Growing Up Feral

A wild summer of freedom, family turmoil, and growing up in rural Oklahoma in 1977.

Growing Up Feral

         I learned to drive a truck before I learned my multiplication tables. Nine years old, both boots planted on the clutch because my leg alone wasn't up to the job, easing a ton and a half of hay truck down a dirt road while some grown man I trusted more than I probably should have leaned out the window and hollered instructions I only half understood. Nobody thought this was remarkable. It was simply Tuesday, and there was hay to move, and I was the boy standing closest to the truck when the need for a driver presented itself. That was rural Oklahoma in the 1970s, and if you want to understand the summer I turned twelve, you have to understand that first: out there, in that particular time and place, a boy became useful long before anybody got around to deciding whether he was ready.
         I won't tell you it was a better way to grow up than the way children grow up now. I've turned that question over enough times to know it doesn't hold water either way. It wasn't better. It was only different, the way a river is different from a road, both of them getting you somewhere, neither one particularly interested in your comfort along the way. What I will tell you is that by the standards folks use today, with their car seats and their tracking apps and their sunscreen reapplied on the hour, I grew up something closer to feral than domesticated. We didn't have a word for it back then. We just called it going outside, and outside was where a boy spent every daylight hour he could steal and a fair number of the dark ones besides.
         The summer of 1977 sits at the center of all this, the way a good campfire sits at the center of a story that wanders off into the dark and always finds its way back. I was twelve that year, living in a town so small it barely troubled the map, maybe twenty-five hundred souls if you counted generously and didn't mind fudging the number of dogs. I had a bicycle held together more by faith than by hardware, a rotating cast of friends who were available for adventure at a moment's notice, a few dollars in my pocket on a good day, and more freedom than any sensible adult would hand a child if they stopped to think about it. Nobody stopped to think about it. That was rather the point.
         Here is the part I've had to make my peace with as an old man looking back at a boy: that same year, my whole world was coming apart at the seams, and I was too busy having the time of my life to notice. My stepfather was a drinking man, the kind of drinking that rearranges a household around it without ever announcing itself by name, and that was the year he and my mother finally gave up trying to hold things together. I had a little sister to look out for and a baby half-brother still small enough to carry, and somewhere in the middle of all that upheaval, I met the man who was actually my father, a stranger with my own face who walked into my life with no more warning than a summer thunderstorm. Any way you slice it, that's a great deal of weather for a twelve-year-old boy to weather. And yet when I dig up that summer from wherever memory keeps such things, what comes up first isn't the storm. What comes up first is sunlight on water and the smell of hot asphalt and the particular freedom of a screen door slapping shut behind me on my way to somewhere better.
         My solution to a hard year, it turns out, was not to be home for it. Fortunately for me, a boy in a town that size had no shortage of places to disappear to, and disappearing, I have come to understand, was less a rebellion than a kind of quiet survival, dressed up in the clothes of summer fun so nobody, myself included, had to look straight at what it really was.
         We had two babysitters in that town, and neither of them cost more than pocket change, and neither of them, strictly speaking, was a person. The public swimming pool ran the daylight shift, and the roller rink took over Friday and Saturday nights, and between the two of them, a mother could hand a boy five dollars, drop him at the door, and drive off with a clean conscience for hours at a stretch. Five dollars doesn't sound like much now, but in 1977 it was a small fortune to a boy who knew how to make it stretch. It got you through the door and bought you something cold to drink and something salty to eat, and if you were careful, and I generally was, you might even ride home with a nickel or two still rattling around in your pocket, proof that you'd managed your little economy like a grown man.
