The Woods, Part Six.

I can't remember exactly when it happened, but some time around the summer of 1973 dad came home from the base there in Kansas City and told us we were movin' again. I couldn't believe it, but I must have been expecting it. We did it on average every three years, and this was the third year.

I was so happy in Missouri. I didn't want to leave. The place was almost a paradise to me. I'd gone from being the new kid to having lots of friends, including one or two close ones. I had all these little kids who thought I was cool, followin' me around like I knew somethin'. I'd grown to love and feel very comfortable in the woods around the neighborhood and I couldn't believe I was gonna have to leave it all and start all over again somewhere else, but this was my life.

I'd even begun to think about girls again by '73. You remember the chick in England who was draggin' me off into the woods and flashing her stuff in school? Well, there hadn't been any other girls in my life since then. Then, one day, out of the blue, I met up with this girl out in the woods, along the path everyone used to get up to school and the strip mall where the TG&Y store was. I was climbing one of the tall trees there and she was already up in it, sittin' on a big limb.

I found myself falling into a conversation with her, and I was enjoying it. Normally I wouldn't have been so open to such a thing, but the freedom and happiness I'd found there in the woods had begun to change me. I felt comfortable there, able to be myself. I guess I was at the age when boys start to awaken to different thoughts about girls. The music of the time helped a little in that process. At some point around there, my friends and I started to hear this song wafting out of our little portable AM radios. I wanna tell ya, this was some hot sexy stuff, when I was about 11 or 12.



Of course, I didn't know what the song was about. I didn't even know what sex really was back then. I'd never even gotten close to kissing a girl. I hadn't even discovered the private joys of "self abuse" (what a stupid term for such a natural and fun thing). It would be years before I found out about all that. I guess I was still just a baby.

Anyway, I found myself enjoying the experience, talking to this complete stranger. I eventually realized that it was time to go home and eat, so I made plans with her to come back after dinner and meet her back up in the tree. I went home to eat and then, with the summer sun still shining, I ran back there. I climbed back up into the tree and waited, but she never showed up. I never saw her again. I never even got her name.

When the sun started to go down I climbed back down and went home. Of course, being who I was, I took it hard. I assumed that it must have been something bad about me that made her not want to see me again. I guess I was wired to think such things, unable to shake it off and think something like "Well fuck her then! Her loss, not mine." I wish now that I'd had someone to talk to about it, but I really didn't, so I just filed it away in my mind and moved on.

Pretty soon after that mom and dad told me that before we moved to dad's new job in Texas we were gonna have to move into base housing there in Missouri. They told me that I was not gonna be able to wander around the base with my bow and arrow, and that cool big shield and spear that I'd made were history too. I might as well not even pack them.

To my folks, all those things were childish toys that I needed to outgrow, and this was as good a time as any. Yet again, after getting comfortable with my world and growing to discover a little about who I was, the time had come to give it all up and start over again. I was devastated, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was just a kid, with no say in anything. A leaf, blown around by the wind.

The next thing I knew we were livin' in a dumpy little house on base and the only place I had to play was the basement. Most of our stuff was in storage, waiting for the big move in a few months to Texas. I didn't have any friends. We didn't live there long enough for me to develop any. In time I started to run with a few guys from the housing unit, but they were never really friends. I sat around in that basement watching TV most of the time and got fat.

When the next school year had started I'd been put in a Catholic school near the base. It was basically an orphanage filled with much tougher, more worldly guys, and I was lost there too. I wan't even Catholic. I didn't know anyone, or have any friends. I just shut down again, living in my own mind, ignoring school work and trying to stay out of the way of the bullies that roamed the place, the worst of whom were the fucking nuns that ran it.

Once again, it was back to square one. I was alone and miserable, and my parents couldn't understand why I wasn't happy and doing my homework. I guess in my mind, there were damn few things in my life that I really controlled. In a self destructive way, unconsciously I guess, I decided that I'd get back at my folks by flunking out of school and giving them as much passive aggressive shit as I could. The stuff I read in the encyclopedia was much cooler than the stuff in the school books anyway, so I just ignored them. The more upset mom and dad got, the better it was.

What an idiot! Of course, I payed the real price for all that stupidity. I got a reputation as the class dummy. I didn't know what a Noun or Verb was until I was in high school. My math skills have never recovered. I missed out on a LOT of basic stuff that made the rest of my school life harder, but there you go. I wish to God now that I'd had something like an older brother then. A friend who could show me how to live my life better and deal with my parents and all this crap that was going down, but I was alone. My older sister was usually wrapped up in her own world, dealing with things in her own way and useless to me. She'd left to go to college by this time anyway, so I was really alone.

