Dirty blonde hair swung back and forth in front of my eyes as I pedaled down the steep embankment alongside Ronnie Eckburg’s teetering old garage.

The embankment was short and steep. There was a large mound of dirt we had sculpted with precision to launch 16-inch Huffys into the air.

My plan was to soar between the two pine trees just beyond the jump and then ride gallantly down the wooded trail and stop once I reached the old railroad bed.

I pulled up hard on the handle bars as my front tire came off the jump. The bike climbed to about three feet. And then it began to rotate, backwards. I found myself looking up though the tree branches at the pure blue June sky.

My back made a thud like a boot stomping something hollow. The noise seemed to have come out of my mouth and I coughed what felt like dust from my lungs. Ronnie looked on from the top of the hill. I could hear him laughing that inevitable question.

“Dude, are you OK?”

Fine. I was fine. I walked it off. I hadn’t been wearing a helmet. It was the law at the time, but it was a law my friends and I scoffed at, like the law about not ripping the tags off of mattresses or not urinating in public.

The helmet law was to protect us fragile children. We were so precious and innocent and pure; nothing bad should ever happen to us.

While our mothers were at work or inside doing the laundry, my friends and I pedaled through the bubbling sewage swamps created by Madera’s nonexistent treatment facilities. It made for marshes and streams of black water in the woods behind our houses.

We played a game that involved smashing old bottles. There were no rules or points.

We climbed on the old coal mining structures and equipment.

And Crabapple wars. When we ran out of crabapples, we threw rocks at each other. We came home filthy and bleeding.

A bleeding child must be a horrid sight for today’s parents. Target recently recalled an entire line of toys due to “sharp points” creating a “laceration hazard.” The Easy Bake Oven has been recalled recent because the 75 watt lightbulb makes for a burn hazard if a child should get her darling little hand stuck in the door.

Ronnie and I stole steak knives so we could sharpen sticks. But somehow we were never made victims of the pointed objects that surrounded us. Against all odds, Ronnie and I are still here. And if something had killed us, then good; great even.

If I see a kid drink a whole bottle of Dimetapp, light himself on fire, or climb out of backseat window of a moving car, I have just witnessed Darwin in action — not a failure of safety features.

We need to stop being so overprotective. We’re letting all the kids who will eventually become a burden to society just slide on through. The homeless were never allowed to play outside as children.

Getting roughed up is good for kids. We learned things from the pain — the world is abrasive. All the hurt makes life worth something; it gives happiness meaning.

This world’s shape edges and hard spots can be the source of its greatest humor.

I watched Ronnie’s gut land on his handle bars on his first attempt at the jump, and I took great pleasure in asking him a very insincere question.