will talk about. We had HUGE amounts of fun. Screaming lyrics off key and out of tune, enjoying the wind in our faces where we knew the road was wide and flat and straight, eating berries in the sunshine and watching deer.

I guess it worked for us because we were two Aspies on our own up there. I think, though, that every kid ought to get that lucky.