William Tumlin

When I was about twelve years old, my cousin and I were on my great grandmother’s farm in Cordele, Georgia and we decided to go for a ride on the four wheelers. We cranked them up and took off through the woods. The trail came to an end, and we drove out into an open field. We both stopped for a second and looked at each other, and as young boys we both had the exact same idea. We were going to race around the field. Everything was good for the first two laps, but that changed quickly. I rounded a corner and hit a log that was hidden from me beneath the grass. The four wheeler turned over sideways, and went skidding across the ground with my leg underneath it. I pushed it off of me and my cousin drove over to see if I was hurt. I told him I was fine, but we could not tell either of our parents about this.

The next day, they found out. The back of the four wheeler was bent in two different places. They took us outside to talk to us and we told them what had happened. I showed them the bruise I had from the four wheeler landing on me, which covered my thigh from my knee to my hip. We both got punished by our parents for a few days, including making us do fifty push-ups before dinner. In the end, the situation was a lot better than it could have been. I could have been much more severely injured, or the four wheeler could have been damaged a lot more. I learned my lesson to be smarter in certain situations and just tell the truth when you do something you did not mean to do.