Chapter 2
To me, the world made perfect sense
At least the parts inside the fence
But now speaking in my own defense
I always wanted something more
“Searchin’”
By the time I moved from Morgantown, West Virginia, to Tallahassee, Florida, a love of the outdoors had already seeped into my soul. The smell of the sweet rhododendron that lined the Appalachian hillsides was long familiar. My cheeks had felt the stinging spray of the punishing river rapids along the Cheat Gorge. I had walked in the shadows of majestic mountains and through the dark hollows of coal country, their size eclipsing my small frame, but not my sense of wonder. Bright-eyed and eager, I had done all this while holding tight to my parents’ hands. Starmount was a new world of wilderness, equally magnificent as what I had seen before, but this time, I experienced it untethered.
Venturing beyond the backyard fence came naturally to me. My parents’ footsteps were already there, leading me forward. I only needed to place my own feet in their tracks and follow their meandering path to learn the value of willful wandering. But the moment I took a walkabout of my own accord, stepping outside of their deeper imprints and forging my own path into the unknown, my vision of the natural world changed forever. You can’t reverse forward-moving steps, and my love for wild places and adventure, to this day, continues to take me farther down the trail and deeper into the woods.
My first steps into that new wilderness came within moments of my arrival on Starmount. The only delay was in the time it took for me to walk in the front door of our new house and find my way out the back sliding door. I knew that making a friend in nature would take no time at all, and I was right.
After navigating two backyards, a loosely hinged old gate, and a sea of giant stinging nettles, I reached the field. It was close by and it was far away. In my eyes, the vista it offered may as well have been the entire Louisiana Purchase as seen by Lewis and Clark. It was big. It was bigger than big, the kind of big that only exists when you’re small. I spent that first morning surveying what would become the southernmost boundary of adventure for my new friends and me. Rope swings, cane poles, under-engineered rafts, an army of snakes, and sunbathing alligators defined the compass points of that realm.
Though I took that first trip into the wilds of Florida alone, that would rarely be the case again. I didn’t know how ready I was to shed my penchant for going it alone until I became one of the Sons of Starmount. By the end of that first weekend, most, if not all, of my boyhood friends were in place. I was the newcomer, and they had surely already invested early dream equity into the surrounding landscape, but I can’t help but believe that we all saw that magical world unfold for the first time the moment we saw it together.
The first time I ever heard the term “rock salt,” I was standing on our new back porch watching my parents make homemade ice cream. They poured chunky gray-white rocks from a small bag into and all around the shiny metal cylinder holding the cream. So, you can make ice cream using rock salt. Well, what do you know? I thought.
My pals and I soon discovered that you could also shoot people with rock salt.
Alligator Pond beckoned us from behind tall pussy willow stalks, sawgrass meadows, and moccasin banks. It called to us over fences and fallen logs, across old gates and backyards, and through bricks and mortar. Alligator Pond was like a young boy itself, an honorary Son of Starmount. Like a ten-year-old, it was impetuous and full of itself; a source of joy; and, at times, an agitator against all things peaceful. The pond had a reputation for being dangerous ground for even naive interlopers. It was the domain of two old men, the Parrish brothers, Billy and Bobby. It seemed to us that they were in a permanent bad mood, but to be fair, we may have contributed to their moodiness with our inclination to view their property, especially the pond, as our own.
The Parrish brothers lived in an old farmhouse just up the hill, on the far side of the pond. There were other outbuildings around the main house, including a large barn. We made a few secret pilgrimages to that barn to raid the incredible stash of wartime gear kept there, especially the green Army helmets hidden in the corner behind an old barrel and bags of fertilizer. We were not accidental intruders, but we also meant no harm. They, on the other hand, did. Billy Parrish, the older brother, was more irascible than his younger brother, but Bobby seemed to come unhinged to a whole other level when he caught us trespassing. And we soon learned that he was a better shot than his older brother, too.
One’s first experience with being on the wrong end of a gun is hard to forget. I watched it all unfold as though in slow motion.
The truck tearing down the hill, but taking forever to get there, screeched to a halt near the dock, and one of the Parrish brothers jumped out. I stood there, wide-eyed, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing. My friends started running a good thirty seconds before I did, and the sound of their screeching voices yelling back at me ripped me from my naive paralysis.
