Ridgetops
That world, the place I inhabited as a child, is gone. Not physically, of course, but it is the kind of world that has become obsolete.
Outside of St. Benedict, Pennsylvania, an abandoned strip mine once provided a mountain range for the group of friends that revolved around my brother and me. Lee is two years older, and though we sometimes clashed as boys—like brothers do—we were buddies, for the most part. When I think about our mountain range, which was land that had been torn and picked at for coal, I think of sunshine, brown dirt, and the flat, fragile rocks that populated the place—slate that had been under the surface from time immemorial.
Strip mining—or surface mining—is exactly what it sounds like: great machines tear away the surface of the earth to get to the coal that lies beneath. In those days, there were no laws requiring reclamation. When a company tore up the ground, they gathered the coal and went away, leaving the scarred land behind them.
I had no complaints about this practice since this ruined terra firma was a boon to our young imaginations. We didn’t think so much about the environment. Whoever owned that land—whatever faceless company it was that brought in the heavy equipment—had created a play space for us: ridges and valleys, the kind of scrubby vegetation that grows from rocky hillsides so that you can grab on and climb; dusty sumacs, tadpole ponds and mud, bright red lizards, futile searches for arrowheads that were never there, places to hide and disappear for a while.
We didn’t see any possibility of negatives here, didn’t mind the earth being dug up and left for dead: this place was mysterious and exciting, just far enough from home to feel like an honest adventure, far away from our mother’s kitchen. These were our mountains, and we went to them quite often on hot summer days in the 1970s.
Our favorite game was called Escaped Convicts. The game’s premise was simple. Beginning at someone’s house, usually ours, two in our group would run off as escapees, and the rest of the gang was required to find and catch them. There were no limits to where the convicts might go, but it was usually understood: they would end up at the strip mines.
You could get there by a couple of different routes, by road or through the forest. Speed was of the essence, though, a swift escape and a hurried chase. And after the prison guards arrived on the scene, the search wasn’t over. Our man-made mountain range was a maze, a network of hills and ravines that allowed for stealthy criminals and a reckless pursuit. At the top of one ridge, you might see an escapee two valleys over. But how to get there? And how to get there quickly and catch him?
Sometimes the decision resulted in a fall—a body tumbling or sliding downward. Scrapes and cuts were inevitable, but we were none-the-worse for it. We got up and kept running. You could get an overview of all the action from the ridgetops and do your best to plan the how and why of your next move. A moving body here, a quick shout there, dark shadows in trees that laughed at you from some unspecified distance, just beyond your reach.
Sneakers slid, branches tripped up wandering ankles, stones and gullies presented unseen hurdles that put gravity to work. A boy might move safer and faster in the valleys, a landscape more suited to running, but there wasn’t much to see down there, not as much sun—you had to listen and guess at the direction of a voice or cracked branch if you stayed between the hills, and it might get a little too quiet sometimes, so you wondered if you’d been left out there alone, the victim of a secret prank. The silence could play tricks on your mind.
The climactic ending was, of course, a captured criminal, almost always brought to justice in the grove of pine trees that bordered the mine. We were creatures of habit, all of us, and the final and fatal decision for a convict involved climbing one of those trees. The pines were planted in perfect rows, a symmetry that lived just outside the haphazard world of our mountain range. If the pursuing guards had possessed hound dogs, the mutts might have barked and leapt at the trunk of one of the towering pines, the victim treed and ripe for the taking. There were no dogs along for the chase, though, at least not real ones. And the game’s result never changed—we knew where to look, even if we delayed the inevitable.
Caught and suitably chastised, the prisoners sat with guards, then, for shouts and delicious rest on a bed of brown pine needles, with the sticky pinesap on our hands and pant legs. We reclined in the shade and laughed at ourselves because boys love to laugh. Half the fun was in retelling the details of the chase, what you saw and felt and heard, what was funny or ridiculous, or maybe even stupid.
Stupidity is comedy to young boys, even while each of them is guilty of it at one time or another. We walked home slowly, then, the entire group, intent on a cool glass of water or, on better days, some grape Kool-Aid that waited in somebody’s refrigerator. We grabbed sticks and rocks on the walk to further enhance ideas and imagination, to hunt for whatever eluded us on long, dangerous journeys.
