When I set down the phone yesterday, I remembered the place where I grew up. Not the house where I lived, but the places I went to escape it. As a kid, I spent as much time as I could somewhere else, exploring the wilds along the fringes of suburbia. Most of that land was overgrown pasture broken by a grid of windbreaks on some sides, drainage ditches and dirt roads on others. A patchwork of weed-choked fields interspersed with palmetto brakes and pine scrub forest, all laced with trails worn by the passage of many small, quick feet.
In that world, the children were the natives, the adults the invading Puritan settlers. We blended into our surroundings and watched their continually encroaching world from behind the borders of our childhoods. We were seen only in flashes, heard only in laughter before disappearing deep into our tribal territories where we ran wild and half naked in the sun. We divided ourselves into clans based on neighborhoods whose boundaries in the margins ebbed and flowed with the tides of our interests, ages, explorations and numbers.
Ours was a bright world bordered by darkness. Bright long and wild grasses, bright, hot sand baking in the bright Florida sun, bright green palmetto fronds, all fenced by double rows of dark, Australian pines that whispered in the wind like Celtic spirits singing a lament in a Grimm Germanic forest, and tannic waters that flowed just above stagnation within moat-like ditches patrolled by the alligators and moccasins we thought would defend our primeval world from mass incursion. In winter we kept to the marches close to home, tunneling through seemingly impenetrable saw grass to hollow out natural shelters from the wind. In the summer, we dug like wild dogs, like angry gnomes carving out chambers with sandy gray walls that we would roof with plywood to disguise. The cool pits served as our refuge from both prying eyes and the blazing sun. Each spring and fall, we felled small trees to bridge the ditches after our parent-settlers had cleared them away. We kept our crossings half submerged to conceal them, knowing the Puritan giants didn't like to wet their feet. Beyond the bridges, we built forts and temporary shelters, migrating from isolation to isolation as our gathering places were discovered.
Alone or small bands, we crossed that bridge and explored the windbreaks farther and farther back to the where an earlier generation had sunk a standpipe to free an artesian well rich with sulfur and other elements that trailed in yellow and white streamers flowing along the dark and rotting detritus that had settled from the trees. The windbreaks ran for miles, broken by twin-rutted roads with grass between their tracks and weeds climbing along their shallow embankments. Deeper to the east were the berms, a perfect backstop to perfect our aim with BB guns or the occasional .22 caliber rifle. Some were topped with scrub oak sheltering high and narrow trails rife with rumors of arrowheads and Indian mounds, signs of our adopted brethren.
In isolated stands of woods between neighborhoods along the now-paved back roads and trails we took to school, we found older, abandoned settlements. Rusted barbed-wire lay coiled between rotting posts that once fenced primitive, three-sided barns that had sheltered horses just a few years before. We would seek refuge beneath their corrugated roofs when they rang with the rain that brought out the faint traces of horseflesh still embedded in their dark and deeply-grained posts. We scouted two-story homesteads with collapsed roofs and open walls, complete with moldy furnishings and housewares, the artifacts of failed colonies that gave us hope that a war against progress could be won. To us they marked a high-tide, the wrack line of an unsuccessful invasion into our wilds at some distant point in history. We didn't realize that the nearby orchard of houses were heavy with fruit ready to drop and spread their seed through our demesne.
I haunted that under-populated territory more than most. I spent my evenings, weekends and summers there, sometimes in the company of friends or rivals but more often alone with a book, a gun and some food so I wouldn't have to return home until dinner or dark. The woods and wilds were my escape from the more dangerous, common world safely hidden from view. The margins became my sanctuary.
Now that sanctuary is gone, built up and paved over. Year by year, the bulldozers have uprooted the trees we used to climb, leveled the ditches we traversed and filled in the abandoned quarry where we used to swim. They have pushed the border beyond the interstate into the last stronghold of original homesteaded pasture being sold off by the parcel, places our feet never ran unless they were prepared to dodge rock-salt or birdshot while being pursued by galloping hooves. Soon, that border will migrate to the river dividing one county from the next until the margins, squeezed from both east and west, shoot up along its banks toward the urban sprawl astride its outlet to the sea.
I don't begrudge these new settlers their homes. Progress marches onward whether I approve or not. New families need new places to live. Our families were once the intruders on someone else's sacred childhood. But when events in my life stir unpleasant memories like decay from the bottom of a still pool, I wish I could escape to the solitude of the margins, and the sanctuary they provided.© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III