“Oh God,” yelled Jim, “it’s Bobby. We’ve gotta get out of here. He’s trying to shoot us again!”
“Again?” Time stood still with that word. What does he mean, “Shoot us again”? I didn’t have time to parse it further, but it was clear that the other boys had kept The New Kid woefully in the dark about the more unnatural hazards of playing at the pond.
Jim and Joey had already taken off, making a beeline for the far-off gate at the edge of Clay Hudson’s backyard, leaving a trail of fishing gear scattered behind them that I had zero interest in retrieving. Clay was John Maples’s age and lived next door to me. His house was also notable as the last bastion of civilization before the pond, or in this case, our first, best chance at protecting ourselves.
As we approached the house, Clay and John were cluelessly diving into and climbing out of a pile of hay that had been dumped in the field just outside the gate. Clay stuck his head out of the hay as Jim and Joey blazed past, with me just a few seconds behind them, racing to catch up. Seeing who and what pursued us, Clay instinctively followed suit, tearing toward the gate and the safety of his backyard.
Unfortunately, John hadn’t seen Bobby or us, and the only sign of trouble making its way into the pile of hay was Clay yelping something about a truck and a gun.
“John!” Jim yelled back from across the fence. There was no response from the pile. Jim dropped what fishing gear he had left in his hands and ran back toward the hay to pull John out. “Come on! Parrish is here, and he’s gonna shoot us for sure,” Jim screamed into the hay.
John stuck his head out and managed to shout back, “What are you talking about?”
Not wasting any more time discussing the situation, Jim yanked John’s arm and pulled him across the field toward the relative safety of the backyard.
By this time, the dust was clearing around Parrish’s truck. He rested the barrel of his gun against the bottom of the window frame, then without any hesitation or common sense whatsoever, aimed at the two young boys and pulled the trigger. The shotgun concussions rang out like high-pitched thunder. Jim was dragging John behind him for all he was worth. John’s feet occasionally touched the ground, but for the most part he darted over the tall grass like a small kite in a thunderstorm. We heard the truck door slam and knew that Parrish was now on foot. We weren’t sure if he was standing still and shooting into the air, or if he was running after us to close the distance between the end of his gun barrel and the targets of his temper. The blasts continued even as we crossed the dividing line between the open field and the backyards of Starmount.
Hearing the commotion, Clay’s mother and sister moved to their back porch, wondering what all the fuss was about. Clay, running, crying, and cussing for all his tiny body was worth, headed straight for his mom, sister, and the safety of the wide-open back door. The rest of us didn’t bother to slow down as we dashed through his backyard and toward civilization.
We all met back up in the middle of Starmount Drive. In times of actual life-threatening peril, most of us boys would head to the middle of the street, which we considered as a universal home base. Just like the inside of a womb, the blacktop of Starmount was always completely safe from outside threats. And of course, if standing in the street didn’t bring relief, you could always just run into your own house and hide under your bed. But the Sons of Starmount didn’t do much of that hiding-under-the-bed thing.
There must have been some divine providence or at least dumb luck at work on our side, because, like all the incidents to come with the Parrish brothers and their shotguns, we came out relatively unscathed. They never seemed too interested in anything more than scaring us off their property, and once we scrambled back over the fences to the safe confines of suburbia, the Parrish brothers disappeared, returning to their semi-mythical realm of Alligator Pond and their old farmhouse, swamps, and monsters.
Maybe it was the era we lived in, but our parents all had a rather blunted reaction to those incidents, treating them as teachable moments, with the natural consequences of scraped-up bare feet and terrorized young souls being our only penalties. Our parents’ comments were simple and matter-of-fact: “You boys know how those brothers are and that they don’t want you out there. You ought to just leave ’em be. Don’t poke the bear!”
The other boys had been through enough of these skirmishes with the Parrish Brothers to believe that they only loaded their guns with rock salt, but we all worried that one day, one of them might become interested in more than just scaring the literal crap out of us. The thought of what “more” might entail was the subject of many of our summer-night curbside discussions.
