The worst thing about being a grown-up is ... no summer vacation. My stepson James has been talking about summer vacation since Christmas. Can't say I blame him. Summer vacation was - at least for me - quite possibly the best time of my life.

Sadly, James is getting a little old to enjoy summer vacation to its fullest; he's 16. The best age for summer vacation is 13.  At 13, no one expects you to get a summer job. If you do, you're seen as "ambitious." If you don't, well, hey, you're just a kid, for cryin' out loud!

My 13th summer was an endless vista of blue-sky, creek-water, warm-breeze days, punctuated by the sound of train whistles and ice cream truck bells; of Easter candy growing slowly stale in the bottom of a forgotten basket - half a marshmallow Peep and the black jellybeans nobody ever eats.

Summer was B.B. guns, slingshots, the impossibly azure feather of a blue jay - a slice of summer sky fell to earth and found beneath the flowering branches of a dogwood tree. It was night sidewalks still radiating midday heat at 11 o'clock and the faint echoes of "tag", "you're it!" and "all-ie all-ie in-free" reverberating through the sweltering summer air long after the last child had been hollered in for the night.

There were fish to be coaxed from the river, dogs to be chased and dogs that chased you; there were friends and enemies, girls who had cooties and girls who didn't ... the world murmured languorously with whispered promises of endless tomorrows.

My whole life was ahead of me, and at 13, I knew it.

At 13, I could see the wide world from horizon to horizon from atop Lookout Hill, yet still take notice of the smallest millipede darting beneath the loose gravel behind our garage. I wanted to see everything, smell everything, taste, hear and feel Every Single Thing.

There was still Magic in the world. It took up residence in the swirling spider web mists hovering over Highland Park creek just after sunup. It was there in the droning cicada buzz emanating from a thousand treetops. And most of all, it was captured in the miles of steel rail which cut through my neighborhood; twin ribbons of silver and rust.

The train tracks.

They crossed Grand Street three blocks north of my house, then curved away east and west, leading to far places I had read about but never seen.

I would stand on those tracks on a summer afternoon; New York, Spain, Istanbul to my left; Texas, Arizona and Mexico to my right. If I started walking those tracks, I might wind up anywhere.

From time to time, a train would rumble past, kicking up dust and shaking the earth like an iron tornado. And if it was moving slowly enough, sometimes my friend Annie - a freckle-faced redhead who most assuredly did not have cooties - and I would hop it; just run alongside, grab a ladder or open doorway, and pull ourselves, laughing and winded, into an empty boxcar. Dangerous?  Uh-huh.  Stupid? Oh, you bet. It didn't matter.

We'd ride for 10, maybe 15 minutes, until the train reached the edge of town and started putting on steam. Then we'd leap off and roll, usually getting pretty scuffed up in the bargain.

The caboose would slide past and we'd be standing there covered with dust, waving and grinning from ear to ear. Sometimes the guys in the caboose would smile back and wave, sometimes they'd wag their fingers and glower stern looks in our direction. They knew what we'd been up to, but a train doesn't stop if it doesn't absolutely have to.

More than once during that long summer, I sat with my briar-scratched legs dangling from a boxcar doorway, thinking that, this time, I might not jump, that instead I might just wave goodbye to Annie and see where the rails took me. Milan, Beijing, Morocco ... if I could just not  jump, by tomorrow I might be scorching my feet in the cinnamon sands of the Mojave or wandering through a noisy marketplace in Madrid.

Sure, some part of me, even at 13, knew that in reality those tracks probably terminated in a Milwaukee freight yard and that I would be found and returned to my worried parents long before I crossed the Michigan-Illinois border. But another, better part of me still resonated to the thrumming alchemy trapped in those rails; sensed their ability to transform my small, mundane city-boy life into something else, something bigger, taller, wider.

But in the end I always jumped.

And the train would roll on without me.

A few years later - when I was 16 or 17 - I spent a summer on the road, hitching around the country. I made it as far as Arizona before turning my face back toward home.

While traveling I worked on a chicken ranch, spent time in a Jesus freak commune, and was shot at twice. I sold fruit, helped a kid who looked exactly like Huck Finn with his paper route, and spent two weeks living with the woman who every Sunday played the third-largest pipe organ in the world at the Reorganized Latter Day Saints temple in Independence, Missouri.

I experienced more in that one summer than I ever had before or have since. They're good stories, or good memories at least. In my more grandiose moments, I think of those experiences as "adventures." And who knows, maybe they were.

But none compare with the adventures that lived in my head at age 13, in those few brief moments before I leapt from the open doorway of that boxcar.

Do you have a comment, question or railroad schedule for Mike Taylor? Send it to: mtaylor@midmich.net, or via snail mail to Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429.