by Elliot Reed
CLIMBING TREES
First make sure the tree isn’t dead on the inside. Some trees can look alive but are actually totally rotted out. A good heavy kick to the trunk will help you figure out if it’s rotten or not. If it sounds hollow or if your boot actually goes into the tree or if the tree falls down when you kick it then you know the tree is no good for climbing. Next make sure to check the canopy. That’s the part of the tree above your head. If someone’s already up there you will have to ask them for permission to climb, unless the tree is in fact your tree, in which case you will then have to decide whether to climb up there and join the other climber or whether you’ll ask that climber to get out of your tree first.
CHOICES OF LOCOMOTION
How you get somewhere depends on when you have to be there and what the land is like between you and that place. In my dreams I get everywhere by zip line or by zeppelin or by flying. If there’s a river, I canoe it. When I went to the moon in a dream and wrote a book about the different types of rocks there, I traveled with a rocket pack. In the real world, the options are more limited. If you have all day to get there, it’s best to walk through the woods. The woods are better than the road because people aren’t always trying to run you over or stop and pick you up. In the woods you can be left alone. If you come upon a tent in the woods and some clothes hanging from the branches of a tree nearby, don’t go knock on the tent. The tent-camper in the woods within city limits is the kind of person who wants to be left alone. If he were in a treehouse it would be different, but the fact is the fun’s long gone out of camping for him and he’s sleeping close to the dirt because that’s where he feels the safest.
CORK RAFT
Raft made of wine cork, toothpick, and napkin sail. Get a wine cork, stab a toothpick into it, and tape a triangular piece of cut-up napkin on the toothpick mast. Load it with passengers and let it go. The cork raft does well in a creek or a flooded basement. Its sail is mostly for show. It’ll still float if it tips. Put an ant on the cork raft and he’ll stay on the cork even if it rolls totally over. Load him on using a second toothpick you’ve gotten him to climb onto. Don’t expect to get a cork raft back after you’ve launched it. If you’re too lazy to build one yourself, go down to the creek that runs through the park and check among the driftwood and stones. You’ll find a lot of wine corks that were never cork rafts, and some whose masts have long since rotted away.
CAREFUL ENTRY OF NEGLECTED FORTS
If a fort has not been used for a while, like after the most rainy spring you can remember, odds are a snake or two will try it out. Often these are green tree snakes since, of course, forts are often found in trees. Most snakes are harmless, though some city parks are home to exotic venomous species that were kept as pets for a while and then released. A snake in a fort is best evicted with a long stick. If your fort is the type accessed from below with a trapdoor system, it’s best to poke a mirror up through the trapdoor before you stick your head in so you can check for snakes from a position of safety.
CAUTION IN FORTS
Visitors usually appear in springtime. This is because people are spending more time outside once the weather has turned nice, and inevitably they come across the tree forts built in city parks over the winter—tree forts built by crews of hardworking boys and girls who take breaks to warm their hands over barrel fires after hammering for hours in the frigid building season, some even traveling to and from the construction site on ice skates. In the spring is when I’d be up in the fort with my pals and we’d get visitors. Of course, we were prepared for visitors of any nature: we were armed to the teeth but also had a huge chestful of magazines, cards for playing and cards for trading, cigarettes, fireworks, jelly beans, and a radio. One time my uncle visited and took us all out to his mansion for Pop-Tarts and sodas. Another time, someone claiming to be a fireman tried to come rescue us from our perfectly comfortable tree fort. We had to beat on his fingers with a hammer.
COURAGE
Courage is doing something risky. Sometimes, just getting out of bed in the morning requires courage. Other times, you’ll find yourself working up the courage to do something risky and terrifying like jumping from a high place into a body of water. You’ll know you’re “working up the courage” when you look down and feel your body talking to you—like when you’re at the top of the cliff and the lake looks like it’s a mile below you, and there’s your pal Ned treading water in the expanding ripple from his cannonball and you feel your calves quiver, and what they’re saying to you in calf language is “don’t you dare,” and they’re probably right, you probably shouldn’t. Or, take another example, an example where courage can lead to more substantial and long-lasting gains than the momentary thrill of falling through nothingness: a half mile or so from your uncle’s mansion, where you’re living, is a run-down trailer. You don’t know the people who live in that trailer, but they look like they have an interesting take on life that might be different from the one you’re used to, and, more importantly, it looks like they really know how to have a good time. So one day you decide to go up there and talk to them. You go up there and knock on the door, which is a screen door, and behind which is darkness, darkness and the sound of a little radio playing fuzzy country music, and you call out HELLO into the darkness and knock again, and this time you hear something thumping in the darkness, thumps followed by a crash, and, instinctively, you run. Courage, in this situation, would be to return to the trailer and bang on the door once more. Courage would be asking yourself, “What’s the worst that could happen?” and not thinking for too long about the answer to that question.
