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Dear Caelan,
Between 1973 and 1975(sophomore to senior high school years), the
Palms Gang went on a lot of camping trips. None of us lived more than a
few blocks from some sylvan expanse large enough to hide the smoke of
our pine fires from concerned adult citizens and law enforcement
officers. At one time or another, we camped or visited camps in all of
these glades, overgrown farms that had never come back from
foreclosure during the Great Depression or splintered remains of actual
forests, which we generally discovered on the heels of surveyors
marking them off for development into the neighborhoods and shopping
centers that comprise most of today's East Coast world.
Development did not immediately follow surveys, for things moved more
slowly then, and lots had to be measured, investors found, infrastructure
planned and architectural renderings rendered. Some of the woods we
camped in survived into the early eighties when investment deals fell
through or other mishaps of which we knew nothing saved them for a bit
longer. We thought that we had the woods because people wouldn't want
to bulldoze them all, and because we moved or hid surveyors markers
and vandalized construction vehicles whenever we could to slow the
decimation of our natural playgrounds.
My closest stretch of "wilderness" was an abandoned farm that began
right across the Palms Apartments parking lot and ran, cross-stitched
with irrigation ditches and rusty barbed wire, centered around an old
silo where one could always disturb pigeons, approximately five blocks
to the next neighborhood, Birchwood. Because it was closest, it became
my natural science laboratory as early as 1969. Three blocks deep, it
gave us a few scraggly copses of young trees, stubbled soy bean fields
harboring quail, doves, rabbits and rats in plenty, good vantage points
from which to observe back yards which occasionally contained tents or
other items ripe for late night theft, and a number of not-so-short
shortcuts between Malibu and Birchwood.
In a dry autumn, when the ditches weren't crumbling into weedy, fetid
mud, the horseflies weren't dive-bombing longhaired humans into
distraction and madness and the sticker bushes had rotted away for the
year, one could almost ride a bicycle the length of the farm, but these
days were rare and the safe streets took no longer, so we rarely risked it.
Shannon Johnson kept a baited live trap near a particular dogwood, and
on one dry, late autumn day, he captured a mother possum, complete
with litter. That was the day I first met Steve Arnold, to whose back yard
I accompanied Shannon and the possums. I remember the Arnolds'
remarkably cubic terrier running around the yard in what would have
been circles for most dogs, but seemed to be perfect squares for her.
There are vague recollections of the possums getting out of the cage, of
at least one of the kits being extracted from its mother's pouch by
Shannon, of Shannon being bitten, and of the possums climbing a
telephone pole in that yard, but nothing definite enough to weave a real
story from has stayed with me.
There was a tree which may have been a magnolia about 150 yards
southeast of the farm's center where I camped, lit small fires, smoked
dope and hung out as a youth. Its branches, laden with large, dark,
heavy leaves, bowed close to the ground, and in the dank earth below
were hundreds of shards of yellowed white ceramic. Early, we believed it
to be a hanging tree, or a haunted tree under which the farmer's
daughter had been buried and where her demented swain had destroyed
the cast angel which had topped her grave.
Through months of absentminded rooting with sticks and knives and
scuffing with shoe and boot heels, we eventually excavated down among
the tree roots to a large shard on which could be plainly read the brand
name, "Bemis." When an angel is transformed so suddenly into a
shattered toilet, it hammers hard against an adolescent's fragile
innocence. More than the corpses all of the small animals we
slaughtered and harm we inflicted on one another with bows and
arrows, knives, slingshots, pellet rifles, axes, bb guns, floundering
harpoons and pockets full of rocks without which we would not have
thought to enter our wildernesses, that smashed plumbing fixture
encouraged us to be Natty Bumppo elsewhere.
My next wilderness was known as "Lemon Way Woods," since it began at
the east end of Lemon Way, at most two short blocks from the homes of
Andy Reid, Jim Cannon, Ronny Gayle Midgette, and Russell Dean. It was
actually the vestigial remnant of "Kings Forest," after which the
neighborhood east of Virginius Drive had been named. Though major
Palms Gang penetration of Lemon Way Woods began in 1973, when
testosterone levels rose and the need for seclusion for pot smoking
entered our lives, most of us had some knowledge of at least their
western flank. A path ran from near our 7-11 straight down the line of
telephone poles to Kings Grant, a section at that time not directly
connected by road to Kings Forest. Like the path across the abandoned
farm between the Palms Apartments and Birchwood, this one could
sometimes be negotiated almost successfully by bicycle, but there was
little incentive to try.
