Chapter 29
See that river I’ve been washed in
See that mountain I have crossed
See that big blue sky, like a bird I did fly
Not all who wander are lost
“Not All Who Wander Are Lost”
I come from a place where there are more tomorrows than yesterdays and where the road never ends, even when the blacktop does. I come from a place where friendship is not earned or deserved, it just is, and where a year of my life is still sealed away, fresh and unadulterated by all that came after it. Some people have endured a cursed childhood, rife with dysfunction and trauma. I am fully aware of the unfortunate turns and cruel realities that plague the lives of some children, but thankfully, that kind of pain is foreign to my soul. Violence, abuse, horrific loss, and loneliness were maladies spared from us on Starmount in 1977 and spared from me for the remainder of my childhood.
Neverland, as described by J.M. Barrie in his books and plays, was the fictional, ageless domain of Peter Pan, Tinker Bell, and the Lost Boys. You couldn’t walk, drive, or swim to Neverland. That magical place was born of a child’s imagination and was only accessible to children who could dream their way into it. J.M. Barrie told us that you had to fly there, “Always at the time of sunrise,” near “the Stars of the Milky way,” and following “The second star to the right and straight on till morning.”
Neverland was a world built on dreams and possibilities, reachable only in the mind of a child. Adventure and exhilaration were the rules of the day, not the exception. Time, measured only by the clock in a crocodile’s mouth, stood still. The air, a cross between the Fountain of Youth and an opium den, kept some perpetually young and others, like the Lost Boys, determined to never to grow up, though they eventually did. If the story and its fabled island did not date back to 1911, you could easily substitute Neverland with Starmount. The parallels seem uncanny, at least to me.
Starmount was inhabited first by children and then by nameless adults, known only as the fathers and mothers of the children. There were places in our world of great beauty, mystical fancy, and present danger. But unlike Neverland, these places were not fictional. The swamps were indeed crawling with snakes of exotic colors and ill will, voracious blood-sucking mosquitoes, alligators, and prehistoric-looking snapping turtles, and we walked among them all with unrivaled aplomb.
The dark woods, Death Valley, the red clay Whoopiedoos, and Alligator Pond were real places, and we owned them all. We navigated their perils, absorbed their energy, and expelled their spirit in fits of great laughter and bravado befitting the kings that we were.
During the time I spent on Starmount, I never wished to be older. I didn’t want to be a grown-up or even a teenager. At ten years old, I saw the goal of merely growing older to be shortsighted and superficial. The boys and I wished for accomplishments, more impressive than the simple passing of time.
We lived for moments of grandiosity that, to us, felt realistic and laudable, even if no one else recognized them as such. We daydreamed of having wings so we could fly and found those wings among handmade capes, handfuls of dead buzzard feathers, and leaps of faith from low-hanging limbs and, once, even from the rooftop of a two-story, half-constructed house at the end of the street. As far as flying went, we were more like astronauts than the Wright Brothers, measuring flight by the vertical distance traveled, rather than the horizontal.
We spoke the language of alien beings using creative combinations of consonants and vowels, cereal-box decoder rings, and walkie-talkies attached to chimney-mounted VHF antennas covered with twisted strands of aluminum foil.
Above all, we endeavored to remain forever young, and, luckily, staying young seemed to be the low-hanging fruit of accomplishment back then. All we had to do was rebuild the raft that sank in the middle of the pond the day before or nail another half-rotten board above the one we nearly killed ourselves on the last time we climbed high atop that lanky loblolly pine. The easiest way to stay forever young was to never let a day go by without the companionship of friends, the soundtrack of an out-of-tune song sung in a prepubescent pitch, and the promise of one more everything.
One more everything seems to be the essence of what it means to be young. The thought of today being the best day ever, with the small exception of tomorrow, was a way of life on Starmount. There would always be bigger fish to catch, taller trees to climb, and undiscovered corners of territory to explore. We had all the time in the world, especially during the long daylight summer months, but time moved just fast enough to discourage the rooting of real regrets. On Starmount, we mastered “moving on” as both a practical art and a life philosophy.
We were always in a hurry, rushing to do what adults may have seen as wasting time; spending the entire day building a fort, chasing random shadows through the woods, and blowing Bazooka bubbles large enough to where they just might lift us off the ground. And no matter what lessons we had learned the hard way the day before, we were never in a mood to look backward. Our personal Utopia demanded an innate sense of the now. Knowledge of the previous hour disappeared into some amnesia-like black hole, and the hour ahead was faintly clouded by an attention-deficit fog.