         Nobody had a telephone they carried around in a pocket back then. Nobody was tracking a boy's whereabouts on some glowing little screen. There was no text message asking where I'd got to, no photograph required as proof of life. Once my mother's car pulled out of the gravel lot, I belonged entirely to myself until she came back for me, and I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to make that sound lonelier than it was. We were unsupervised, technically, the way a fish is unsupervised in a pond it can't swim out of. Everybody in that town knew everybody. My grandmother's house was a bicycle ride away, and so were the houses of two or three aunts, and in a town that size there was always some grown woman hanging wash on a line or some older man rocking on a porch who knew me by sight, knew my mother, knew my grandmother, and could have told you inside of thirty seconds exactly whose troublesome boy I was. That town was physically enormous to a child on a bicycle and socially about the size of a matchbox, and it's that combination, I've come to believe, that let a whole pack of us run wilder than we had any business running without anybody actually getting lost to the world. We weren't watched, not the way children are watched now. But we were known, every one of us, down to our bones, and there is a kind of safety in being known that doesn't look like safety at all until you're old enough to recognize it from a distance.
         Being known, of course, did nothing whatsoever to slow us down.
         We didn't buy bicycles in those days so much as assemble them out of whatever the neighborhood had to offer, the way a magpie builds a nest out of anything shiny enough to catch its eye. A frame from one wreck, wheels salvaged off another, handlebars that matched nothing, a chain that had seen better decades. We'd tinker and swap and curse under our breath until the thing rolled, and it needed to roll by Thursday, because the weekend was coming and the weekend had expectations. Those expectations mostly involved ramps built out of whatever boards and cinder blocks we could drag into a backyard, engineered by nobody, tested by everybody, the whole science of it amounting to stacking something under a plank, pedaling like the devil himself was gaining on you, and hoping for the best. Every jump that worked demanded a bigger one the next time. Whatever got bent or broken over a weekend went back into somebody's garage during the week to be hammered straight or cannibalized for parts, and by Thursday we were, more often than not, back in business, ready to run the whole ragged fleet through the wringer again.
         Eventually, as was probably inevitable, I jumped a car. I want it on the record that the bicycle did not survive the encounter. I did, though not without leaving a fair amount of skin behind on the gravel, and I limped home with the particular pride of a boy who has just discovered the outer edge of his own luck and lived to brag about it.
         We also had a tree house, which is too plain a word for what that place actually meant to us. It sat a good quarter mile from the nearest house, far enough that it might as well have belonged to another country entirely, a country with no laws written by adults and no borders they cared to patrol. That was where we smoked cigarettes we'd pilfered from wherever cigarettes could be pilfered, and I don't recall any of us actually enjoying the smoking part of it. The smoking wasn't the point. The point was the stealing, the sneaking, the striking of the match in a place no grown-up would ever think to look, the sheer outlaw thrill of doing something we had been expressly told not to do and getting clean away with it. Older boys supplied us with magazines we had no business owning either, and we studied them with the diligence of scholars, purely, I assure you, in the interest of education. Mostly, though, we just sat up in those boards and talked, the way boys do when the whole future still looks unclaimed. We talked about girls we were too shy to speak to in daylight. We talked about the men we were going to become, and the places we were going to see, and the lives waiting for us somewhere just past the edge of that little town, lives we were absolutely certain would be grander than the one we'd been handed.
         It strikes me as one of the stranger tricks memory plays, that I look back across nearly fifty years now and count that summer among the finest of my life, while the boy sitting in that tree house at the time was already dreaming of some better, more glamorous life waiting for him somewhere else. He had no earthly idea he was living in the good years. He thought the good years were still ahead of him, out past the county line, and it took me the better part of a lifetime to understand he'd had it backward the whole time.
