Bunker
11:51 on Tuesday, September 14, 2004 • 5 responses
I spent a long time this summer traveling through rural areas, which naturally made me think, in simultaneously romantic and masochistic terms, about my childhood summers in rural Illinois.
As a kid, summers were hard for me physically. An asthmatic child who couldn’t roll around in the grass without breaking into hives and who couldn’t really handle super-humid midwest US days for very long, I found summers to be much like that which winter probably signifies for most people—long days locked indoors.
This drainage tube—one of three arranged side-by-side—was pretty much the only outdoor place I hung out in summer. Long before satellite tracking became mainstream, neighborhood kids somehow managed to rig up a system by which they could pinpoint my location and, within minutes, summon legions of bullies to send my way. For one reason or another, they never clued into the fact that I was hiding in these tubes, fishing in the farmer’s pond into which these tubes emptied flood water from the lake across the road in the spring.
Actually, I know the reason why the neighborhood kids stayed away from these tubes. The farmer who owned the pond was a mean motherfucker. One day he showed up with some farmhands at a treehouse fort built by some neighborhood kids on the edge of his property, saying he had to take it down. When, in protest, the kids wouldn’t come out, he and his helpers just started hacking away at the walls. I don’t know what makes a good farmer, but clearly this guy missed his calling as a prison camp commandant.
Rumor had it that if he saw kids fishing on his property he’d fire at them with a BB gun. I was careful, then, to cast my line into the pond from 4-5 feet back into the tube. I went months without being detected, then one day in the late afternoon, I heard a sharp, tinny ping against the corrugated tube. I dropped my fishing rod and squirreled further back into the tube, and when he left, I ran home.
I eventually came to an agreement with this farmer. One day I rode up to him on my bike while he was mending a cow fence. I told him that a few weeks back he shot at me and that I didn’t think it was very nice (I was maybe 7 at the time, and “not very nice” was about as forceful as I could be). I don’t remember the details of the conversation, but he said the reason he shot at kids is because they always left trash in his pond and in his fields, and that the cows ate anything they could find, which killed one of them a few years back.
So at a very early age, I negotiated my first deal with someone outside my family. I told him that each time I went fishing, I’d bring a bag and collect any trash I saw, if he would let me fish from the tube without shooting at me. It was a sweet deal for me, because he still shot at other kids, so in this arrangement, I had exclusive rights to a good fishing spot and a “heavy” to watch my back.
I took this picture while in college, sometime in the early 90s. I’ve been back only once since that time to find that the old neighborhood is of course completely devoid of any cornfields or cow pastures. It’s all been magically transformed into a suburban utopia, which is to say an architectural nightmare of prefab house after prefab house, and a cultural cesspool of Walmart lawn decorations and SUVs parked in driveways.
I have very few pleasant memories from that neighborhood. Part of me revels in the knowledge that it has more or less been paved over, in the malicious, elitist sense that the neighborhood got, in some ways, what it deserved. I do wonder, though, if the draintubes are still there, and whether if I go back someday, I’d find a child in them. In a really strange way I think I’d find that comforting.