Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails...

I was something of a tomboy when I was a kid. I’d say that by late elementary school, I had grown out of it. But from about age four through eight or nine I spent a lot of time keeping up with the neighborhood boys.

There were several boys in the neighborhood who were my age. When I was very little, we played together in our yards. I remember at age four, when one of my little friends, Stevie, went off to Kindergarten that I was quite sad. I had to play with his dorky little brother. I was friends with Stevie and his brother for several more years. These were the kids with whom I built forts, climbed trees, played games, and got into trouble.

As I think of it now, a part of my tomboyish-ness was my own personality and a big portion was the result of parental neglect. I just wasn’t supervised. The boys in the neighborhood tended to be more free to roam, as I was. I remember the usual childhood mischief – hiding in the bushes and spying on passersby; ringing doorbells and running away; playing “doctor.” I recall friends of my parents' skinny dipping in our backyard pool and leading the gang around to the neighbor's backyard for a peek.

But I also remember when our mischief turned to destruction and petty thievery. The petty thievery gave me mild pangs of guilt, but nothing serious…nothing that wouldn’t soon be forgotten.

First, we discovered that we could put cardboard “pennies” in the gumball machine at the local candy store. If you put the cardboard piece in there and turned the handle, you could keep turning, around and around. One day we emptied it. We filled a bowl. We went back to one neighbor’s playhouse and chewed gum until we got caught. My mom made me empty my piggybank, marched me up to the candy store (the “Variety” Store) and stood there and waited while I confessed. The man at the store was very serious, but not mean. I was somewhat intimidated…but not intimidated enough.

Later, when we got a little older, we stole packs of cigarettes from my dad and smoked them in the playhouse. When our smoking habit became a big pastime, we went to the local grocery and stole a whole carton of cigarettes by stuffing it under one of our shirts. This was a more serious crime by neighborhood (or I suppose any) standards. My mom again marched me to the store with my life savings. The man at the store was more menacing this time. I was genuinely scared and quit even entering that store. But for Stevie and his brother, who were Mormon, the consequences were even more severe. They were grounded and got the belt (or the back of a hairbrush) for this. I remember feeling guilty because my punishment lasted one afternoon and an evening - theirs lasted for weeks and they were forbidden to play with me.

I hung out at the girls’ houses while the punishment lasted. But eventually, we sort of lapsed back into our regular old habits when the boys parents’ attention turned to other things.

There was also a boy in the neighborhood named Paul. Paul was a tough kid who went to Catholic school. We often heard his parents fighting in the back room of his house when we played over there. I had a crush on Paul from about first grade. He was a couple of years older than I. But my parents should have separated us sooner. If he had any affection for me, it took a strange form.

One evening while playing, for no apparent reason, Paul threw a brick at me and hit me in the head. I ran home bleeding. My mother fashioned a special band-aid and taped the skin back together. Another time, we were playing baseball with a ball and a metal pipe in Paul’s backyard and Paul accidentally swung around and hit me square on the forehead. Still, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. His mother was a nurse. She cleaned the wound and put a butterfly bandage on my forehead. I still have the lump from that one. But the last straw for me and my mother was when he came after me with a crowbar. This time it was just plain old anger at something I said or did. He hit me over the head. My mom cleaned that one up. Another butterfly. It left a gash. It also reduced the size of our gang. Paul was out.

I think that must have been the turning of the tide. I began to have less interest in boyish things. The boys were just becoming gross, in my opinion. Every year in the spring, we would ride our bikes a few blocks to where the drainage canals went through town. We’d hide our bikes in the bushes and climb the fence. Down the cement banks we’d carefully crawl, to the bottom where the mucky water flowed – drainage from the streets above. This muck and mud didn’t bother any of us in the least. The algae that grew there was the perfect breeding ground for tadpoles, which we loved to watch grow. For a few weeks we would watch the development, then one day we’d show up with our buckets and little hoppy toads would be moving everywhere. We’d fill our buckets and take them home. They’d be re-introduced to nature in our backyards - and many of them would live there for a long time. Our parents didn’t mind because they helped to keep down the number of aphids.

But the year after the cigarette fiasco, was also the end of the road for our gang. This year I remember going down to the canal on a hot and sunny day. One of the boys took to showing off by throwing little toads against the cement. Another boy did the same thing in turn, calling it, “giving the toad a sunburn.” I tried throwing one, but I couldn’t hack it. I shouted at them to “Stop it!” but that just inspired them to greater violence. We left the canal with our buckets and walked our bikes home in sullen silence. After supper, when it came time to play with the toads, the boys decided to do dissections with sticks. That was it for me. The end of an era. I decided, from then on, to be a girl.