Time was only one of the constructs that defined our real-meets-make-believe world. Friendship and the idea of having a family outside of your biological one was new and exciting. Those friendships were valuable not only because they filled our days with laughter, fun, and purpose, but because they were of our own making. We founded those friendships, which meant we could lose them, so we protected them with a fervor previously reserved for protecting ourselves. Friendship, companionship, and shared journey were our best antidotes to selfishness, and to the loneliness it inevitably creates.
Arguments were not rare among us, and tempers occasionally flared, but in the purest fashion possible, we accepted each other on Starmount. I’m sure that we remained blissfully unaware that we had transcended entirely, the human frailties of judgment and jealousy. Just as I am sure that we had remained equally oblivious to eating the occasional June bug that had crawled next to a bumpy peanut on a Baby Ruth bar we were inhaling or the hundreds of ants attacking our shoes after we had peed on their anthill. Still, because of that particular time and place, at least for that one year, we had indeed found a perfect pocket of tolerance and doubtless trust between us. Looking back, we seemed to confound the adult understanding of the ranges of emotions kids should be able to feel and communicate at such a young age.
Young children are supposed to be scared of their own shadows, right? At least until they have made the kind of adult-like mistakes that take the mystery out of failure and adversity. But the Sons of Starmount did not frighten easily. Fear was an emotion that certainly existed in our extraordinary space, but in an unconventional way. We regularly communed with monsters and faced dangers both real and imagined, and as a result, we experienced highs worthy of any era of our lives. Nineteen seventy-seven was the first time in my life I remember being exhilarated by fear. Fear drew us in like a chocolate-covered magnet, constantly pulling at us. We ran toward it, even if it meant running the opposite direction once we got there.
We certainly didn’t know what adrenaline was back then, but we knew what it felt like in our bodies. It was like an upset stomach, but in a good way, or the dizziness that came with spinning around in circles until you were drunker than you would ever be at any future college kegger. And we tasted it, bitter in our mouths, like a candy bar going bad, but it was still candy.
I think we felt the most intense adrenaline highs when our greatest fears went unrealized, like peeing on an electric fence, expecting the world to end, but not actually having to endure the infamous insult. It turns out the old boat battery that fed the wire had lost most of its charge. I felt a similar thrill the first time I held a baby rattlesnake, its head pinched safely between my little forefinger and thumb, asking the question, “What do I do with it now?” and realizing that none of my friends had a decent answer. They didn’t have good answers, but that didn’t stop them from offering their best advice: “Kiss it,” “Put it around your neck,” and my favorite, “Put it in your pocket, let’s take it home.”
The chemical rush that accompanied both euphoria and relief became associated early on with the idea of getting away with something. The concept of a close call became synonymous with what it felt like to be alive. We were certainly afraid of specific threats: snakebites, alligators chasing us, and school on Monday mornings all scared the crap out of us, sometimes literally. But we were never afraid of being afraid. Fear, either as an emotion or a circumstance, always seemed a bearable weight and a worthy trade-off when compared with boredom and convention.
Starmount would continue to drive my childish imagination, beg my risk-taking, and ultimately obfuscate any real attempt to age out of being a Lost Boy.
I have fortunately eluded most of the trappings of a “normal,” boring grown-up life, but I have not been exempt from its inevitable unkindnesses and disfavors. I have enjoyed the highs of a passionate love affair and marriage, only to endure the lows of its end. But the saddest loss and most significant blow to my eternal sense of youth, was losing my father long before I was ready. To tell you the truth, he could have outlived me and losing him would still have come long before I was ready. The death of a parent is by far the most alarming signal that you are leaving your childhood behind, but it often comes after ignoring years of other sentinel markers. There are signs of maturation I have chosen to ignore; paying bills, arriving on time, delaying gratification, and, the one that still causes me to roll my eyes, cataloging your ills and aches.
There are plenty of other attributes of maturity that my friends say I am still quite successful at ignoring. Those that come to mind are my insistence on holding the bumper of my old red pick-up truck on with bungee cords rather than buying a new bumper; dying my beard a color it has never been rather than going with the Santa Claus look that is naturally overtaking it; and even careening down snowy Tennessee hills in my kayak. Sometimes when they talk about these idiosyncrasies of mine, I think they are honestly doing so out of respect, like a compliment. As for the other times, well, I am still deaf by design.
