The Lay of the Land

Childhood happiness may originate from many sources such as happy parents, economic stability or childhood friends, but I think sometimes we might overlook how location contributes to happiness.

For me, my first world was uncomplicated, explorable by foot and possessed of mysteries that both peaked my curiosity and defied my understanding.  I had the tremendous luck of growing up in a rural environment both cut off from the bedlam of an urban site and yet accessible to the conveniences of an urban world.  It was isolation without deprivation.  It was an outback with flush toilets.  It was my childhood home.

The site started as nothing more remarkable than 10 acres of converted rice field near the small town of Manville, Texas.  If there were one word that could describe the most significant characteristic of the land it would be flat.  There was not a hill, nor a hummock, nor rise in that land that was not made by man.  In fact, due to its original use as rice fields our land was not only flat, but somewhat sub-flat, as in a deeper sort of flatness that was great for holding vast acres of water for rice farming, but not as desirable for holding houses and other things you did not want submerged.  To combat its tendency to submerge there were deep abundant ditches to carry the water away from the land and a large bayou in the back of the property to carry the water further away.

Why this parcel of land appealed to my grandfather is lost to time.  I suspect that it was a combination of low cost and location that made this his hearts desire.  I do know that he had a strong wish+ to have a garden which must have come out of some remnant of his childhood from his Louisiana upbringing.  I suppose that due to its previous history as rice field he felt it was 'proven' as farmland.  To look at the dark rich soil one might get the impression it was very fertile, unless one also understood the term 'gumbo soil'.  Gumbo soil becomes very sticky mud when it gets wet.  It also cracks like baked clay when it dries out.  Perhaps he was misled or perhaps he was so keen to get his acreage that he overlooked the obvious.  Whatever the reason, he purchase his ten acres and built a large single story house there for himself, my grandmother and their youngest daughter.  Then he somehow convinced my aunt and her husband and my mother and father to move out there and build houses on the acres he gave to them.  

To reach the land one would have to travel south from the large city of Houston through a series of highways then county roads and then crossroads that really didn't have a name, just a route number for the postal carriers to find us.  Our plot of land was almost a mile back from the county road down a roadway topped with shell.  From this shell/dirt road we had our own roadway that traveled the center of the ten acres and ended at the driveway to my grandparents house.  My aunts house and our house sat across this road from one another one acre back from the shell/dirt road.  My grandparents house was on the same side of land as our house and was in the middle of the third acre from the road.  There were two more acres between my grandparents house and the bayou that bordered the plot.

This was the first map of the world I ever learned.  There were no fences only buildings and the road to mark the boundaries of things.  Our land was mowed routinely and the 'wild acres' were overgrown with weeds, which was another boundary.  Ten acres by a world standard is just a blip, but to a very young child it is very large.  I can still recall with fondness the journeys of my mother, my sister and I as we crossed the land between our house to the acre behind my grandparents house in order to visit my grandfather's garden.  It seemed a long way to my four year old mind and it was filled with many interesting sights between the weeds and the bugs and other fascinating features.  So this first world was not something I could completely explore myself until I got a little older.  My life was easily contained within it boundaries.

Then my cousin came along and by the time I was seven he was old enough to be running around with me and having a companion really broadens your horizons.  We very quickly went to exploring the entirety of our ten acres, and began to flirt with the boundaries.  Between my fourth and fifth year my grandfather had passed away and the two acres he had used as his garden had been allowed to overgrow.  The tractor that had been used to keep the acreage mowed had broken down and when I was seven it had been more than a year since the back two acres had been mowed.

I had been back to this part of our land with my sister and father and on that trip my father had chosen to bring a rifle with us.  My sister and I did not find it remarkable our father had the gun with him since target practice was something we all were familiar with, but on reflection now, I realize he was probably concerned about encountering snakes.  There was good reason for this because being close to the bayou, this back acreage was usually a bit wet and pretty much crawling with snakes.  We saw several snakes in the verges of a ditch that was against the banked walls of the bayou itself as well as quite a few rippling the areas of free water we could glimpse between the branches of brushy overgrowth.  Although we didn't have any actual snake 'encounters' that trip, it unnerved my father enough for him to forbid us going back to this area alone.

I am pretty sure when he said we were not to go alone, he actually meant 'don't go without me', but his failure to say exactly that left a rather large loophole which I exploited on many occasion.  I did not go 'alone', I took my younger cousin.  The two of us would first have to steel ourselves for the upcoming journey and also we would have to escape the notice of my older sister (she would rat us out) and his younger sisters (they would not be able to keep up and would spill the beans later) but since the two of us were almost always together and ranging about in various directions any observers would lose interest in us and then we would set off.

The back acreage terrain was less forgiving than the other acres and for this and this alone I would wear shoes.  If anyone was ever wondering what I was up to, they could have figured it out just by noticing whether I was barefoot.  If I was wearing shoes it was serious.