Between the Parrish brothers’ shotgun rages and our tendency to respond with late-night house eggings, the tempo of our conflict with them quickly rose to an untenable point. Our parents and common sense both begged us to stay away from the pond and the brothers, but that was simply not an option. Alligator Pond and the surrounding fields were too inviting for us to be content with merely peering at them from afar. Knowing something is close, yet out of reach, was more than our adventure-craving souls could bear.
Though emboldened by the adrenaline rush that came with each encounter with the Parrish brothers, we did begin to grow weary of our ongoing battles with them. Fishing with one eye on your bait and one eye on that old truck up on the hill was messing with our fishing mojo. We realized that we needed a change in strategy if we were to claim those fishing grounds as our own, once and for all.
Our growing friendship enabled more than just revenge eggings; it also encouraged group problem solving. The eggings had grown too risky. After one particular close call, where all the lights had come on in the house and the brothers’ silhouettes had appeared on the porch and then disappeared into the shadows of the backyard, we knew our raids had run their course. We had pushed our luck beyond the point where even we were comfortable standing. And for a confident pack of luck-pushers, that’s saying something. We all knew that if the brothers ever caught us, eggs in hand, they would not respond with flying breakfast food, and maybe not even with rock salt. It was time for a new strategy. We let a few days go by and then hatched a plan to walk right up to the old farmhouse en masse, knock on their back door, and propose a truce. Seeking a cessation of hostilities, we were ready to deal: we would offer to show more respect for their property, including saving our eggs for the breakfast table, and in exchange, we sought to secure official permission to fish the pond. It was a plan that required more than your usual chutzpah, especially when you consider that we had been the targets of their shotguns on numerous occasions.
Jim, Tommy, and I took the lead, standing side by side on the porch. The rest of the boys stood behind us in full support, but ready to abandon all manner of friendship at a moment’s notice. We all subscribed to the safety-in-numbers theory, but I heard the other boys quietly rumbling behind us, “If things go badly, Parrish will be too busy shooting at them to think about killing all of us.” Had I been smart enough not to be one of the kids standing on the porch, that’s exactly what I would have said, too.
Only the older brother came to the door, but the scowl on his face made it seem as though our negotiation would be over before it could even get started. It was scary at first, especially for the three of us dumb enough to be standing in his doorway. We didn’t give Parrish a chance to yell at us or throw us off his porch, or to turn back into the kitchen and grab his gun. In high-pitched, unison voices, we stuttered through our best argument: “We just want to fish, man.” We owned up to the eggings, but had decided early on to leave the whole issue of barn-raiding and helmet-stealing for future negotiations.
Given his propensity for shooting at us, Billy Parrish was surprisingly receptive to our peaceful overture. After some obligatory, and admittedly deserved, scolding about personal property and respect and perhaps a moment of reflection over having shot at us himself, Billy made his first and only concession. He brought out a yellow legal pad and hand-wrote each of us a note to have signed by our parents. To go from shooting rock-salt pellets at us to supplying us with homemade legal documents somehow escaped our sense of irony. In his best hereby and forthwith legalese, Billy scribbled out his expectation that our parents relieve him of any potential liability, including drowning, snakebite, or getting alligator-rolled. Ironically, I don’t think he or Bobby ever considered shooting at us to be their biggest legal liability.
Our parents were amused that we had negotiated a fishing-rights treaty all on our own and somehow were able to overlook the dangerous war that had been raging for weeks. Most of us had our folks sign our hand-scribed documents, with a few practicing their forgery skills for future high school absence notes. We closed the deal. The Parrish brothers may have possessed the legal rights to that pond, but a wild band of young boys had come to own it, at least for one summer.
We were finally free to explore the ins and outs of Alligator Pond in detail, without fear of reprisal. It had an old dock that became the jumping-off point for many of our water-related expeditions. Of course, I use the term “dock” loosely. Bounding back and forth across the less-than-safe jetty, which had been hastily constructed with a random collection of half-rotten boards haphazardly nailed together, was an adventure unto itself. The first plank didn’t quite reach the bank, requiring a small leap to get out to it, with the rest of the dock jutting across snake-infested shallows, over the top of an unsecured, small-boy-sized drainpipe, and into the clearest, richest blue I had ever seen.
