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Arthur Shuey
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.