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.

The Longest Mile

After learning to ride on a hand me down bike from my sister, I was eager for a better bike and on Christmas both my sister and I were given banana seated bikes.  We were in heaven and immediately set out to find out all the bikes could do for us.  We found we could ride really fast and stop very fast as well.  We could even ride with no hands which was quite a feat considering the surfaces we rode on were nothing more than shell dirt roads full of pot holes.  The bikes could even jump the small ditches near our house, but the best thing the bikes could do for us was give us the freedom to go to the corner store.

Where we lived was acres and acres of previously farmed rice fields.  We were at the end of a long dirt road that branched off of a county road.  There were very few houses along our road and our family's 10 acre plot of land with its three houses was the largest community.  About a mile away from our house was a corner store that sold cold drinks, cigarettes and candy.  When we got our allowances we always pestered my mother to take us to that store.  When we got our bikes she told us that we could take ourselves there but under one condition.  We always had to have at least one other person with us.  We were never allowed to go alone.  This suited us just fine because although the trip might have only been a mile, it was a long mile.

The first part of the trip was easy because it was through the most populated part of our road.  We would start out from our house and for the equivalent of about two or three acre lengths we would be near the yards of other houses.  Then came an empty field area that stretched for another few acres.  Last of all came the first house on the lane from the county road.  This house had a couple of dogs who loved nothing more than to chase us as we road by.  All the way to the approach of that house we had to steel ourselves for the gauntlet of their barking attack.  If we road past quickly enough we could outrun them, but it was always nerve racking.  Once we were past them though there were several more acres, each more wild and overgrown as we came closer to the county road.  Not only were the fields more weed strewn, but the ditches on either side of the road began to gradually steepen leaving the road seeming a white oasis in their darkened shadows.  This lead steadily to the county road.  We would always try to stay near the center of the road through this point.

Along the near side of the county road was a very deep drainage ditch.  It had steep walls and was about twelve feet deep at its lowest point.  Because the fields were no longer used to grow rice, the ditch was usually allowed to become quite overgrown along its steep walls.  You might think that would make it look a little less frightening, but in reality it gave it a wild unkempt look that multiplied its fear factor exponentially.  At the crossing point for our road onto the county road there were huge culverts whose diameters spanned the width and height of the ditch.  These areas were always clear of brush affording a look down, way down, to the water that was always at the bottom of the ditch, even in the driest weather.

The ditch water was teeming with a small type of tropical fish related to sword fish.  The rice farmers had used these fish in their fields to cut down on mosquitoes and every time a field flooded or when they drained the fields of water these fish would be flushed into the large drainage ditch.  Since the water supply was constant the areas immediately adjacent to the ditch was full of wildlife.  It is a testament to the fearsomeness of these ditches that I and my cousins did not choose to go near them.  There might be turtles and interesting fish and crawdads and some of the largest dewberry's growing on the ditch banks, but we knew there were also snapping turtles, sucking mud and water moccasins.

Water moccasin doing its thing

Water moccasins were the most frightening creature in our little part of the world.  We seldom ever saw one, but we suspected almost every snake of being one.  Cottonmouths, as we also called them were a venomous snake almost always dark black in color and up to about three feet long.  They were not the only venomous snake around and we shared our acreage with copperheads and rattlesnakes as well.  We saw copperheads all the time, but they were always a very small snake.  We never saw nor heard a rattlesnake in any of our ventures.  Water moccasins were big, they were relatively abundant and since several other even more prevalent water snakes looked a lot like them we were always afraid of running into one.  They were indeed something for us to be very cautious about, but we gave them near mythical abilities in our childhood lore.  These were the smart snakes.  Water moccasins would chase you.  They would hide in wait for you if they heard you coming.  If they bit you they would never let go.   This last one we borrowed from the folklore about snapping turtles, which we also were afraid of, but not as much as the dreaded Cottonmouth.

It is no wonder that we stayed to the center of our road the closer we got to the county road.  Not only were the ditches approaching the 'big ditch' deeper and wilder as we progressed but the weeds would tower twelve or more feet in the adjacent fields.  The distance from the last house on our road was a quarter of a mile of  nothing but overgrown fields, the ditches and a silence broken only by the insects and our voices.

At the end of our road, before we traversed onto the county road we always paused and looked to see if there were any cars coming.  Cars traveled fast on this road but it was usually empty.  We were not as worried about the cars as much as we didn't want to be choked by the thick cloud of dust they would kick up on the shell dirt pavement of the road.  The weeds along the edges of the road always looked like they had been whitewashed from the billowing dust.  This did nothing to make the trip less intimidating.

Once we had checked to make sure the coast was clear we road out onto the road to the far side, as far from the big ditch as possible.  It was now serious riding time and we did not wait for the slowpokes.  We road as fast as we could and would always arrive breathless at the county roads juncture with the two lane highway.

