In his conclusion to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain wrote: “It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.”1
Not many people—not Mark Twain himself—ever claimed to have witnessed the moment when a boyhood ended and the boy entered a new stage of life. I have witnessed such a moment. The boy was Dean, nearing his eleventh birthday then; and the “moment” was a balmy, sunlit Sunday afternoon, August 23, 1992; and the setting was a sublimely cockeyed old amusement park in the Lake George region of New York called the Great Escape.
Our family had made a ritual of visiting the Great Escape every year on the Sunday that marked the closing of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Dean and Kevin had grown more attached to Bread Loaf with each passing summer. I had come to love the conference as much through their eyes and imaginations as through my own. None of us had ever quite overcome the rustic spell cast by the nineteenth-century campus with its right-angled yellow wood-framed Inn and dormitory buildings, all clustered in a mountain meadow and cordoned off from the world by pine forests and the Green Mountains rising behind them. But to the boys, their twelve days and nights there had almost become their normative lives, with the other fifty weeks of the year a prolonged hiatus. Thus the Great Escape, sixty-five miles southwest of Middlebury on the eastern border of the vast Adirondack Park, was an ideal midway point in our transition from an even greater escape back to our daily lives.
The park was and is a small nonesuch—as much amusement-park museum as amusement park. A little “graveyard” on the grounds is festooned with markers commemorating attractions that have passed on: Jungleland, Danny the Dragon, the Nightmare at Crack Axle Canyon.2 It dates to 1954, when it opened as an attraction for small children under the name Storytown USA. The name change occurred in 1983. The Great Escape grew over the years, and thrill rides went up and then gave way to even more thrilling rides. Yet the Escape never seemed to lose touch with its own childhood. Artifacts of its early era lay scattered on the grounds. Amid the flashy Steamin’ Demon roller coaster and the Rotor and the Spider, one could find remnants of its rustic origins like fossils in geologic strata: chipping wrought-iron playing cards from the old Alice in Wonderland walk-through; the petting zoo; the western-themed Ghost Town with its blacksmith shop and saloon and daily quick-draw shoot-outs on Main Street.
It seemed to us that all visitors checked their habitual American edginess at the ticket window in favor of a smoothie and wandered around in caloric bliss. I once looked up to see, striding directly at me, a heavily muscled bald guy with a cage fighter’s mustache, wearing a skintight EVERLAST T-shirt and laced-up boxing gloves. He was throwing shadow punches as he bowled along. But he politely stepped around me at the last moment.
On this Sunday afternoon in orange-tinted early fall, Dean and Kevin grabbed their tickets at the booth and exploded into the park ahead of us. They knew the layout by heart. (Kevin had just turned nine.) They scampered side by side, brothers and pals, waiting up for us every time they reached a ride that interested them: the bumper cars. The pendulum-swinging Sea Dragon. The ninety-foot-high Ferris wheel. The Raging River waterslide. And as a capstone to the day, a gut-wrenching turn on the massive throwback wooden roller coaster, the Comet.
We stayed the whole afternoon at the Great Escape on that Sunday. The sun descended, and it silhouetted our boys, and fired their bouncing hair—Kevin’s gold, Dean’s auburn. I had left my camera at home, but I made mental snapshots of them as they larked and ran, and with each one, I silently repeated a mantra that had come into my head once, as if to freeze the image in time: Dean and Kevin. When they were young.
A few days later, Dean entered middle school, his boyhood behind him, frozen in my incantation. Within five years all vestiges of his forever-young days would be forever gone.
Dean’s behavioral shift toward truculence slowly continued, and by his mid-adolescence it was impossible to ignore. Honoree and I still attributed it to “phases,” to “hormones,” to “parental rebellion” triggered by the normal psychological need to “separate” from the parents. We assumed that if we rode it out and kept confrontation with him to a minimum, it would “go away.”
It did not “go away.” Not for a long time. Then it came back again. By the time it went away for the last time, or so we have hoped, things had happened that were terrible beyond our imaginations.
