Memoir rough draft

When I was younger I belonged to a very tight-knit group of kids from throughout my neighborhood and we would all hang out together and go exploring on weekends and during the summer. Michael, my older brother, always seemed to be in the lead of our little gang mainly due to the fact that he was the biggest, this is quite funny to look back at because now he is the smallest of those of us who are still in contact with one another. CJ was a very mischievous child, he always seemed to be in trouble for something and was definitely the bad apple of the group. Timothy, or Timmy as we called him was more sensitive to insults and the general ribbing that goes on between boys and so he always seemed to get mad at us and storm off home only to rejoin us the next day. Tyler was my best friend, short and scrawny but tough as nails, a stark contrast to the tall behemoth he has grown up to be, he always had a smile on his face and was up for an adventure. Then there was me, I was always along for our escapades but never really the leader, being less athletic than some of the others I seemed to shy away from the spotlight.
Being a group of adolescent we engaged in all the usual activities, racing bikes around the neighborhood, playing football, wrestling and what not, but from time to time we felt we needed to escape from our parents and go exploring in the woods adjacent to the neighborhood. It was not a very large expanse of land maybe 10 or 20 acres, but it was big enough for us. On a normal day we would hangout at a fort we had made at a tree that was inside a crater of clay, fighting with sticks and just being boys. We always had a great time and found so much fun in the fact that we thought we weren’t allowed to be there. My brother would always make up stories about how there was some crazy man who owned the property and told us about the time when the man had chased him with a shotgun and even though we all knew it was a lie we acted as if we believed him just to keep the sense of danger alive.
Usually we did not venture very far into the woods and kept close to the highway, but on occasion we would go deeper and sometimes make it all the way to the lake, and this was our destination on one particular Saturday. As usual we gathered at my house, sort of our de facto base of operations, we collected the necessary supplies(juice boxes, cracker, fruit snack, etc.) and were on our way. We hiked our way to the command post at the tree where we stopped to rest and partake in some of the snacks we had brought along. Once we were refreshed we set off into the woods in search of the lake, even though we had been there several times before we had no true path and usually just wandered in the general direction of where we wanted to go. As simple as this may sound it was no easy task, there were many treacherous obstacles along the way.
Our first obstruction was a mass of vines so thick that the only way to get through was to crawl on our bellies like soldiers, the sharp thorns scratching at our exposed arms and necks leaving a sharp stinging sensation, it was tough going but we forced our way through and made it to the other side. We were scratched up and a little bloody, but nothing could deter our mission. Next we came upon a large puddle about eight or nine feet wide with a log laying across it, sure we could have just walked around it but that would be no fun, so one by one we showed off our balancing skills by walking the log while keeping our feet dry. We were almost to our destination but the closer we came the harder it became, since the woods bordered a lakes the ground became more and more saturated with water the closer we came to the lake. We had to be very careful where we stepped, from time to time someone’s foot would sink into the mud and come back without a shoe, this was very unpleasant because after you retrieved your shoe you would have to spend the rest of the day with a wet foot.
Even after all the obstacles we were nearing our destination, we could just see the waterline just starting to appear from between the trees. As we drew closer to the lake we suddenly saw something on the shore, at first we thought is was just a log about ten feet long on the bank, but growing up in Florida we knew better than to assume a log was a log. We froze in our tracks, not sure if we had been scared by a harmless old piece of wood or if we might just be looking at a gator large enough to kill any one of us, slowly we crept forward to determine what it was. When we were about twenty feet from it one of the most frightening moments of my life occurred, the alligator suddenly turned and looked at us with its mouth wide open! That was enough for us and we ran away as fast as we possibly could, through the mud so fast we didn’t have time to sink, past the giant puddle, and somehow through the vines without even crawling on the ground, by the time we reached our tree fort we were bent over and panting for breathe. It took us about thirty or forty minutes and we had just made it back in less than five. After we caught our breathe we began to laugh and kid about the look on each others faces when we saw the gator and of course Michael had to tell us about the time he had seen one twice that size, of course he was with a friend of his none of us had ever heard of before.