There is no great dramatic ending to the abandoned strip mine games—no one lost or hurt, nothing that is incredibly funny or sad or life-changing. We all went home safely and didn’t lose anything in the process—nothing important, anyway. Those days are snapshots in my mind, pictures I consider from time to time, a boyhood remembered in moments. This particular memory inhabits something deep within me that seems to be connected to the fiction I write: that world, the place I inhabited as a child, is gone. Not physically, of course, but it is the kind of world that has become obsolete.
The most striking part of this snapshot is that we could run off to that abandoned strip mine and never tell our moms and dads—it was just understood that we would run, and that we were safe. We could move around St. Benedict without worry, move to the very edges of civilization as we knew it. I don’t imagine that our parents worried, either. We were just kids being kids. The woods weren’t that big, the distance to the strip mine not so great. When it got dark, we’d go home. Or maybe earlier if an hour had been prescribed to us.
We moved in and out of the yard all day, all summer, and on Saturdays, too, during the school year. We were free to go and do and be. Sometimes it was just me and Lee. On other days we had a group of four or five or six, depending on who was around. We played baseball and football, war and hide-and-seek. Our bicycles were overworked, our sneakers and jeans threadbare and dirty. We were dirty. My mom used iron-on patches to repair the jeans. And once a year we got new sneakers, at Paul’s Shoe Store in Barnesboro, or maybe at G.C. Murphy’s 5 & 10 cent store, about a block away and around the corner from Paul’s.
We were never bored.
On rainy days we played dice baseball or Strat-o-Matic. We traded our Topps baseball cards or thought and hollered through hours of Stratego, Monopoly, or Risk. Maybe my memory isn’t as clear as I’d like it to be, but sitting around doing nothing—well, that wasn’t part of our constitution. We were busy inventing worlds. I don’t know where that habit of invention came from, but I imagine it’s the same faculty that allows us to build our adult worlds. Somebody said you become what you think about. Who can deny it, that our imaginations really carry us to those places? That it’s all, somehow, concrete in our unconscious mind?
I suppose we found arrowheads on those days—even if they weren’t there. We threw touchdown passes in front of great crowds and hit homeruns, too, as stadiums full of people stood and cheered our athletic prowess. In war, we were brave and fierce in the face of an enemy. We climbed the mountain, drove the truck, ruled the world, got rich, lost it all. Sometimes in a single day. We found laughter, and on some days we fought—real fights that had fists flying—hands clutched around a neck and the momentary will to choke your opponent, an angry will that must have been alive and desperate and dangerous and, gladly, fleeting, so that we would survive to do it again on another sunny day.
I wonder at those characters who crossed my path and whether those boys are so much different as grown men. I know their boyish faces and personalities and can almost reach out to touch them, nearly fifty years later. Even the younger me is visible, clear to my bespectacled eyes, in sight and knowable. I see snatches of my first-grade self sometimes, and I’m not surprised to find him there, the kid who shoved homework into his desk because he just wouldn’t (or couldn’t) do it; the kid who refused to take fluoride pills and shoved those into his desk, too. I see him feeling inferior, somehow, to everyone in his class, first grade. Even as high school rolls around, as he gets older and a little more self-assured, the kids around him seem to be urbane and sophisticated, their worlds much larger than anything he can conjure.
You can think your way into a lot of different spots, I suppose. Back yourself into some corner that isn’t real, in the same way that you climb mountains and capture criminals and win wars. You don’t change much at all as you grow up, but maybe the halting moments lie in disbelief: you grow and doubt, you stop believing yourself when you set out to do those things that require a view from the ridgetop. Sometimes you choose the valley because it’s safer, even if there isn’t so much sun.
You simply start thinking too damn much when you’re an adult—about how to quickly move two valleys over and catch the criminal. You wonder if you can because it’s hard, when really, all that’s required of you is to move and run and trust your instincts to find the right path. Your sneakers will take you there. With luck, you might not trip or slide down the hill.
The trick is to believe it, with all your heart, that you’ll catch whatever it is that has escaped you. It’s hiding in plain sight, right where you left it, right where you expected it to go in the first place.
Sometimes you have to remind yourself that you’ve just forgotten how to play the game. The woods is not so big, the distance to the mine not so great.
“Ridgetops” is an excerpt from the 2020 book, Loud and Sure of Myself. Buy it at Amazon.