Have you ever unintentionally broken the law?
Once when I was in high school my two older sisters and I decided to drive from Maryland to Maine to stay in a summer cottage of my grandmother’s for Thanksgiving. Sounds like a dumb idea now, but it sounded like an adventure to us then.
The car broke down in a farm town in New Jersey, and while we were waiting for it to be fixed, we walked around this town and passed a field of rotting pumpkins. We saw a good one that we thought we could use for pumpkin pie, so we hopped the fence, got it and walked back to the garage.
Just then, a police car pulled up and the officer asked us why we weren’t in school (I guess students in New Jersey weren’t on Thanksgiving break like we were), and if we were runaways. My oldest sister who was around 23 at the time explained where we were going. He was unconvinced. I guess we looked like trouble.
Then the officer’s eyes lit on the pumpkin I was carrying. “Where’d you get that?” I explained we found it in an abandoned field down the highway. He cited some criminal code and said the field belonged to the Hines company and we were stealing, and he relieved me of the pumpkin.
The fallout was that the car could not be satisfactorily repaired for us to make it to Maine, and the officer said he’d arrest my oldest sister for kidnapping and charge us for stealing and running away if we didn’t turn around and go home.
So a shoddily planned adventure turned into an unexpected brush with the law.
Rachel Landrum Crumble poet 