Part Five - For the Sake of Completion. The style of this is about to change. We have arrived at the point in my tale where I enter high school, and very soon I will be able to relate these stories in a more precise chronological order. Before I get to that point I want to cover a few items that have not fit into the story so far and that I won't have an opportunity to make fit in the future without a major aside. Maybe they'll seem relevant when all is said and done and maybe they won't, but I feel the need to include them regardless. I suppose I should start off with the fact that my brother shot a kid. I was very young, around 7 years old I think, and of this incident I do not remember a whole lot. I was playing with a number of neighborhood kids in my family's wood shed, which was a large, unfinished, barn-like building that my father had constructed to house the firewood that was our home's main source of heat. My brother and a number of other older boys were out back in the woods behind our place hunting with air rifles. These were not your Red Ryder variety of "safe" BB guns; these were the kind of pellet guns that you could pump up ten or twelve times and kill a rabbit or possibly something larger with. We were pretty much rural kids and things like guns and knives were not foreign to us. We were taught the proper handling of such items and for the most part we respected them as tools more than toys. We were always taught to walk with a gun pointed out to the side and not straight ahead so as to protect anyone who might be walking ahead of us from an accidental discharge. In all of my young years I was only ever aware of any such unintended firing occurring once, and that was this day. My brother and another boy were walking on either side of their friend, for the purpose of this story we'll call him Jeff, and his arms were draped around their shoulders. He was unable to stand or walk without their support, and it looked to me as they approached as if they were playing war. At that age I could not conceive of it being anything else but play, and even when I saw the blood on the back of Jeff's shirt as they passed it did not seem like it could be real. The boys I had been playing with were the younger brothers of my brother's friends. I do not remember any of what passed between our two groups as they walked by. I only remember hearing Jeff moan. I still to this day know exactly what that sounded like. After that the events get confused and jumbled in my mind. I heard my father yell, "you did WHAT?!" I remember hearing my brother clearly answering back, "I shot him." The next thing I can remember is sitting in the swing set in our back yard. My friends were all gone but I don't remember them leaving. There was an ambulance in front of our house but I don't remember it arriving. My brother was sitting on one of the swings as well. His head was lowered and he was explaining what had happened to some adult. I think it was one of the other mothers from the neighborhood, but I cannot be sure. She may well have been a cop. I heard the story: a branch had swept back as they were walking through some bushes and it had hit the trigger of my brother's incorrectly pointed rifle. That was it: A horrible accident. It should have been clear, but understanding would not come for me. I asked my brother, "but wasn't Jeff your friend?" At this I was scolded and moved away from the swing set, but I was still so confused. I think I just did not know how to ask the question that I felt. I knew that it had not come out right, but I didn't have the words that I needed to ask it correctly. I never did find them. There simply was no way to make it make sense in my head. Jeff recovered, although from what I understand the pellet was lodged in his lung and never removed. That is all that I remember of that day, and of the days and weeks after I have no recollection. I do not remember ever talking of this incident with any of the kids from my school, or anyone else for that matter. It must have happened, but my brain seems to not want to allow me access to such memories and it must have its reasons. I asked Bill what he remembers, and he told me that he knew that this had happened but that it was something that was not spoken of. I suppose that this story might just shed some light, for those who have known me over the years, on why I can be so meticulous about how I do certain things, and why I react badly when people try to change the way I do them. It could be because somewhere in my mind there beats the constant refrain that if you don't walk with the gun pointed to the side every time you could end up shooting your friend. And guns only go off accidentally when they are pointed at people. Overdramatic, perhaps, but I cannot think of a more likely reason for why I respond the way I do when someone who is certain that they know a better way attempts to get me to break some rule for the sake of expediency. It does matter. They will care. Something bad can happen. I know this to be the truth. So whether I'm parking my car, following directions, or walking with a gun, I am going to do it the right way as I see it. The entire previous section has pretty much had it's way with me. I think it is time to move on to something else. Something fun, perhaps. Something like summertime. Two things dominated my pre-high school summers: camp and strawberries. That will make more sense as you read on, I promise. Camp really wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and in my mind that was Bill Murray's fault. No matter how hard you try, you cannot make Lutherwood bible camp as much fun as the movie Meatballs. You might find yourself having fun much of the time, but whenever things were getting really good the diligent staff would invariably find a way to try to make some moral lesson out of it. That was their job, after all, but the truth is that all-camp capture the flag does not need to be an allegory for anything in the good book, and even the best swim buddy can't walk on water. Don't get me wrong, I loved going to Lutherwood. It was as close as I was ever going to get to "real" camp and it was plenty good. There was a pretty heavy religious slant to most everything but we still did our best to make it as normal a pre/early teen