The Swamp

As a boy I ran in a mob whenever I roamed farther than a few blocks from home.
Not a cohesive gang or pack, mind you -- but a random gathering of neighborhood
boys who had drifted together by chance on a summer afternoon, and then by consensus
decided to go on an illicit adventure. An adventure our parents would not have approved
of if we had asked them. The idea was we would alibi each other when the inevitable
third-degree took place at home that night; a plan that always fell apart when some
sniveling quisling ratted us out for the price of an extra piece of lemon meringue pie
(OKAY -- so it was me, alright? Can I help it if my mom made an exquisite
lemon meringue pie?)

Forbidden places to explore included the gutted bottle factory across the tracks down
on Elm Street Southeast; several derelict warehouses off of 15th Avenue Southeast down
by Van Cleve Park; the trashy ramshackle and partially abandoned row houses on Nicollet
Island in the middle of the Mississippi; and, most exotic of all, ‘The Swamp.’

If you walked due east on Fairmont Avenue Southeast to the top of the slight hill it ran up,
you could survey a fetching vista that included grain silos, rusted abandoned railroad tracks,
graveled washboard roads, stands of pin oak, and boggy water meadows filled with cattails
stretching endlessly off to the east. This is what we called The Swamp. A wonderful
terra incognita that our parents warned us was full of desperate fugitives, bushmasters,
fetid storm drains, sluggish channels of raw sewage, and foul heaps of discarded junk --
a veritable Land of Mordor.

One golden summer day in the year 1961 a mob consisting of myself, Wayne Matsuura,
Butchy Hogley, Randy Mikelson, Don Lockwood, Junior Kryjava (who had six toes on his
left foot), and one or two other hangers-on, drifted down Fairmont towards The Swamp.
Our intent was to find an appropriate patch of drainage ditch for a cattail fight. It was
blazing hot, so we stopped along the way at a pipe in the side of an elevated, disused
railroad siding that dripped cold spring water to refresh ourselves (we hoped it was
spring water -- there was a tin cup on a chain next to it) before continuing on towards
the water meadows.There was no such thing as individual water bottles back then;
and keeping hydrated was a concept as foreign to us as Brinkmanship. Occasionally
a Burlington Northern Railroad truck came hurtling down the washboard road, raising
a veil of reddish brown haze, but otherwise we had the entire landscape to ourselves,
as if in a Twilight Zone episode where everybody else on earth has vanished. Mourning
doves made their curious sobs in the pin oaks, but otherwise it was a silent world we
wandered through.

The milkweed pods were bursting open, and we debated, for the umpteenth time,
whether or not milkweed sap had been used to make rubber tires during World War Two.
Junior swore up and down that it was true and that his dad still had a set of milkweed sap
tires in his garage. Wayne and Randy were frankly unconvinced. Me, I just gathered up the
milkweed seeds and fluff to stuff in my pockets, with the vague notion of making myself a
milkweed pillow when I got home.

We finally reached a tall stand of cattails and immediately waded into the muck to snap
the stalks off and whomp each other senseless with the cattail heads. This was
a cattail fight. When we finished, we were covered in slight bruises and our hair
and clothes were embedded with cattail fur. Just then Randy spotted a painted turtle
scuttling for cover and made a dive for it. He held up his prize, announcing he was
taking it home as a pet. Overwhelmed with a Clyde Beatty bring-em-back-alive
determination to do the same, the rest of us wallowed deeper into the gumbo
to find turtles and salamanders in gratifying abundance.

Walking back home with our captives, we looked like a Swamp Thing convention.

There was no use in equivocating when we got home; even our simpleton brains
realized we couldn’t deny the reeking and slimy evidence we trailed into the presence
of our despairing mothers. But we had pet turtles now! That made the tongue lashing
and scrubbing down just about worth it.

In my case, I had snagged a particularly robust specimen; about the size of a
dinner plate. Now I needed somewhere to keep it. My mother was unreasonably
against me putting it in the bathtub. It’s not like we NEEDED to take baths,
I tried to point out to her. The garden hose would be just as effective, and quicker
too. But she remained obdurate. So I took Turtle-saurus (as I had named him)
out to the garage for a look-see. And there, like the Holy Grail, stood my dad’s shiny
new aluminum Hamms beer cooler. Just waiting to be turned into an aquatic homeland.

I used the garden hose to fill it, threw in some grass clippings and a few bricks
from old Mrs. Henderson’s crumbling outdoor barbeque -- and Turtle-saurus
now had his own watery domain. Of course, I had no idea what to feed him.
I thought maybe the grass clippings would do. But it was a moot point.
When dad got home that evening he had a bag of ice and a paper sack full
of bottled beer for his cooler.

I will not detail the ugly scene that followed when he discovered
his cooler had been hijacked by a member of the Testudines family.
Suffice it to say that Turtle-saurus was remanded back into the wild by
a grim-faced man claiming to be my father -- who at the time appeared
to think children, especially small boys, should each be impaled on a Pixy Stix
and left to rot in the August sun.