CLEANING LADY
Cleaning ladies are mostly ladies, though there are one or two boys who have done it, but still the boss of the cleaning ladies, along with the people who have their mansions cleaned, call the cleaning ladies LADIES, even if one of those cleaning ladies is a boy. I know this because I was once a cleaning lady for a day. A teenager named Carla got me the job and I only lasted one day at it because it was the worst job I’d ever had and the pay was no good. Carla said they were desperate and since she kind of knew me I could join the crew. She said they’d hired a twelve-year-old before so thirteen was no big deal. I was on my way to the treehouse when Carla whistled at me from the front porch of her house. I stopped to see why she’d whistled and she told me the deal and said that work would start on Saturday. Tomorrow was Saturday, and Carla said that the boss would pay in cash and that one day’s work could get me as much as fifty bucks. Fifty bucks would be enough to buy a camouflage parachute I’d had my eye on so I said yes to the job. This was sometime after the flood, a little before the gypsies came. Cleaning houses was a bad job right off the bat. First, Carla was thirty minutes late to pick me up. When she showed up she was in a truck being driven by her friend, another cleaning lady named Liz. Liz was so fat I could barely squeeze between her and Carla in the truck, and Liz was mean. Liz had a bottle of schnapps and was drinking it that morning and saying that whatever Carla said was stupid. Carla talked to Liz about me like I wasn’t there. She told Liz that I was probably going to an orphanage and that my friend Ned had told her I wasn’t like other kids. “You just tell this kid to do something and he’ll get into it, whatever it is,” she said, and Liz looked over at me for a second but then looked back at the road and took another sip of schnapps, which smelled a lot like a cleaning product. I could think of plenty of things I wouldn’t do whether or not you told me to do it—drink that schnapps, for instance—but I didn’t say anything because I could tell I wasn’t supposed to talk and I could tell that it didn’t really matter what anybody said. My feet got cold because the heat in the truck didn’t work and I’d stepped in a puddle when I was getting in the car. Carla remembered she’d forgotten the vacuum so we had to go get it from her house. Liz called Carla a bunch of bad names on the way there and Carla didn’t say anything back. She just smoked a cigarette and turned up the radio. Then Liz looked at a tree on the side of the road and call
ed the tree a bad name, and that’s when I realized bad names were most of the words that Liz knew, or at least the only ones she really wanted to use. After we got the vacuum we went to the wrong mansion at the wrong time. Carla said I should go in first, and that the key to the mansion was under a flowerpot by the door. I found the key and went in. But inside, a woman wearing a white robe was vacuuming. She screamed when she saw me. I said I was a cleaning lady, though I knew it was a dumb thing to say because she was already cleaning, which meant we were in the wrong mansion. She yelled at me to get out, that I was supposed to be there on Tuesday. I said I was sorry and I got out. I ran back to the truck where Carla and Liz were waiting and I told them what had happened and they just laughed at me. Liz called the woman in the robe a bad name without even knowing what she looked like. In the next house we went to I had to scrub dog pee off a carpet while a cocker spaniel watched me from the cage where his owners kept him locked up all day. I cleaned up the pee on the carpet, and then I saw the puddle of pee the dog was standing in. I let him out of there to clean out the cage and at that point I realized I might as well let the dog out of the house altogether, which I did, and which I felt good about, but which I also figured ended my career as a cleaning lady, so I found the master bathroom, filled the bath with a couple inches of hot water, and warmed up my feet. There were six bottles of shampoo on the edge of the bathtub, each of which had something called jojoba in it. Back in the truck, I told Carla and Liz that I quit. Carla gave me five bucks and I was fine with it because of what I’d been able to do for the dog, which nobody ever said anything about afterward, so I assume he hit the woods for good where he became wild again and sired lots of mutts. I thought Liz would be mad or say something mean to me when I told her I quit but she didn’t. She just ate a sandwich and said nothing. I noticed that Liz had some teeth missing, and that her missing teeth forced her to chew only with the right side of her mouth, which made me forget about how mean she’d been earlier. You have to be tough to be a cleaning lady, tough in a way I guess I wasn’t.