experience as possible. Most of it was innocent, but there were enough small forays into dangerous territory to make it interesting. Sneaking out of your cabin at night was absolutely forbidden, but every year people would try and often succeed. I made it out a couple of times and never got busted. The first time was really just to see if I could do it, and my fellow sneakers and I did little more than run around outside the boys cabins before deciding to attempt the even more dangerous mission of sneaking back in. As any true sneaker understands, getting back unnoticed is the true test of your abilities. Apparently mine were halfway decent. Camp Lutherwood. The last summer that I attended Lutherwood contained the one truly serious late night sneak out, but to this day I can not be sure that it wasn't part of some elaborate scam by the camp counselors. This was the last year that we would be allowed to attend the camp as we were getting towards the age that we would likely be unmanageable and the idea of a sleep-away camp full of horny teenage boys and girls was probably not so appealing to the church. In truth, it was already a problem, as a hook up with a member of the opposite sex seemed to be the one camp experience that pretty much everyone was seeking. There were plenty of camp romances in progress, but the campers were watched fairly closely by the light of day and it was hard for people to get any real alone time. Once again it seemed as if the staff were actually doing their jobs. By the end of that last week it was the general consensus that a serious late night exodus was in order from both the boys' and the girls' respective quarters. It was discussed a great deal and many plans were made. To hear everyone talk it was going to be one big un-chaperoned party that night if we could all just get out. That afternoon a girl approached me and asked if I was planning on doing something that night. Now, I didn't really know this girl, and to be honest she hadn't caught my eye before then, but now that she was paying attention to me she started looking pretty cute. In fact, she seemed very sweet and I had to wonder how I had overlooked this one when trying to determine whom my camp crush would be that year. For the sake of her anonymity and my embarrassingly faltering memory in regard to her name, we will call her Annie. I told my new friend that I did not know and that I had no real plans. "Sneak out and meet me," She said. Now, I had to be sure that I was hearing this right, because this sort of forward approach from girls was not my usual experience. Annie told me quite directly that she intended to leave camp with some memories and that if I met up with her that night I would have some of my own. None of this came off as slutty or desperate, and her matter of fact approach kind of freaked me out a little. I got the idea that if we did meet up I might be in for more than I was prepared for. So, as you might imagine, getting out of my cabin that night became Priority Number One. As it turned out, it was way too easy. And I'm pretty sure that was by design. As lights out approached and we were all settling down and pretending to get ready to sleep, our counselor brought up the fact that he was pretty well sure that people were going to be attempting to sneak out. A fairly heated exchange ensued during which a number of hypothetical sneaking out scenarios were discussed. Some of the boys in my cabin were bold enough to suggest that they should be allowed to go out if they wanted, as it was the last night. I just kept my mouth shut and tried to brainstorm ways to get to where Annie would be. If it turned out that our guy was going to stay awake and attentive it was going to be a real problem. He then surprised us by saying that he was going to go to sleep and that if anyone were going to sneak out it would have to just be on his own conscience. I can assure you that none of us were worried about that in the slightest. Very soon after that he was snoring convincingly and we were bailing out into the night. Groups of young teenage boys from various different cabins were now roaming around the Lutherwood campgrounds unsupervised. All that was left was for the girls to show and then the real party would begin. But no girls showed up at all. Annie's plan had been for me to sneak up the trail that led to the girls' cabins and she would be waiting for me outside of hers. I held up my end of the deal, but she was nowhere to be found. I waited for quite a while but it was beginning to seem like no girls whatsoever were coming out. I eventually had to give up and wander back down to the main part of the camp. Guys were still out and about, but it was really starting to get boring. One kid had stolen the keys to his counselor's car and had a big plan to get in and unlock the steering column and then have a bunch of us push the car from the parking lot out into the middle of the field that was the center of the camp. I should point out here that this was one of the only cars at the camp and also the only one that was in a position to be pushed anywhere. Apparently the keys had been really easy to get as well. We should have wondered about this, but instead we just stood around the car waiting as our friend quietly unlocked it and slid into the driver's seat. Soon after inserting the key he made three very important discoveries. The first was that the car's radio came on as soon as he turned the key to unlock the wheel. The second was that the radio had been set to maximum volume and rock music could now be heard everywhere in the camp and most likely across the lake as well. The third and final discovery was the fact that he could not get the key to turn back to the off position. We all knew this last detail from speaking to him later because within a matter of seconds we were all running as if for our lives through the dark and quite hazardous camp. Our friend was quite the brain, however, and he quickly discovered that there was a release button on the steering column that allowed the key to be turned back and removed. After all was once again quiet he found the radio controls, turned it off, and then did manage to coast the car out onto the field as the rest of us crept back to a safe vantage point from which to watch