The family sized tent was a permanent fixture in the back yard of the duplex mill house where I lived with my Mom, Dad, two brothers and a sister. My Grandparents lived in the “plex” next door. I never could figure out why they called them duplexes, so I figured one side should be called unoplex or just plex. But yeah, all summer long that tent occupied the far back corner of the yard. Sometimes there were as many as twelve young hoodlums packed like sardines into that six man tent, just waiting in the darkness for the last of the lights to click off in the old two-story duplex I called home. After the last of the lights went off we would wait an extra fifteen or twenty minutes just to be sure that we could scurry out past one of the plexes without being detected. As soon as all of us had cleared the front edge of the driveway, we were free. Everything; the streets, the town, the night, the fireflies and even other peoples’ property were there for our enjoyment and entertainment.

On this night the first order of business was to creep down to the old textile mill for some climbing and exploration. Of course we had learned long ago that it would be totally foolish to walk down the center of Mill Street unless we wanted to be detained by Johnny Law. So my eleven friends and I single filed down through the seemingly pitch black woods that bordered the long double row of plexes on my street. At that time the mill was experiencing somewhat of a comeback as far as occupancy was concerned. In years earlier there were times when that old granite behemoth was all but abandoned. After creeping along the front wall of the main building like midget commandos, we took turns boosting one another up onto the hanging ladder of the fire escape leaving the tallest of our group to leap for the rung and muscle himself up (I was one of the shortest of our gang so when I climbed onto the second floor roof, I laid on my belly peering over the edge and cheered the others on, in a whisper of course). When we were all gathered on the flat roof we turned and started on the true physical challenge of this mission. We were here for the “Challenge of the Zig-Zag Roof”. The Hope Mill is a grouping of many different building sections all interconnected on the interior, but depending on the era of construction, of very different architectural styling. The section we were interested in on this night was about three hundred feet long and the roof was a series six foot tall standing window walls and then a steeply sloped roof that bottomed at the foot of the next set of windows. So all twenty of us climbed quietly up and over each set of windows and tiptoed down the slope of the following shingled roof sections being as sneaky as 12 hoodlums can be so as not to alert the workers running the machines below us. By the time we had traversed the twenty or so zig-zag sections and reached the far end of building, the excitement was electric. With hearts pounding and adrenaline pumping “Ready set go!” we all started running back the way we had come, except this time we ran up and ramped off one sloped roof landing with twelve resounding booms on the next slope. I could hear the shouts and curses from the workers below us almost immediately. “Hey you little bastards!” and “We’re calling the cops!”…  Apparently they weren’t bluffing about the call, by the time the slowest of our gang made it back to the flat roof where we started, there were in fact two patrol cars with strobes flashing that came fishtailing into the dirt lot in front of the mill. Being the hooligans we were and experienced with alluding the law, we dropped any hopes of escaping from the fire escape, and we ran like the wind toward the back of the mill where we all hung from the lip of the roof and dropped into the waiting dumpster ten feet below. Scrabbling out from the garbage we all disappeared into the dark woods before the cops could make it around to the back side of the mill. Back at the tent it must have been hours before we lost our giddy hyperactivity and calmed down enough to stop talking and get some sleep.