Eventually we relocated to San Antonio, where dad had been put in command of a communications group at Kelly Air Force Base. We moved into a nice house at the end of a street, the top of a hill, where there was one of those circles that cars can turn around in. When we got there and got everything packed away I discovered that this cul de sac was where all the kids on the street played ball.

I'd tried to sneak my bow and arrows onto the moving van back in Missouri, but somehow along the way they had disappeared. I never saw them again. The folks had interceded on my behalf, at least in their own mind. I was supposed to grow up now and do the stuff they though all the kids should do. Once again, I guess I decided to fight back by refusing to go along.

My first experience with the neighborhood kids was interesting. I came out one day to find everyone out in the circle playing kick ball. I went out there and they let me join in. It was my first meeting with all of these kids, so I was nervous. They asked me who I was and why we'd moved in and I told them. About 15 minutes into the game I found I needed to go back into the house to go to the bathroom, so I excused myself and went in. When I came out again moments later everyone was gone. The street was deserted. I was very confused. I felt like I'd been the butt of a practical joke, so I just went back in the house and stayed there. It turned out that little joke set the mood for my entire stay there in San Antone.

Long story short, I hated it there. It was worse than the snake pit we lived in in England. We were there until 1975, after dad retired from the Air Force. I was put in one or two private schools by my mother, who was trying to get me to study and snap out of my funk, but when one school that was basically for special needs kids tried to get me and a few others into the Special Olympics my mom blew her stack. Her son might be weird but he wasn't retarded, so she took me out of that school and tossed me into the public school up the road from the house in the middle of my seventh grade year.

I showed up there and found that in my absence from the public school system all the kids had gotten girlfriends and boyfriends, and I had no idea what that was all about. My years of screwing around in the woods and not studying in school made my transition back to the public school that much more tough. I didn't really fit in there in any way. I felt like all these kids were several years older than I was, in terms of their maturity, and they all seemed to know instinctively that they could push me around and get away with it. Something about being outnumbered and alone made me feel like the best way to get by was to back down, so I did, over and over. Each time I did I guess it just encouraged the assholes there to try again, and reinforced in me my own since of weakness. It was like being in England all over again, only worse.

Oh yea, the woods. Well, there weren't any there where we lived in San Antone. I did manage to find an interesting drainage ditch to explore one summer. That was the summer when "Streaking" had become the rage. I actually saw some dude, probably a high school kid, jump out of a car buck nekkid and go runnin' down the road there, as his buddy kept nudging the car forward, not letting him back in. It was hilarious.

At some point around there, when I was about 14 or 15, this little number started to get regular air play, and just about made my head explode.



I far as I could tell, there weren't any girls around there who were in the least bit interested in me. There was one chick that lived across the street from us, but she was just a tease. She liked to make all of us think that she might go all the way, but she never did. Never even let anybody kiss her. Once, while we were all riding bikes around the circle there late in the evening, I noticed that she and two of my friends had laid their bikes down and were heading over into the shadows between two houses. I laid my bike down and started to head over there, but as soon as I did they all came back out again, with the guys cussing me for obviously messing things up for them. of course, I wondered why I was being excluded, but again, I just filed it away and told myself "of course, why would they want me around?"

Anyway, about half way through our stay there in San Antone one of my neighbors pulled out a bow and arrow and started messing around with it in the front yard. I got excited and picked it up, filled with confidence in my ability to hit almost anything. I took aim at a tree in the neighbors yard, drew back and promptly missed. The tree was only about 5 feet away. I was stunned. How could I have lost it so quickly? I didn't pick up a bow again until I was in college.

I kept a feeling of love for the woods in my mind all through my adolescence and into adulthood, but there really weren't any opportunities for me to be much of a woodsman. I didn't know anyone who hunted, or even went camping, so I didn't do any of that ether. Every time we went up to visit my grandparents and cousins in Bell County, they'd say stuff like "Why don't you stick around and go fishin' with is?" But we never did stick around. My dad tried to get me interested in golf, but it was useless. I basically just stuck to my room and my books. I developed a love for Native American bows and archery, and did a lot of thinking about how cool it would be if I could make my own stuff. Years and years later I learned how to do all that, and it's still a huge love in my life today.

Next time I'll tell you how I finally started to get back into the woods, in the early 1980s. Cheers.