The dock, in our eyes, was a magical portal allowing us entry into a land of unrelenting bounty, irresistible danger, and soul-defining companionship. And it did so, all well beyond the watchful gaze of our blissfully unaware parents.
Bucketloads of pan-sized bream caught on thumb-rolled pieces of Sunbeam white bread held our attention for most of the summer, but we often caught one another looking past the final board of the dock, though the cypress stumps, and over toward the far side of the pond. Alligator Island rose up like the Rock of Gibraltar and eventually distracted us all from our summer catch. We named the island for the two eight-foot alligators that lived at its center and regularly fed off its banks.
On sunnier days, while standing on the bank closest to the island, we could see that it had what looked like a dark watery hole in the middle of it. We believed it to be a front door of sorts, where the gators could enter and exit their nesting grounds from underneath.
Our parents must have been in some serious progressive-party-cocktail denial to allow us to play within even a mile of that water. Those gators were real and were the prime suspects in the many pet disappearances around the neighborhood.
“We’ve got to go to that island. I mean, there might be treasure hidden on it or at least something cool,” I said, gazing out across the pond.
With his usual brave determination, Jim seconded the motion. “Oh, we’re going alright. We’re definitely going. That treasure is ours.”
Tommy, realizing that the wheels inside our small brains were quickly picking up speed, added, “Okay, okay, I know we’re going, but the important thing is to figure out how.”
John Maples began to sweat as the rest of the younger boys started backing away from him. Uncharacteristically, he proclaimed, “Oh, hell no! I am not putting the helmet and pads on and swimming across to that island. I don’t care what you say!” He would not be our test dummy for this mission. Before we could respond, he beat us to the punch on what he must have believed would be our next thought. “And no, tying a rope around me while I do it will not make me change my mind. Forget it!”
The same immature decision-making that later defined our teenage years with choices about alcohol, drugs, and girls now enabled us to form a plan to build a mighty raft. Seaworthy or not, this raft would set sail for Alligator Island.
We dutifully drew out the blueprints on the backs of two Kings Candy cigarette boxes. With supplies pilfered from our houses (and quite possibly the Parrish brothers’ barn), and labor equitably distributed, we took to building that raft like the Rosie the Riveter women did when they cranked out one B-24 bomber after another during World War II. We began building the raft up high on the flats, above the bank, but once it began to take shape, we finished it on the small, white sandy beach, about thirty yards from the dock.
We hotly debated the flotation capabilities of different materials such as logs, boards, milk cartons, pieces of Styrofoam, and buckets with lids on them. We also intently discussed the merits of different knots that could be used to lash that trash heap together. That part of the discussion didn’t last long, as we only knew one or two knots anyway. One of the knots we knew, of course, was the one we all used to tie our Chuck Taylors on our feet. As far as raft-building went, that one didn’t really count.
Built primarily of logs and a few pieces of buoyant trash, our raft was soon ready to leave the damp, sandy shore. We launched the empty raft into the green, brackish, shallow water to cheers of “Yes! It floats!”
“The next test is whether it floats with all of us on it,” Tommy pointed out. Jim’s optimistic bravado and my sense of confident destiny always ran headlong into Tommy’s practical caution.
“We built it right. It’ll float,” Jim said confidently as we looked across the top of the raft toward Alligator Island.
After celebrating the ceremonial launch of the great raft, we began the next phase of its journey. We needed to get it to the end of the dock, so it would be well into the deeper blue water the moment we shoved off. That reduced the chances of us becoming stuck, or worse, stepping on one of the many irritable snakes that inhabited the muddy reeds along the shallows. Using long nylon ropes, we guided the raft from the safety of the bank through the soupy swamp weeds. We pulled the raft up alongside the dock and walked it out to the deep end. With supreme confidence and less than sufficient engineering, we all stepped aboard our new ship. We pushed off the dock and, with eyes fixed upon the horizon, promptly and unceremoniously sank.
“Gator!” I yelled.
“Cottonmouth!” Jim yelled.
“I told you so!” Tommy yelled.
And the next thing we knew, the Sons of Starmount, like Jesus himself, were walking on water. No, more like, running on water.