Boyhood, Airborne

Here’s a nice story for a Friday afternoon. Enjoy:

We’re 14 years old–me, Kevin, and Eric. The August day is hot, probably 85 degrees, the air almost tropical. Cicadas hum away rhythmically. We wear polo shirts and shorts and baseball caps and Keds sneakers. As we go deeper into the woods, we watch our step on the tangled brush underfoot. Kevin leads us on. Only he knows where we’re going, and why, and when we’ll get there.

As parks went, Dunkerhook Park had all the usual amenities — swings and seesaws and slides, picnic tables and benches, a gravel parking lot. But it also had a section where we had never ventured before — the woods beyond, with the stream curling alongside the path, and the secret Kevin had promised to share with us.

You never knew with Kevin. He was always kidding around, making wisecracks, putting you on. He would tap your right shoulder from behind you, even though he would be over on your left, and make you look right, with no one there. Or he would point to your belly button asking what might be wrong with it, and as you looked down, flick his index finger on your nose. He always got the better of the taller, beefier, Eric, who remained good-natured and easygoing, every insult rolling off his back, a trusty sidekick whom he more or less led around by the nose. Now, without our having any reason to trust Kevin in the least, we had entered these woods and left ourselves entirely in his hands.

Within minutes we’re about half a mile into Dunkerhook Park. We hear no sounds except those of sparrows warbling and chipmunks scurrying through the leaves and the ever-present stream gurgling alongside us, below the banks.It’s even hotter now, over 90 degrees, the glare from the sun turning the sky into a white haze. No whisper of a breeze comes along to stir the leaves in the trees. Our shorts and shirts stick to our skin. As the cicadas buzz louder, we move ever-slower, as if trudging through molasses. We feel far away from everyone and everything, our homes, our rooms, our parents, our schools, our other friends, out of sight and beyond earshot.

We go through spells of friendship, me, Kevin, and Eric. We like to kid around and hold burping contests and try to light farts. More seriously, we play basketball and wonder about girls. We’re close for a while, then less close, even no longer particularly close at all, but then we come back together, close all over again, if never quite the very best of friends then friends just the same. And now our on-again-off-again kind of friendship is taking a new turn. Now Kevin the master mischief maker is luring us ever-farther into this foreign frontier, all on the pretext that Eric and I will find the experience immensely entertaining.

Maybe Kevin is right. Maybe whatever he’s brought us here to show us will actually be the genuine article — a cave with some Indian drawings, or an abandoned 1956 Chevy Impala with the chrome tail fins all rusted out, or three cute girls our age or older, or a dead bum who wound up wasted on cheap whiskey.

“There,” Kevin says. “There it is.”

“Where?” Eric asks.”Where is it?”

“Right there,”Kevin says, pointing emphatically straight ahead.

To our left, about 20 feet away, we see it. The stream that ran parallel to the trail we took has deepened and widened, the banks steeper here, and transformed itself into a makeshift pool, still and lakelike. There it is, all right. A swimming hole is better than any of the other scenarios I imagined, miles better than a cave or some old car or a dead body or even three cute girls our age or older. No contest.

Our ringleader has come through, erasing our worst suspicions.

Just then, though, the swimming hole goes itself one better. A tall sycamore that juts out over the water from the bank on the other side, its trunk cantilevered at a 45-degree angle, has a rope dangling from it. The rope hangs long and thick from the lowest, sturdiest branch, about 10 feet off the ground, with a knot at the end, a knot evidently designed to serve as a handle. Some venturesome early pioneers to this spot, maybe other 14-year-olds, had rigged the rope to the branch just so, sensing the possibilities…

Amazing how much this has changed these days. These same boys would probably be playing video games and taking pills to control their behavior nowadays.

POSTED BY TONY RAFETTO