COYOTES IN THE PARK
Coyotes live in the wilderness but they also live in big-city parks. The sound of a pack of coyotes can be ominous (see OMINOUS) or it can be thrilling. Animals perk up when they hear coyotes. Some animals get scared by the sound of coyotes, while others rush off to join the pack. Let’s say you’re sitting on the porch of your uncle’s mansion and it’s sunset and the coyotes start making noise somewhere in the distance. You hear yelps and high-pitched howls in one direction, and they’ll start up all at once and then drop right back off. Right after that you hear another group of coyotes calling to the first coyote pack, responding, talking coyote, from someplace else. The sound of coyotes might cause you to feel strangely lonely, especially if you’re prone to getting lonely right before you go to bed (see LONELY). Let’s say your uncle starts howling back at the coyotes. He will howl, he will bark, and he will decide to visit the casino. But let’s say you’ve once again snuck into the abandoned Victorian in the park downtown with your friend Ned, and by the light of a flashlight the two of you are looking through an old book you found in the top-floor bedroom when the coyotes start howling. If it’s just you and Ned and you’re already a little nervous since you’re in a place where you’re not supposed to be and the coyotes sound like they’re close—they sound like they must be living in one of the old trees you know of in the park that’s right outside the Victorian—you’ll feel afraid. If the book you’re reading is a huge old dictionary and the page you’re flipped to is the page with the definition of COYOTE (see COINCIDENCE), and you hear four legs coming up the creaking wooden stairs, the tack-tack-tack of a dog’s toenails outside the room you’re in, and the door to the room is open, the flashlight beam will shake in your hand and your body will be frozen in fear. You may become sure you’re about to die. Ned may have a breakdown (see DOWN, BREAKING). If it’s a coyote coming up the stairs, you will have to fight it off. If it’s the guard dog coming up the stairs with his tail between his legs, calm Ned down and leave before the guard dog works up his courage and decides he’s bad.
CRISPY OLD PLASTIC
Forts designed and made from scratch are a lot better than the store-bought forts made of plastic parts that you take out of a box and put together according to a diagram. For some reason, plastic forts are replacing the old-fashioned hammer-and-nails variety, especially in neighborhoods like the one my uncle lived in. One good thing about a plastic fort is that it will never rot. Over many years, though, the plastic walls will slowly be crisped by sunlight. If you walk the woods and weed-buried fields along the outskirts of suburban neighborhoods, it’s only a matter of time before you’ll find an old plastic fort overturned and half-hidden by weeds. Finding one of these abandoned structures, you will feel the need to learn about who lived in it. At one time, you’ll think, this fort was ruled by two children, and those children imagined it was a castle. You’ll stand there looking into the dirt-filled corners, in light coming through the plastic, and you’ll try to imagine what she looks like now, the grown-up girl who played in this fort, who carved flowers in its walls and the next day abandoned it.
CONSTRUCTION SITE
A construction site is a place where workers and machines are building a new building or tearing one down, or both. If you play a lot of hide-and-seek, odds are you’ve played it at a construction site or you’ve at least considered it as a possibility, but the first thing the construction workers do when they start a new construction site is put up a huge fence around it so that kids can’t come in there and play with their tools or steal supplies for their treehouses. Construction-site hide-and-seek is best played at night just as long as there’s no night watchman or any other kind of Daddy (see DADDIES) around to bust you. Besides that there’s only one other thing you need to be careful about: don’t get swallowed up by a pipe. I remember I was once running full-tilt across a construction site at night. Ned was chasing me. I vaulted a pile of two-by-fours, swung on a chain that was dangling from a metal beam, crawled through a concrete tunnel partially filled with mud, got up, ran some more, then saw a wide plastic hole in the ground and stopped to take a look. Ned was way behind me by then so I had a little time. Well, the plastic hole, it turned out, was a pipe in the ground that went down really far. I realized it was a great place to hide, so I lowered myself into it and dangled from the rim of the pipe. I was able to dangle there for a minute or two before my arms started to give out and I pulled myself out of it. Then I called Ned over and showed him the pipe. We dropped a rock down there and never heard it hit, so we established that the hole was very deep. Around a month later Ned came up to me and said that some kid in the first grade had fallen in there and gone down at least three hundred feet and died. When I think about that kid I feel sick.
CANOEING PONDS
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: snakes love taking shelter beneath overturned canoes. Most people store their canoes on the edges of ponds, bottom up, paddles below, everything ready for a quick launch. So many people have done this for so long that snakes have gotten used to it and have taught each other about the shaded grass under the canoe. Whenever you turn over a canoe, you should be prepared to encounter a snake. The snake, when its canoe has been overturned, will make a quick break for the water. Do not stand between the snake and the water. Allow the snake to go, and always check for any more snakes that may have been trapped in the canoe as you flipped it over. The last thing you want is to realize you’re sharing the canoe with a snake while you’re out there in the middle of the pond. Once you’ve conducted the snake check, you’re all ready to canoe. If it’s a windy day on the pond, be ready to encounter the reeds and the cattails. If it’s a calm, placid day on the pond and the water looks like a piece of glass, you’re in for an easy paddle. You get around in the canoe by paddling or by pushing off the bottom with a long stick. But be careful: if you’re using a stick to pole around the pond, say you’re trying to be silent so that you
can bag a bullfrog or two, take care not to push yourself into deep water where your pole cannot touch the bottom. In this case, when you try to push off the bottom with your pole, you will fall overboard.