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Summer Lost
Published 7/12/2002

Guy Wheatley
The Texarkana Gazette
 

I remember the sounds of locusts in the late summer afternoons. June through August in the early 70s always brought the sounds of locusts in the late evening. My mind carries images of large lawns, giant trees and a sinking sun.
Usually long grass is not appreciated in the rice country of southeast Arkansas. Mosquitoes like it too much. The grass is usually clipped as short as the mower will go, and by mid-July it is thin and brown. The faintly sweet smell of dry grass also is part of the mental snapshot I carry from those days.
Summers were longer back then. We got all of June, July and most of August off from school. I can't remember what I did with most of the time. I've got fragmentary images of falling, or being pushed, into the creek by one of my friends.
The creek was called "Rocky Bottom." It carried that name since my father's time, but I have no idea who came up with it. As best as I can tell, there's not a rock within 100 miles of Rocky Bottom. It was a muddy flood ditch that ran through the woods behind my house. It was close enough that we could get there in a few minutes, but far enough away from adults to be attractive. In our imaginations, the muddy banks of Rocky Bottom were somewhere deep in the Amazon.
The Amazon illusion didn't take a lot of imagination. This is hardwood bottomland. From March to April, half of it is likely to be under water. The trees are mostly tightly packed cottonwoods with a few pecans, gums and oaks thrown in. The ground is covered in a tangle of dead limbs. Grape and muscadine vines are everywhere. You have to hack a trail through the breaks to get anywhere.
The largest part of our domain was on the other side of the creek from my house. The usual method for crossing was to swing across on a grapevine. Other times you could find where a tree had fallen across and use it. We even built a bridge one summer, large enough to ride across on a motor cycle. The next year's flood washed it away and we were back to grapevines and dead trees.
The summers of my 13th, 14th and 15th years were spent stomping around those woods with a 22-cal. rifle, a knife and an axe. It's a wonder I'm here to write about it. We built tree houses and dug tunnels in those woods. We built one bridge and numerous log cabins from native material. I'm not sure who owned that land, but he supplied a lot of timber to our projects.
We weren't the first kids to inhabit those woods. We were all related in some way. Half of the gang was a direct cousin, the other half were at least cousins of my cousins. I've seen old pictures of my father and my friend's fathers as kids in the same woods. I just assumed that our grandfathers had haunted area in their time, and I assumed my descendents would carry on the tradition.
I was back in my hometown of Gillett a few years ago and decided to check out Rocky Bottom. I couldn't find the trail into the woods through the tangle of brush from what had been my back yard. This didn't surprise me much. I figured the kids now finding adventure in the woods sere simply coming in from another direction. I knew that as soon as I reached the creek, I'd find their trails and construction projects. I hoped I might even bump into one of them. I was sure I'd know the kid's father.
I hacked my way to the creek with a machete without finding an intersecting trail. When I reached the water I followed it the entire two miles that stretches through the woods without finding any sign of recent activity. No trails, no construction projects, no soft drink cans or candy wrappers. Nothing. I did find the remains of an old campfire. There were old cans in it, rusted almost to powder. These were steel, not aluminum, and came from an earlier time. I had moved away, but many of my friends had stayed and had kids. Where were they?
Heading out of town, I noticed several ball fields where once vacant lots had stood. They were all full, and appeared to hold the entire population of Gillett. I've never been much of a sports fan, but I stopped by to see if I'd find any of my old running buddies. Sure enough I ran into a couple of guys from the old crowd.
I asked about the new ball fields. They proudly told me about the various leagues that keep modern kids at practice or in games about every spare moment. The fields were built with volunteer money and time by the parents. The kids are under constant supervision every moment. "We didn't have anything like this when we were kids," one of the guys said.
"Yeah," I thought to myself. "Thank God."

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