I have never been immune to great disappointment or mistakes, both personal and professional. I have uttered words that were incredibly ill-conceived. I have suffered the self-inflicted wounds of stupidity and arrogance. And I remain a stranger, or at least a distant relative, of sound financial judgment, leaving me perched constantly on the precipice of bankruptcy. Still, and maybe even to a fault, I rebound year after year with an optimism disproportionate to reality and with high-flying dreams ungrounded by facts or careful consideration. I suppose that if one has to endure the consequences of unregulated optimism, one should at least be proud of and take some enjoyment in its occasional offerings. I have always been, and will continue to be, the Lewis and Clark of my backyard and the John Glenn of the space beyond it.
At ten, one already possesses all the qualities of being a good person, unless, I suppose, you’re just a bad seed. The trick to actually becoming a good person later in life seems to lie in remembering that those qualities you embodied at ten are still important and worth possessing.
When I look at people my age now, I don’t see myself in them. They look old to me, like parents do, teachers do, or bosses do. If it weren’t for the occasional glimpse in the mirror or unfortunate photograph showing me that I have more stomach than I have hair, I would swear that I am still the same carrot-topped wonder boy I was on Starmount. The kid who was fast on his feet and starstruck by the unexplored world that lay before him. I have neither looked nor longed for my childhood, because I never felt like I lost it or gave it up.
I have questioned why I am the way I am many times throughout my adult years. I’ve questioned it while sitting in a jail cell on the beach in Ocean City, Maryland after singing Don McLean’s “American Pie” with about a hundred other drunks when a bit of a brawl broke out. The money in my guitar case went to paying off a hefty fine. I have questioned why I am the way I am, soaking wet for two days trying to get a canoe unwrapped from a boulder at the bottom of a wild-river rapid 125 miles out in the Canadian wilderness. I have questioned it while swiping five thousand dollars’ worth of charges on my nearly maxed-out Visa card, trying to save my ailing dog’s life. I have questioned it after both fighting tooth and nail to hold onto things I’ve hated and letting go all too easily of things I’ve dearly loved. I have questioned it, and questioned it, and questioned it. And I have never found an answer. Fortunately, in this book, I believe the answer has finally found me.
The expectation that everything will work out in the end is a spiritual muscle I first learned to exercise when I was ten. My love of the wilderness, music, loyal friendship, fierce independence, and a habit of making big mistakes are all hallmarks of my adulthood, but I can finally point to every moment in my childhood that has influenced that man I’ve become. All those moments, like the confluence of great rivers, converge at Starmount.
Boldly sinking an ill-conceived raft in the middle of Alligator Pond among hungry gators and ill-tempered snakes did more to keep my sense of adventure afloat than the thousands of risks I have taken since.
I have kayaked most of the wild mountain rivers of Tennessee and glided canoes over beaver flowages in the boreal forests of the Canadian Shield. All of these adult-sized expeditions were borne on the backs of ten-year-old, dimple-cheeked pirates piloting dry-rotted inner tubes down a rain-swollen drainage ditch while smoking Tootsie Roll cigars and laughing like jackasses.
I have climbed a lava-spewing volcano in southern Chile and have ascended the frozen Zugspitze Peak of the Wetterstein Mountains in Germany. Though neither was on the scale of Mt. Everest, they were both serious climbs with significant risks. I was able to crest those summits without a mentionable fear of falling because I had once learned to shimmy up the long trunks and over the spindly branches of the towering loblolly pines back in the dark woods around Starmount.
I have sought a life in music and the creative arts, trying to make palatable the constant, bitter flavor of rejection, by washing it down with the all-too-infrequent sweet taste of success. I have written songs for famous singers and even-more-talented, unheralded artists. I have sung songs for audiences large and small, including strangers on several continents, family, friends, lovers, publishers, shysters, and mostly, just for myself. I have done these things for money, acceptance, food, a warm bed, and for the promise of things not yet delivered.
I now know that I have created music to recapture the feelings I experienced singing along to the soundtrack of 1977. Whatever success I have enjoyed as a professional songwriter will always pale in comparison to the feelings I had while riding down Panhandle roads in the greatest of all jukeboxes, The Eight-Track with an Engine in Back.
