DISTURBIA

First, the names of the streets: Valleyview at the top, Hudsonview in the middle, and then mine--Eleanor Drive.  Of course my street was named after a woman.  No lofty vista name for me, just a girl, some girl long lost to the NYC transplants who moved up here pushing their backs against real live farm country, Westchester County's last gasp before the rest of the state started its rural Hudson-Valley-ing in earnest.  Valley, Husdon, Eleanor, all perpendicular to Crossroads St., flowing downhill at a ninety degree angle to the others.

When our side yard collapsed I remember (maybe it's all made up) that it was attributed to an underground river, the flow of water from down the hill above us beneath the lawn I mowed constantly in the summer, below there was a cavern I would have gladly gotten lost in like a Hardy boy had I know it was there all along.  And the nest of yellow jackets that took up resisdence each June took on a whole new significance--if there was a cave, a network of vestibules beneath the grass maybe this tiny hole from which an industrious line of bees erupted when it started to get really hot was just the tip of an iceberg of drones and deep below a massive queen lay on her side spraying a hiss of larval insects coating the walls with a mania of menace.  One false step beneath the tangle of forsythia and neglected grape vine and down you'd go, stung over and over until you bloated and puss'd like a boiling pot of maple syrup.  

Behind the house a plateau for the rest of the neighborhood standing tall above, shitting and pissing into the water table, a pool collected momentarily in sight of our porch and the septic fields overran.  We soon learned to make home plate on the side of the house instead of behind though the backyard's longness and flatness was a perfect arena for one-on-one ball; your Keds ("7.07's" as they were known in local parlance) soon soaked well enough leaving an Armstrong footprint in the bright green well-fertilized lawn, teaching an adequate lesson of stink about this no-play zone.  From there, a rock wall, a line of trees and then an open field, another downhill, a wintertime sled hill, ending in a place known as "Freedom Gardens."  These names all must sound like something different to the casual reader.  To thems what was raised in this magical kingdom "Freedom Gardens" was an irony of the scariest, bedtime story, fairy tale splendor--the wolf in a red cape, the menacing hag with a tasty apple.  Nothing "Free" ever lived there in our experience--it weren't no garden!  Grown over fountains and lawn sculpture and half-dilapidated manses with B-movie vines and Boo Radley's peeking out from paint-peeling windows.  Sometimes they roamed weirdly and haphazardly in too-small clothing and over grown hair (where there was hair) or disturbingly bald-patched and blue lipped--wild-eyed monsters to a 7 year old being given an unsupervised run of nature.

Dennis almost drowned in the stream after sliding off an algaed rock.  I extended a limb as he wirlpooled momentarily and he dragged himself out.  We roamed the woods.  Down here at the very base of what would be known as a "development" in future years, everything collected.  Swamps swamped up in the spring and dried out in the summer.  The mud shimmered irredescent for some reason we couldn't understand but we did know if you clobbered the "skunk cabbage" with a stick you could raise a holy smell.

One summer we found a dead dog.  We determined that he must've fallen off the log and lost the ability to move and just died there.  Who knows what really happened but that's the story I have buried in the deep of my memory for no good reason.  Maybe he wandered down here in the woods because he was too sick though I know cats were more likely to go off and die than dogs were.  Maybe some Dad dumped him here, unwanted.  When we found him though his stomach was a boliling stew of maggots and Drake retched behind a tree while we laughed at him until we peed our bell bottoms.

If you kept walking you would eventually come upon an abandoned stone house, graffiti'd, blown out and collapsing.  The trees hung over and every shadow lengthened eerily.  No one would ever go in there.  Here was the smell of moulded wood and sweet discarded beer bottles filled with rain water, pot smoker campfire and garbage.  I came upon an old issue of Hustler and peeled open a water logged centerfold and found a leering pink pussy, pried open by a leering pale model, the first one I really got a good look at.

I know why the Blair Witch Project was a really scary movie.  I don't like nature all that much.  When you wander too far from home--from the safety of the lodge and the park ranger--the possibilities begin to expand, and anything can happen.  A line of cops a mile long could comb the woods and they may never find you.  I'm not embarrassed to say I enjoy a nice mall.  I'm not looking for anything exotic.  Maybe I got too much nature as a kid.  Maybe I drank my fill.  I can find a certain peace and quiet on a crowded street, a dirty old bus, a train car lumbering through a rat infested subway tunnel.

In my nightmares I wake up in the woods, not knowing the way home.