The Teeter-Totter Incident

How Treasure Hunting Found Jimmy - Part 4

Long before Jimmy had old maps, strange clues, and treasure hunts to occupy her attention, she had trees.

At eight years old, a tree was not scenery. It was something to climb, investigate, and occasionally make a terrible plan around.

One particular branch was just out of reach. Jumping did not work. A bicycle did not work. Even the highly sophisticated bicycle-and-stick method failed to improve matters.

Black-and-white Lost Cabin Mine comic showing eight-year-old Jimmy turning a teeter-totter into a launch system while trying to reach a tree branch, with increasingly questionable results. — Eight-year-old Jimmy needed to reach a branch. The teeter-totter looked like a solution. Several friends and gravity eventually became involved.

What followed involved an assistant, a launch plan, gravity, and the discovery that reaching a branch and successfully returning from that branch are two entirely different problems.

A reasonable eight-year-old might have accepted the first attempt as evidence that the plan was flawed.

Jimmy recruited more friends.

The branch remained undefeated.

Years later, the incident makes considerably more sense as part of the story of how treasure hunting found Jimmy. The treasure changed. The maps got older. The searches got farther from the playground.

The questionable determination apparently survived intact.

These stories are experiences, not instructions. Do not attempt Jimmy's stunts. Let Jimmy's experience show why.

Jimmy is a fictional treasure-hunting persona. The raccoon insists he is real.