My favorite place in town. Been coming here since I was five years old.
In the shade of a small maple grove, a keg of beer sat on ice as the men played softball and the women moved about arranging platters of homemade food, stopping periodically to flip burgers over the fire. They exchanged niceties and town gossip, both in equal measure. A small group of folks, who likely preferred a sport that could be played with beer-in-hand, found themselves at the horseshoe pit. Iron clanked as shoes circled spikes in the ground. The town’s children ran free across the river and through forest trails. Clothes were wet and faces muddy, bodies salty with sweat and sticky with watermelon juice. So much dirt under fingernails. Nobody seemed to mind. Dad pitched the softball game in denim cutoffs and work boots, talk about a classic seventies outfit if ever there was one. Six year old me wondered if anyone knew he was once scouted by the Red Sox farm team. Vietnam saw an end to that possibility. No matter, a pick up game at the town picnic with the promise of a few cold ones was enough for him. Or so he let on.
The town picnic that I recall from my childhood no longer happens. The parking lot of this remarkably beautiful place holds about forty cars at best, something that worked fine in 1978, but not so much for the scope of today’s town population. I found myself there yesterday, walking the woods, entire place to myself. Such is your chances if you're among the few who finds forty degrees and rainy a good time for a hike. Solitude is the reward. I was having one of those antsy “I have to run a few errands” kind of afternoons, and well, the photo up there is my idea of running errands.
Not much has changed through the years. The river continues to barrel through bedrock, but to my untrained eye it looks the same as it ever did. Although the forest did grow smaller. Funny how that happens when a seven year old becomes a seventeen year old becomes a twenty-seven year old, and so on. So much of my life has happened here. Camping along the once abandoned train tracks, about a mile into the woods; today the track is refurbished and serves as a much used bike system, which is cool too because it gets people outside and moving. It’s just different. As I did in high school, I still look for that perfect slant of light through the trees or across the water, camera in hand. Today my gratification is instant, there is no darkroom nor the slow anticipatory build as an image reveals itself in a tray of developing solution. Bittersweet. There was a guy named Tom who sold nickel and dime bags out of the back of his van. He loved to read the bible and would often share passages with those who cared to listen. To pass the time, Tom enjoyed foraging through the swap pile at the town dump and always had some new to him lamp or book or knick knack to show off. He’d use these things to decorate his van. It was impressive. Sometimes these items became currency for other goods, always they were to be taken notice of, and admired. One day we arrived to meet up with friends, as was often the thing to do after school, given the lack of cell phones and all. Do you remember that? Checking in with friends by visiting one of the few designated meet up places, to see who was there and determine what sort of riffraff could be caused before dinner? (Kidding. I was a lot of things, but a rouser of riffraff was not one of them. At least in my mind.) On this day, Tom’s van was parked in the shady spot he loved, but it stood locked and empty. He was nowhere to be found. As it turned out, the cops had caught on to his little cottage industry, and I’m not talking about the swap shop of dump treasures. Busted. As far as I know, nobody ever did see Tom again. In the weeks that followed, I remember people missing his kindness and good nature, but nobody said a word about the absence of dime bags.
This place and I, we go way back. The stories here are endless.
See what happens when you "run errands?" A full-on trip down memory lane, when all you were in search of was a breath of fresh air. Perhaps they are one in the same.