Yes, I left behind childish things that day. But I had guilty nightmares for years after about my real friends, the toads. I think my affinity for Buddhists and their non-violent ways was probably born the same day our little gang died.

Field Biology

When I was in fifth and sixth grades, there was a great summer school course offered through the public schools. I took “Field Biology” for two summers in a row. I don’t know how the school district afforded it, but they allowed a whole school bus filled with kids to take this class. We used several classrooms and had a variety of instructors.

Early each weekday morning in June and part of July, we would arrive at the elementary school (not our usual school, we had to get ourselves to a different campus than we were used to). The teacher would show slides. We learned scientific vocabulary words – and saw photos of whatever sort of “specimens” the teachers expected us to encounter that week. I remember learning about everything from the different types of coastal redwoods (Sequoia Gigantia and Sequoia Sempivirens…see, I still remember), to the names of things found in tidepools, to wildflowers, to birds, snakes, and lizards. But learning these names was not the best part of the class.

If we spent Monday learning all about tide pools, then on Tuesday, we would head to Half Moon Bay. We’d load up our buses and take our little field journals and bag lunches and we would explore Northern California. We rode various distances - not short rides – to arrive at our field sites. We went everywhere. I mean we went to Foothill Park, Half Moon Bay, Bodega Bay, Point Reyes, Point Lobos, Mount Tamalpias, Mount Diablo, Muir Woods, you name it. At each place, we would draw pictures of the items on our “list” for the day or we would keep a tiny sample – of leaves and flowers and grasses.

As we took our long rides and explored hot hilltops, foggy coastline, and shady woods, we became admirers and intimate observers of nature. We learned that if you stick your finger gently into a sea anemone, it will close and “stick” to your finger. That is how they feed. We learned that if you have a big fire in a redwood forest, it almost always comes back. Redwoods are very resilient. We learned about the various types of birds that live near water and how they survive and we learned why rattlesnakes rattle.

Then, at the end of the term, the course would culminate in a week of camping and hiking. The first year, we went to Big Basin. I remember I loved it and had a good time. But that’s all I remember. The second year, we went to Yosemite. Honestly, for a nominal public summer school fee, they were able to bus us off and let us camp and explore Yosemite for a week. It was unbelievable.

I know I had a crush on some kid from another school and that was interesting. It was a diversion and added a dimension to the week. But, the experience, in sixth grade, of a week of camping, hiking, and exploring Yosemite was just mind blowing. We hiked to the top of peaks. We hiked trails that took us to the base of spectacular waterfalls. We hiked and hiked and hiked. God bless those teachers. I can’t imagine what a responsibility it must have been to shepherd a group that size in a National Park.

At the end of the week, at the last campfire, I got some kind of award for being the “best trooper” of the group. It was a dubious honor. It started when I had tripped on a tree root sticking out of the ground near my tent when barefoot. We had been told not to go barefoot. Not wanting to get in trouble or to be left behind, I sort of rinsed off this giant chunk of skin that had been gouged out of my heel and taped it back up there with a bandaid. On every hike we went on, I was also getting huge blisters, but didn’t want to give up hiking, so I didn’t mention it. I developed blisters upon blisters upon blisters.

At lunch time, on about the fourth day of hiking and camping, I remember taking my boots off because I was in pain – just to give them some air. Unbeknownst to me, the instructor was standing behind me. When he saw the state my feet were in, I remember the shock and concern on his face. I seem to remember several adults with first aid kits attending to my feet for ten or fifteen minutes. Then we hiked the additional five or six miles back to camp. For some reason, they were impressed with my lack of complaining. That trait has not necessarily been a good one for me over the years, but it was apparently an asset in this setting.

I will never forget the beauty we encountered that week. From Half Dome to Bridal Veil Falls, we explored. Yosemite has changed a great deal over the years. You now have to take shuttles around the park and can’t explore in solitude the way we were able to. One has to share the park with hundreds of other nature lovers. When we were there, it was still a quiet majestic place. It is a good reason to be glad to be over fifty years of age. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.

The experience I had at the age of twelve, I’m sure helped to inspire me to work in the Tetons when I was eighteen, the Rockies when I was twenty. It probably was a formative experience that caused me to push my own children out the door when they decided to blaze trails for the Minnesota Conservation Corps, to explore the great boundary waters, or to embark on their own great adventures. So, wherever those teachers are now, wherever the school administrators are who decided to set the money aside in the budget to allow us to do this, I say, “thank you.” Thank you and here’s hoping there are more teachers and administrators like you long into the future.