It was the group led by Andy Reid that began to find or break trails east
through Lemon Way Woods, for several reasons. First of all, that was the
Palms Gang segment that became earliest involved with marijuana,
courtesy of Andy Reid's older brother, Bill Weed. We liked Bill, a shy,
mellow, yet occasionally humorous bass guitarist two years older than
us, with shoulder length hair and a popular habit of referring to his
younger brother as "Bozo" in front of us, and we never thought of him
when singing, "Goddam the pusher man," along with John Kay of
Steppenwolf. Second, Ronny Gayle Midgette was genetically right in the
middle of the southwestern dog-gun-fishing pole tradition, and if there
were woods nearby, they needed to be trod. Third, Andy himself was
known to take a picnic lunch and a butcher knife into the woods and
torture frogs to death for fun. We didn't call him "Dirty Andy" for
nothing, nor for his hygienic practices, which were acceptable except
that we thought it was weird for a big he-manly, dope smoking gang
dude to regularly have his hair washed in the kitchen sink by his
grandmother. Later, we reflected with some bewilderment and
trepidation over his going to Steve Arnold's house to relieve himself of
his "daily granulation," as he put it, but these tangents were never
essential to camping trips.
It was in Lemon Way Woods that we camped in the worst weather and
perfected the odd, woven shelters that I think were invented by Ronny
Gayle Midgette and Ricky Yeates. Many incidents occurred and patterns
developed there. One January night, I set the right half of my body on
fire with Coleman fuel.
We had put together our dollars and coins and gotten my mother to buy
a dozen bottles of pop wine for us. Lovely stuff, with brand names like
"Cold Bear," "Annie Green Springs" and "Boone's Farm" and flavors
labelled as "strawberry," "Concord peach" and "mellow melon," I best
remember it for the purgative aftereffects one would expect from the
ingestion of raw pork, ground willow or most commercial film
developing fluids. A couple of campers had dope, domestic homegrown
cannabis sativa which then sold for twenty dollars per ounce, and
somebody had come across and splurged on what was supposed to be
"Acapulco Gold," for which the staggering sum of $25.00 per ounce had
been paid.
I wasn't smoking pot yet at this stage, but looked forward to heavy
involvement in the drinking and any other vices that made themselves
available, such as the "chicks," for whose anticipated visit to the freezing
mud of our campsite I had, at the request of my fellow campers,
shoplifted no fewer than six dozen condoms from Miller's Discount
Department Store. Outside of these hedonistic preparations, we did little
prior to the trip. As we aged, camping trip preparations became more
elaborate, but we were quite primitive at this stage. We stuffed our new
aluminum frame backpacks, army surplus knapsacks or duffel bags with
extra socks, flannel shirts, canned goods, toilet paper and matches, plus
more machetes, axes, shovels, hatchets and hunting knives than were
used in the construction of colonial Jamestown, hid sandwich bags of
dope in our socks and wine bottles in our winter coat linings and
gathered at the Midgettes' house for the final trek.
We hoped it wouldn't rain, since our shelter was limited to one pup tent
and a large tarpaulin stolen from a construction site. Half of us had
sleeping bags; the others made do with blankets and garbage can liners.
Somebody had a Coleman lantern. The slim rations we'd been able to
liberate from our parents' pantries were augmented in an after-sunset
raid from the campsite itself when we visited a gas station, kicked in the
lucite front of a snack machine and scooped an assortment of oatmeal
cakes, cheese crackers and jelly candies into our packs. Andy Reid had a
hammock, in which by 10:30pm he was contentedly swinging back and
forth near the fire contentedly singing "Be My Lover," from Alice Cooper's
newly released "Killer" album. Those of us who were inebriated enough
to ignore the drizzle as we sat in the mud or on rotting logs as the
formerly roaring fire sizzled away sang along with him. Clothes which
had been hung to dry earlier in the day hung and dripped forlornly over
branches. Someone threw one of Steve Arnold's socks into the fire. Steve
exclaimed, "Man, that my old man's good sock, too," but received only
derision from his pals.
I thought it would be a great trick to pour a little Coleman fuel on the tip
of my boot and stick it in the fire, then wave it around in the air
screaming in mock terror and pain. It seemed like a good idea at the
time, but I was a bit careless with the fuel, unknowingly spilling it down
my sleeve, the side of my shirt and the length of my leg before cautiously
pouring just a few drops on the toe of my boot, which I then extended
toward the flames. It still seemed like a good idea when my footwear
flared, because I at first focused only on that boot, but when I heard a
whooshing sound in the air as I clapped my drunken hands in glee and
saw that one of those hands was on fire along with half of my body, my
delight diminished more than somewhat.
Leaping to my feet, I noticed Andy Reid falling out of his hammock into
the fire in uncontrollable laughter before crashing through the brush
and diving into a handy swamp to extinguish the flames. Crawling out
and sitting on a handy, damp, moss-covered stump to catch my breath, I
was immediately assailed by Ronny Gayle Midgette, who was helpfully
beating me with a sodden blanket to make sure the fire was out. After
he'd knocked me back into the swamp and I'd crawled out yet again and
returned to the clearing, I began to feel stinging pain in my hand,
especially when the chill wind hit it. After a couple of hours of hoping it
would go away, I packed up my gear and went home through the dark,
wet woods to smear my hand with various ointments.