Here was a point we had to be cautious for fear of traffic because this road was more traveled and cars would whiz past.  But it was a short crossing and there was always ample time between cars.  Once we crossed this last obstacle were were in the large parking lot of the corner store.  It was a simple affair not any bigger than a trailer house, but it was always a welcome relief to get there.  They had an outdoor drink holder filled with ice and cold bottled drinks.  You had to sink your arm into the ice to grab your drink which would always chill you to the bone no matter how hot the weather.  I always chose a Big Red because I was head over heels crazy about cherries and since it was red I could pretend it had something to do with cherries.

Aside from the cold drink we always got candy as well.  The candy rack was always filled with an amazing assortment.  Unfortunately we were never as flush with cash as we wanted to be.  Usually we had to settle for one candy bar if we got a drink or two if we got just candy.  I always took a long time making my selection.  Since the price per candy bar was the same I almost always chose the largest candy bar which was invariably the Three Muskateers bar.  If I was really flush with funds I would choose Hot Tamales as well.

One we made our selections it was time for the trip back home.  This was always complicated because of our candy and soft drink loot.  On the way back home we were more daring probably because we were fueled with sugar.  We would sometimes ride near the big ditch and even try to look over the weeds into the water to see what interesting creatures we could spy.  If a car came through when we were near the big ditch side we always stopped to let the car pass by for fear its nearness would somehow push us over the edge.

Thus our trips went usually at least two or three times a month during the summers.  Each time we went would be nearly an exact copy of the last time with the exception of one incident.

It started off the same but for some reason instead of just two or three of us, me, my sister, my oldest cousin, my two younger cousins and also a boy from down our road, Vince made the trip.  This larger group took up much more space down the center of the road at first, but as we approached our roads intersection at the county road we were strung out.  My two littlest cousins were the furthest back and my sister made us all wait for them before we ventured onto the county road.  We all had a chance to look down past the culvert and into the water pooled below.  Vince was closest to the edge and I was right next to him with Bobby my oldest cousin right next to me.  My sister was drunk with power being the oldest and was trying to boss us around while we waited.  "Don't get too close to the edge," she barked out, using her superior to everyone voice, "You don't want to fall in."  This made Vince, a red headed trouble maker, move ever closer to the edge.  "I'm not afraid," he bragged.  He was, but he also was not about to be bossed around by my sister.

Suddenly we became aware of an approaching car on the county road.  It wasn't just traveling that road, but also was going to turn onto our road.  This happened to coincide with the arrival of my two youngest cousins.  This all put my sister into a whirlwind of authority driven panic.  "Get to the side of the road!" she shouted and nudged my bike with her own.  As she moved into me, my bike nudged into Vince which had a catastrophic effect.  I watched as he slowly went over the edge of the road and into the ditch below.  I managed to keep myself from going over and saw Vince sprawled out on the bank below us with him on one side of the water and his bike on the other side.

Before any of us could even react, Vince sprung up from the muddy bank, grabbed his bike and somehow vaulted his way up the side of the ditch and back down the road from which we came.  He was on his bike and pedaling like mad.  I took off after him but even though I was bigger I couldn't keep up with him.  He disappeared into the cloud of dust the recently passed car was leaving in its wake.  I could hear the calls of Bobby and my sister behind me but I kept pedaling even though I couldn't catch up with Vince.

When we got to his yard his bike was in the front yard but Vince was already in his house.  We ran up to his back door and knocked, calling for Vince.  His mother came to the door and told us that Vince didn't want to come out right now and we should wait for him until later.  We waited around his yard for a while and then finally went back to our yards.  About an hour later Vince came back outside.  We rushed over to him.  "Are you alright?" I asked him, "I thought you were a gonner!"  He said, "I nearly was done for that's for sure," he paused to sit down and we crowded around him.  He continued, "When I fell into that ditch I landed just an inch from a water moccasin.  It reared back to bite me and I ran it over with my bike."

"You really road away fast," Bobby mentioned, "Were you scared?"  Vince stood up.  "No way was I scared," he said, "I road away fast because I thought I had been bitten and I wanted to get home before the venom had a chance to kill me."

Now there were several things about Vince's story that didn't settle with me.  First of all, Vince was a bigger fabricator of stories than even I was, which was quite a hard thing considering how loosely I valued the absolute truth.  Second, my vantage point gave me a perfect view of his position and if the snake had been an inch from Vince there was no way he could have run it over with his bike, which was on the opposite side of the ditch.  Third, being the daughter of my snake fearing mother, I knew the last thing you wanted to do was move about very quickly if you think you had been snake bitten.

Even with my suspicions I held my tongue.  I figured as long as the topic didn't turn to how he had fallen in the ditch then I wasn't going to point out the obvious fabrication.  Even though my bike had bumped his by accident, Vince had a mean streak and would exact revenge on me if he thought I had played a part in the fall.  Luckily he just basked in the 'nearly snake bitten' role he had created.

Later on after Vince had gone home, Bobby asked me, "Do you think a water moccasin nearly got Vince?"  "No way," I said, "He is just making that up."  "Yeah," Bobby said, "I didn't see any snake."  We laughed.  "Do you want to go to the store?" I asked.  "Sure!" he said.  And we headed back down the longest mile again.