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Arthur Shuey
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.
Hooked even more on the outdoor life after this incident, we began searching for a better campsite in Lemon Way Woods and soon found one, not so convenient to a swamp but well-situated as to privacy and with trees perfectly placed for a new project. It was at this second Palms Gang campsite, you see, that Ronny Gayle and some helpers created a bizarre shelter. Weeks before the camping trip, they began cutting down long, straight saplings, stripping them of branches, and weaving them between living trees at the campsite, ending up with three wicker-like walls with a narrow opening in one corner. The walls were then stuffed with pine straw for insulation, bunks which would never for a minute support a teenage boy's weight were nailed to them, and the obligatory large tarp stolen from a construction site was draped and lashed over the whole affair. "Squaw wood," as we called lightweight dead limbs, rotten branches and similar rubbish found near the camp, was piled near a freshly dug firepit. More solid logs were dragged to the fireside. Plastic milk jugs were saved at our homes, filled with water, and hauled out to the campsite in advance to save us last minute haulage. I shoplifted another 72 condoms, the initial batch having ended up either in the fire at our earlier campsite or filled with whatever noxious, viscous substances we could mix up from our parents' pantries and medicine chests and thrown off of highway bridges at car windshields below late at night when we had spent all of our cash on drugs and/or drink and were thus too broke to hang out in the foosball parlors.
That shelter was a great joy to us. It snowed in early March, and I went out to the campsite as soon as I was sure that school was cancelled, just to hang out for awhile. Growing bored with this by about 9:30 and thinking of going back home to rustle up some grub, I was just exiting the shelter when something flew through the wall scant inches from my right kidney. A razor tipped arrow thunked into one of the shelter's corner trees and I ran out to see Ronny Gayle bounding toward me through the underbrush, 50-lb. bow in hand. He didn't know I was in the shelter when he shot into it just for fun. Well, if death and danger hadn't been lurking in our lifestyles then, we wouldn't have so many laws and regulations in place for our safety today.
A camping trip took place in early April at that site, free of major disaster but attended by the trademark feature of all our woodland weekends -- Rain. We moved the fire into the shelter, pulling back a corner of the tarp to allow the smoke to escape. Five minutes into a cold downpour, we were inspired to gather wood and store it in the shelter, where it would stay dry. Within hours, we had torn down the bunk frames and fed them to the fire and were starting to yank damp pine straw from the walls.
The temperature dropped, smoke from the smoldering pine straw hovered about our heads rather than rising through the roof opening. We coughed, shivered and ate what we called "corn dodger," based loosely on something that some of us vaguely remembered John Wayne feeding to a grizzly bear in some movie, but none of us could recollect whether he'd liked the grizzly or not. "Probably not, if John Wayne's batch turned out like this shit," was our conclusion after facing the charred, greasy grit that wasted our cornmeal, water and butter. We cussed Andy, threw dirt and pine cones at him, cut his hammock down and threw a lawn chair he'd stolen from someone's back yard on the way to the campsite into the fire after he'd consigned most of our toilet paper to the flames as a joke. We also drank heavily and smoked a lot of pot, and a couple of the hardier hoodlums ate chocolate mescaline or LSD, as if eating corn dodger was not enough.