We usually would have to start off against the north corner of the property because this was the least viewable area from any of the houses.  This was unfortunately not the best route to where we wanted to end up because it was lower than other parts of the land and if not actually water filled, it would often be thick with sucking mud.  However, since the weeds often towered five or more feet, we could cut back across the field to the drier center area and make our way back.

It is rather startling what a thin veneer civilization places on a land.  Where our acreage was kept up and the weeds diminished by mowing, there were all manner of insects and creatures we were used to seeing.  Once we were just a couple of yards deep into the un-mowed areas things changed quickly.  Unseen things would dart away from us, insect sounds would intensify and we would see much larger versions of insects than in the 'civil' areas.  This more primal world was lurking just a few feet from where we normally played. 

By the time my cousin and I had made our way back to the ramped earth between our land and the bayou, we had talked ourselves into a nervous state.  As the sounds of the insects and wildlife intensified our own voices softened until we were just whispering.  We did not do this consciously, but rather just as a reaction to the world now around us.  If we were quiet, perhaps the wild things would not notice us.  We could not get all the way to the earthen walls of the bayou because between that and our land was a rather large ditch that was overgrown with weeds and trees.  It was filled with scummy water and seethed with life.  There was sort of a calm in the midst of this for us as the sounds of nature were abundant we stopped our talking.  We paced slowly and carefully along the water's edge with our eyes darting to take in all of the sites.

As we walked along this chaotic bank we were soothed by the constant undulation of the wildlife fleeing our approach as frogs and snakes and turtles submerged themselves away from us.  It was peaceful and mysterious this wild world we were viewing.  Then one thing stopped us in our tracks.  Up ahead of us a tree was leaning from the bayou bank toward our land.  Its branches drooped toward the water and stretched across one limb was the thick body of a brown snake with a pale cream belly.  We could see the tail and a couple of links of the body wound around the branch near the tree on the far side of the ditch.  The length of the snake dipped low off of this branch and just brushed the surface of the water.  The head of the snake was lost in the green top of this branch some seven feet away from the trunk.  On our side of the ditch.  Not three feet away from where we stood.  The snakes body undulated in a slow sinuous slide as it moved further onto our shore. Closer to us.

They say that our actions often precede our thoughts and this was surely the case for my cousin and I as we turned as one creature and began to run madly away from the bayou, with stifled screams as we tore blindly through the weeds.  We did not stop our mad flight until we were all the way through the weedy acres and back into the safety of civilization where a mowers blades had marked the limits of the human world.  It was here we caught our breath and our minds caught up with us and we were able to make up stories to fit in with our actions.  We were able to reclaim ourselves and banish the wild back to where it belonged, away from us.

I am pretty sure that this thrill seeking behavior is common in children and supports the entire industry of amusement parks when civilization has pushed the wild to far corners of the earth.  We did not need a roller coaster to experience terror when our local world held it in abundance.  However, like an amusement park, the terror must be greater than the actual danger.  There is nothing fun about actually hurtling off a ramp into certain death, but there is fun in pretending you are riding to your doom and then being whisked back to safety at the last minute.  The roller coaster builders have taken this to a refined art where hopefully all the actual danger has been engineered away.  As children of the rice fields we had to use caution because our world was a risky place and there were no engineers to make it actually safe for us. To name just one thing that was dangerous in our world was the fact that the place was crawling with snakes.  You get it wrong with a water moccasin and this is a life altering event to say the least.

We dealt with this at first by reacting as if every snake was a water moccasin.  However, soon it became obvious that all snakes were not the same.  We learned what a water moccasin actually looked like and this knowledge took the edge off of most encounters.  A search through the encyclopedia did let us know that there were other poisonous snakes we could be afraid of and that charged us up for a while but knowledge is an expansive thing.  We soon knew within a matter of seconds whether a snake had a poisonous body (triangle shaped head) or a poisonous color (red and yellow kill a fellow) but much of the time there was still room for doubt.  Water moccasins could be brown or black and most of the non-poisonous snakes were either brown or black. 

We did scare ourselves a number of times traveling to the 'back acres', but each venture was less thrilling than the time before and none as brilliantly terrifying as that first encounter. Familiarity and knowledge made the frightening ordinary and the mysterious knowable.  This comfort allowed us further exploration of our boundaries and our world became bigger.

I am thankful that my world started out where it did.  It was large enough to seem limitless at first and thrilling enough to teach me proper respect but it was also small enough for me to physically interact with, wild enough for me to be intimidated by and safe enough for me to explore.  I was truly happy there and I learned to seek out experiences and have fun in simple ways.  It was an often damp, insect swarming, muddy, snake strewn bit of flat land and it was my first piece of heaven.