         That was also the summer my mother bought me a lawn mower on credit, and I went into business, though of course nobody in that town would ever have used a word so grand for it. I started mowing lawns, and I mowed with the seriousness of a man twice my age, two lawns most days, sometimes three or four if the weather held. I handed every dollar over to my mother, believing, in the uncomplicated way a boy believes what he's told, that she was tucking it away in some account with my name on it, building toward some future I couldn't yet picture. She'd peel a little of it back for me, enough for the pool, enough for the rink, now and then enough for a plastic model kit that I'd spend a rainy afternoon gluing together at the kitchen table. I thought it was a fine arrangement. What I did not know, could not have known, was that my mother was out of work that summer, that she and my stepfather had come apart at the seams, and that the money a twelve-year-old boy was earning pushing a mower through other people's crabgrass was quietly keeping groceries on our table. I didn't know we needed it. I didn't know I was, in my small way, holding up a corner of the roof. I only knew I was making money, spending Saturdays at the pool, Friday nights at the rink, and building plastic airplanes on the kitchen table. By any measure a twelve-year-old boy could apply to his own life, I was living about as fine a life as a boy could ask for.
         There were other roads out of the house besides a lawn mower, and we traveled most of them on bicycle. Distance meant very little to us that summer, since nobody was expecting us to report our position. We'd walk the bikes when the ground demanded it and ride them when it didn't, and one of our favorite far horizons was the railroad track that ran out past the edge of town toward a trestle spanning the river. We'd follow those rails out there the way pilgrims follow a road toward something holy. Once we arrived, we'd climb out onto the catwalks that ran alongside the track and wait, sometimes, for a train to come thundering across, the whole structure shuddering under us while we held on and hollered into the noise. I can hear, from this distance, exactly how that sentence lands on a grown man's ear. At twelve it didn't strike any of us as complicated in the least. Train's coming. Get out on the catwalk. Train passes. Go right back to whatever you were doing before. Afterward we'd climb down and swim in the river below, or wander off to a pond, or settle for the creek if that was closer, and half the time swimming didn't mean actual swimming so much as simply getting good and wet on a hot day. Nobody tested that water for a single thing. Nobody thought to pack sunscreen. I don't recall a single bottle of water among the lot of us. We drank straight from garden hoses, the way generations of boys before us had, and somehow, against what modern wisdom would surely predict, we survived it.
         Daylight wasn't where our adventuring ended, either. Some nights a friend or two would spread sleeping bags out in my backyard, and I use the word sleep here loosely, because very little actual sleeping ever took place. The bags stayed put. We did not. Once the town had gone properly quiet, we'd slip off into it. There is something I still don't have quite the right words for about being twelve years old and walking the streets of a sleeping town at three o'clock in the morning, as though you and your friends were the last people left on earth, and the whole place had been left unlocked just for you. That town employed exactly one police officer, and we made something of a sport out of avoiding him, though I never once thought of us as criminals in those hours. Ducking that officer was simply part of the game, the way hide-and-seek is part of a game and not an actual crime against the person hiding. No unlocked building went unexplored on our watch. No idle train car, no leaning barn door, escaped our curiosity. We weren't there to take a single thing. We were there because the door was open and we wanted to know what was on the other side of it, and if you'd asked us at the time what we were up to, we'd have told you, dead serious, that we were explorers. I doubt the police officer would have signed off on that description, but he never caught us long enough to argue the point.
         We burned our own garbage in a rusted barrel out back, same as most everybody in town did, and nobody thought a thing of it. Trash went in. A match went in after it. Today, that sort of thing comes wrapped in warning labels, permits, and a healthy dose of liability. Back then it was simply how Tuesday got handled. Fire, in that world, was just another tool a child might reasonably be trusted to use. Trucks were apparently much the same, since by twelve I already had three years of driving under my belt, and it wasn't unusual, on a bad night, for me to be the one behind the wheel steering my stepfather home on account of his drinking. I understood some of what was happening in our house that summer. I understand a great deal more of it now. Alcoholism is a word for grown-ups to use. At twelve you don't have the word. You only have the behavior, and you learn, without anyone ever sitting you down to teach it, exactly when a man has been drinking, exactly when the air in a house has changed, and exactly when it's wiser to be somewhere, anywhere, else.
