Walking

When younger I was the fastest runner in the neighborhood. I could out run just about anybody and I had moves too. I always got picked early when we chose teams. Often I was the captain or the chooser. I knew most of the players in my neighborhood and what value they would have on my team. Our team games were baseball, football and hockey. 



Big guys usually were chosen last. Generally they were not as valuable as they were slower and in the sports we played, speed was always an asset. Agility was also an asset and generally the smaller guys were more agile too. Later in life I found out that big guys stayed big usually, but developed a lot in agility and speed. I found that was a source of concern in high school as I was often caught and thrown around like a rag doll.



But my athletic abilities gave me a confidence in myself that seemed to spill over into other things. I was a good student and enjoyed going to school and learning about most everything. I loved science and math.  I was considered perhaps smarter than I really was. Mr. Beck, a fifth grade teacher, gave me a chemical and the instruction to "make a road torch burn orange and you'll be rich". Why he gave the stuff to me as summer break was starting I can't say. I am thinking back on it and surmising that Mr. Beck was just cleaning out his cabinet. I don't think road workers ever had orange torches, but they went to battery operated orange lights...sometimes on orange barrels. If I had ever worked on the project maybe I would be wealthy now, but I don't recall spending a minute on it. Summer vacation was for sports, not thinking about something that would be obsolescent in a few years. Does anybody even remember those little round, flaming torches that used to be near road projects? They burned yellow and I missed my chance to make them burn orange.



But running without competition was the most enjoyable thing I remember as a kid. No other person with whom to contend. Running would fill my senses and give me a feeling unlike any other. On these runs without human competition I felt closest to my world and my place in it. In fact, running gave me my favorite status in his world. It gave me confidence in myself and it felt so good that I never wanted to be average in anything. I wanted to be special.



I often ran in the field near my house. I lived at the end of a street where there was a very large open field with some trees, but mainly just weeds and the sort of scrubby trees that might some day be a forest if left alone. The trees were smaller last year when a shopping center consumed about a third of the field. While I was upset that some of the field was gone, the new sewer pipes and run-off ponds were interesting to explore. At least when they were new to me they were fun.Later I felt a bit more confined and perhaps even bored on these runs.It was the same old clutter every run. I ached for something new to discover.



The shrinking world I lived in was considered suburbia by my parents. I had heard them talk about being smart enough to live well away from where dad worked. Dad worked in the city of Detroit while mom felt safe and secure at home apparently. The city seemed to take forever to drive to and the buildings were much bigger than the flat suburban landscape. I only saw the city when dad drove us to Red Wing, Lion or Tiger games. Dad, had never taken me or my brothers to the office where he worked. If his office looked anything like the areas around Briggs Stadium or Olympia it was pretty crappy looking. Maybe dad would be embarrassed, but I really didn't know. Somehow I pictured the Penobscot Building where dad worked as looking like pictures I had has seen of Berlin after WWII. I had seen the top of the Penobscot building and thought it looked so impressive that dad would be proud to show it to his kids up close. But he never did. Maybe only the top was impressive.



Jay, my youngest brother, said he opened the glove compartment in the car one day and found a gun. Dad had yelled at him to, " Leave that alone! Don't ever touch that again! That gun has a hair trigger". He never got an explanation for why dad had a gun, but Jay and I figured maybe he was a spy or something. Why else would a person like their dad need a gun?   



The world was getting smaller for as I grew older, but I knew there was a big part of it I did not know anything about. In school they talked about the size of the earth and the sun and the moon. I sensed a vastness that I could not comprehend, but it was all where I wasn't. My world was shrinking. I felt my best bet for seeing part of this other world was to expand my running in different directions. So the next Saturday I was going to go across Plymouth Road and see what was there. I knew there was something different!



Plymouth Road was the northern boundary for my known world. Middlebelt Road was on the east and Merriman the west. Joy Road was to the south. our house was near the end of Henry Ruff Road and the intersection with Orangelawn. I had seen all of these four boundary roads from the inside, but had never crossed any of them by foot or bike. One heard there was some neat stuff past Plymouth Road. Stuff I had never seen anyway. There was a place behind Sibley Lumber where some older kids swam "BA", bare assed.



I decided that Saturday was the best day for this new adventure and that the Big Boy on the other side of Plymouth was where my first landing point would  be. Hopefully nobody his parents knew would see him. Parents always spread the news, be it good or not so good. And I knew that my parents would not like my crossing of the busy Plymouth Road.



Behind the Big Boy I discovered a huge open field. There was junk from cement slabs to old pipes haphazardly pushed or dropped in their place many years ago. Farther to the west there was a small hilly area and a fence perched atop and running north to south. I headed to the fence to see what was being guarded. The fence looked shiny from where I was, so I suspected it might be newer.













Work in progress