Dean’s rebellion was not total. He asked us whether he could take guitar lessons, and we enrolled him with Kevin’s teacher. He learned quickly. His guitar tastes ran to folk and rock. He played saxophone in the middle school’s jazz band.
I could still take Dean to the field beside the grade school and fungo fly balls to him. We still shot buckets in the college field house, and we played catch in the backyard. The yard canted upward near the woods’ tree line, and Dean liked me to throw him football passes just beyond his fingertips (not an easy task, though certain pro quarterbacks on teams that I follow seem to have mastered it) so that he could dive dramatically and land softly on the bank, whether he caught or missed the ball.
In the August before his sophomore year of high school, Dean flabbergasted all of us by going out for football. Granted that his shoulders were developing, he was still a five-foot-ten kid who weighed about 145 pounds. He played halfback on offense and defensive end—second and third teams. He took his shots from the big beefy linemen and runners. Once he was hit so hard that he rolled backward several times like a runaway Hula-hoop. But he got up again. And he had his moments. One of them involved the first time his number, 36, was called to join the varsity huddle on the field. I don’t think he ever forgot, and I know I haven’t. I asked him what it felt like later, as we all sat eating hot dogs at the A&W. His emotional chilliness thawed for a moment.
“It was beautiful. I couldn’t hear a sound. I just felt myself running. I’ve never run so fast in my life as I did running out there to the huddle.”
The following season, Dean took a handoff, made a sharp pivot to the right, and burst forty-five yards up the middle for a touchdown. The head coach, who was standing near the end zone when my son crossed the goal line, told me later that Dean was grinning all the way.
His creative life expanded: He played the role of Peter, Anne Frank’s doomed sweetheart, in the high school production of The Diary of Anne Frank. He joined Kevin for two weeklong sessions of the National Guitar Summer Workshop in Connecticut.
Yet Dean did not like being asked questions, especially about his life outside the house, or about his friends. Honoree and I made it clear to him, and to Kevin, that we expected them not to drink, not even beer, and to stay utterly away from cigarettes and drugs. This was conceivably not the first time that parents have issued such directives to their teenage children. Our ground rules brought nods of assent from the boys, while they were within our sight. And then a car would appear in the driveway, and the driver would honk his pipes of Pan, and our sons would go trotting off into the night and the mercies of an unmerciful world. We watched them leave with a sense of helplessness. There was nothing we could do, short of imprisoning them in the house. (We were soon to learn the horrors of house imprisonment.) We hoped each night that—well, we hoped. Each night.
One of my most bittersweet memories from those years is of the Ping-Pong table that dear Honoree bought for our basement. She thought that Ping-Pong would be a fun thing for the kids and their friends to do, and something that would keep them safe. The fragility of this hope still makes my throat tighten. The Ping-Pong table went unused. The night was far more interesting.
In the fall of 1997, when Kevin was freshly fourteen, his guitar mentor suggested that we enter him in some competitions, just so he could get used to that world. Application forms for DownBeat magazine’s annual student music awards were due before the end of the year. Eighty categories were available. Kevin recorded three tunes in each of two genres, jazz and rock. His choices were challenging and sophisticated. In the jazz category he tackled “Blue Monk” by Thelonius Monk, “Ain’t Misbehavin’” by Fats Waller, and “Satin Doll” by Billy Strayhorn. In blues, he submitted “Stormy Monday” by T-Bone Walker, “The Thrill Is Gone” by B. B. King, and “Tore Down” by Sonny Thompson. The submissions were multitrack dubs, in which Kevin performed lead, rhythm, and, on some of the tunes, harmony and a bass line off his electric guitar.
We sent the submissions in, and then we began to worry that we had asked too much from our young adolescent son.
The following June, DownBeat announced its winners. Kevin had won for his age-group in both his categories.
We made a big deal of it, naturally—in retrospect, probably a bigger deal than we should have. We made sure the town biweekly knew about the dual awards, and the editor published a photograph of Kevin with his teacher. And we spread the word to friends and relatives.
Our euphoria was not destined to last. Within a few days of the announcement, the “Before” in the Powers family saga ended with a crash, and the “After” began.