         So I went somewhere else, over and over, all summer long. I went to the pool. I went to the rink. I mowed one more lawn. I rode the bicycle out past the edge of town. I sat in the tree house. I walked the railroad tracks. I swam in the river below the trestle. I rode over to my grandmother's, then to an aunt's, and then wherever else twelve-year-old legs and a bicycle with a mismatched frame could carry me. At the time I believed, with my whole boyish heart, that I was having adventures. It has taken the better part of my life to wonder how many of those adventures were actually escape routes wearing an adventure's clothing. I suspect the honest answer is some of both, in roughly equal measure, and that's the trouble with looking backward from where I stand now. An old man's eyes see things the boy never could have, and never should have had to.
         I know now what I couldn't have known then. I know my mother was drowning that whole summer quietly while I splashed around in the shallow end of my own good time. I know exactly what that man's drinking was doing to our family, piece by piece, though nobody ever said so out loud. I know why a twelve-year-old boy steering a grown man home in the dark isn't the funny story it can still sometimes sound like, even though parts of it, God help me, still make me smile. I know the money from those lawns never sat waiting in any account with my name on it. I know that meeting my real father that year was a far bigger thing than I had the tools to understand at the time. But I refuse to let everything I know now reach back and erase what that boy actually felt while he was living it. He was there too, after all, and by his own reckoning, he had himself a fine summer.
         He had five dollars in his pocket and a rink full of friends on a Saturday night. He had a lawn mower and a growing list of customers. He had a tree house where no grown-up ever set foot. He had a bicycle, or something close enough to one, and when it broke he built another. He had railroad tracks that led somewhere worth walking to, and a river underneath them worth swimming in. He had a grandmother and a couple of aunts close enough to reach under his own power, pedaling hard, before supper got cold. He had an entire sleeping town to prowl once everyone else had gone to bed. And he had, above all else, a whole head full of dreams about the finer life waiting for him somewhere out past the edge of that small Oklahoma town, a life he was absolutely certain was coming.
         A couple of years later, at fourteen, my world got bigger still, when I finally got hold of a motorcycle. A bicycle had given me freedom enough. A motorcycle put an engine behind that same freedom and pushed the edges of my world out further than they'd ever reached before. That machine brought its own stories, plenty of them, but twelve stands apart from all of it in my memory, the way a hinge stands apart from the door it swings on. Twelve was the year wedged between being a small boy and whatever I was becoming next. It was the year my family came apart at the same time I was discovering how enormous my own small world could feel. It was the year I started working. The year I wandered further than I ever had before. The year I met my father for the first time. The year I first understood, in some wordless boyish way, that home wasn't always the place a person most wants to be.
         Of course, I understood none of that at the time. I was entirely too busy for understanding. Lawns were waiting to be mowed, and pools waiting to be swum in, and trains waiting to be dodged, and buildings waiting to be explored. Cigarettes waiting to be stolen, and dreams waiting to be argued over half the night. Somewhere out there, always, another perfectly good bicycle just waiting for its turn to be destroyed.
         Was it a better way to raise a child than the way it's done now? I honestly don't know, and I've stopped pretending I do. It was different, and different is the only honest word I've got for it. We were allowed to wander farther, and later, and more recklessly than I can picture any child wandering today, and there are moments from that summer that make the grown man in me question the good sense of every single adult who was supposedly in charge. But we were never truly alone out there, and that's the part that took me the longest to see clearly. My grandmother was down the road. My aunts weren't far behind her. The neighbors knew us by name, and they knew our mothers, and the whole town, in its own quiet way, knew exactly who belonged to whom, even on the nights we were doing our level best not to be noticed. We were turned loose, all of us, into a world that still knew our names cold, and because of that, nobody ever had to hover over us to keep track of where we'd got to. Whatever independence we had, and we had plenty, came to us mostly as a simple side effect of being allowed to go.
         That could be the whole of what growing up feral really meant, in the end. Nobody in that town could have told you exactly where I was on any given afternoon or three o'clock in the morning. But nearly anybody you stopped on the street could have told you exactly who I was. And for one long, complicated, gold-lit summer in 1977, that turned out to be enough.