I used to think that my ease in finding and keeping friends was exclusively due to the fact that I was an only child, always having to put forth the kind of extra effort not expected of those with siblings. It’s true that being an only child enabled the initial extrovert in me, but Starmount took that natural inclination and exploded it onto a Jackson Pollack-esque canvas that still bears my most honest likeness. I am often described by the statement, “That Mark, he’s not real subtle, is he?” I suppose I would be offended by the notion if I weren’t busy reveling in it.
Though I have arguably attempted it here, there is no overstating the epic nature of my time on Starmount. The effect it had in forming a near-perfect template for relationship-building has endured for a lifetime. No matter what schemes I get into, whether harebrained or brilliant, I still walk in the comforting shadow of friends and feel honored that they are still willing to walk in mine.
There is no moment more fulfilling to me than that of eyeing a ridiculous challenge and then turning to see my favorite look on a loyal friend’s face. It’s the “What the hell, let’s go for it!” look. It was a familiar sight during my time on Starmount, and thankfully, that experience has remained the status quo in the decades since.
I still chance wilderness waters, even nearly drowning once in a kayak designed for a leprechaun rather than for a man of more, let’s just say, substantial size. I continue to navigate lost trails through dark woods, like the time a girlfriend and I went out for a day hike only to wind up directionally challenged for four days in the mountains of North Carolina. At the time, I had thought it a brilliant idea to introduce her to my inner self through a brief jaunt down unmarked wilderness trails. Add that to the growing list of my not-so-great ideas.
My lifelong Scottish complexion, once protected from a lobster-red sunburn by youthful freckles and thick hair, now burns and peels at the slightest hint of direct sunlight. Despite that, the feeling of the uninterrupted sun on my face while running through a shadeless field is still twice as intoxicating as the whiskey I’m drinking at this moment, describing the same.
It is true that for most of my life’s challenges, be it finding love or holding on to it, making money or holding on to it, or acquiring position and holding on to it, I have forgone the logical route in exchange for one good, clean shot at the sensational. My record of those accomplishments on paper, as evidenced by my bank account, my publishing debt, and my divorce decree, looks remarkably unimpressive. But if Starmount taught me anything, it taught me not to measure happiness from the objective side of success or failure. Doing so with such a sterile scorecard misses the point of a successful life. The truest measurement can only be taken from the perspective of visceral enjoyment and spiritual fulfillment. I have always known that life is about the love of the ride and the thrill of doing it all over again tomorrow. I have finally gotten pretty good at going with that flow, so it would seem a waste to change horses in the middle of that stream now.
I wonder if there’s a portal leading back to Starmount 1977, like a magic storm drain or tire swing time machine. Given the chance, I’d walk through that dark drainage tunnel, ankle-deep in the kind of rusty rainwater and green slime that only a young boy could appreciate, and then slosh ever forward, back to the very beginning. I’d sit snuggly inside the old rubber tire swing with my arms wrapped tightly around its white walls. Then I’d bend and straighten my legs until the momentum carried my body over the top of the live oak branch, softly depositing me upon the sweet grass of my Halcyon days. Luckily, I don’t have to rely on finding such improbable gateways.
Whenever I feel the urge to take off my shoes and walk through the green, knee-high grass of a summer field, wade into wild waters, or take some serendipitous flight of dreams, I find myself young, full of piss and vinegar, and once again standing in the middle of Starmount.
The beauty of the Neverland Effect is that once it has touched your life, it is no longer limited by time or place. It travels with you, like a one-in-a-million passport, stamped with visas from every corner of the world, and into the next one. And it never expires. In Neverland, clocks tick without the passage of time. Although my physical body has not followed suit, I have chosen to live my entire life in a state of perpetual childhood. And I have no desire to change that now.
Science tells us that the universe is long past its heyday for creating moons and stars, with no new celestial births upon the horizon. I suppose even the cosmos gets tired at some point. That’s okay with me though, because I don’t need to stare upward for starry-eyed inspiration or to free myself from some earthbound convention.
The sun has gone down, I have finished my dinner, cleared the table, taken my bath, and completed all my homework. Still, I am not done with my day yet. I’m not tired, and I’m not ready to go to bed. For I am a ten-year-old boy, one of the Sons of Starmount, still reaching down to touch the sky.
the end...doesn’t exist