him get caught. That did not happen however, because for some reason despite the massive amount of noise that had come from the radio not one camp counselor showed up. With one mission of the night accomplished, and really nothing left to do, the sneaking back in process commenced. Once again, it was far too easy. There was no talking as we all drifted off to sleep, and I can only speak for myself here but I have to think that there was a sense of failure and lost possibilities in the minds of my fellow interlopers. I was supposed to have met up with a cute girl in the middle of a warm summer night in the woods by a lake, and instead I watched a guy push a car out onto some grass and ran around like a fool in the dark. It was pretty stupid, really. The next morning the car was back where it belonged and nothing was said to anyone about our late night adventure. It was our last day and parents were trickling in to the camp as various final day activities were held. I managed to get a few moments with Annie and I told her that I had waited for her. I asked her if it had all just been a trick, because in truth I was feeling kind of gullible and rejected. She insisted that it hadn't been, and she looked genuinely unhappy. She said that her counselor had stayed awake guarding the door of their cabin all night, and that from what she had heard it was the same deal in the other girl cabins as well. Like they all had known exactly what was going on. Because of course they did. Let the boys be boys, but guard the girls. That must have been the plan. Sort of like what they do all the time on a larger scale in places like Iran and Afghanistan. All things considered, I guess we were pretty lucky. At least my friend didn't get his hands cut off for messing with the car. Despite all of this, my absolute best memory of camp is an innocent one. All the boys in my cabin slept out under the stars one clear night. We spread our sleeping bags out under the grass near the tennis courts and just lay there for hours and told stories and stared at space. I had never spent that much time looking at the stars before, and I was amazed when our counselor pointed out that if we watched long enough we could see satellites moving across the sky. We stayed up late enough to track the movement of the constellations, and I just got lost in the vastness of it all. I woke up in the morning shivering and wet from the dew and I couldn't remember falling asleep, but the sun had put out the stars and the spell was broken. I have looked up at the stars since, but they have never approached the majesty of what they were that night. It was a moment in time that has resisted all attempts at repetition, but that acts as a marker in my memory reminding me that the world can be amazing and wonderful, and in the right time and place all it can take to understand that is to just look up. Summer camp was a big deal for me each year, but it rarely delivered on my expectations. This seems to be a theme of my early life. The other summer event that I always had to look forward to was picking strawberries. I say HAD to look forward to because it wasn't really a choice. We were supposed to make money during the summer to help buy our school clothes for the next fall and berries were really our only opportunity to do so. My cousin drove a berry bus for a company called Chilton's, and so every summer throughout the month of June I would get picked up early in the morning and taken out to the fields to do a day's hard labor for pennies an hour. In order to truly appreciate this part of my life, one must start with an understanding of the harsh realities of picking strawberries for money. The number one thing that you must know going in is that at no time during your day will you be able to feel comfortable. This is no cushy assembly line or garment factory job with their ritzy walls and indoor plumbing. No sir, this work happens outdoors, in the open... in the elements. And the elements always want to hurt you. That is a simple fact of life. If you let them, they will mess you up. The best that you can do is to try and prepare ahead of time for what they might throw at you on any given day. Good luck with that. Dress warm because it looks like rain and the sun will be more than likely boiling you by a quarter of noon. Go light because the weatherman promised sun and you will certainly be shivering in a frosty shower before long. The real secret is to concentrate so intently on the work that you don't notice the weather at all. So let us discuss the work, shall we? Have you ever picked wild blackberries out in a field somewhere on a warm August afternoon; walking around the bushes trying to get to the biggest and best berries while avoiding the thorns and eating nearly as many of them as you keep? A fat, lazy bumble bee buzzes by, and you can hear the sound of children laughing off somewhere in the distance... Well, forget about all that because strawberries are a whole other reality. Strawberry plants are planted in rows and they grow about a foot high. The berries grow bunched together on stems under the leaves of the plant, and their weight usually pulls them and the leaves down to the dirt on the edges of the rows. To pick the berries one must kneel in the dirt between the rows and lift bunches of leaves up to reach the berries underneath. Even on a nice day there will be dew on the plants in the morning, so the close proximity of water and soil ensures that a person will be getting extremely dirty. You start the day by choosing from a pile of filthy 3 gallon buckets. The key is to try to find one that smells as little like rotten berries as possible as you are pretty much going to have your face in that bucket all day. You then head over to an assigned row and begin harvesting the berries as fast as possible. These are not the pretty strawberries from the produce department of your local grocery conglomerate. These berries are going to be canned, or made into jam, or smashed up for god-knows what, and so they must have the stems removed completely before they can help fill your bucket. To remove the stem you must hold the berry gently in one hand while pinching, twisting, and pulling the remaining part of the plant off with the other. This slows the bucket-filling aspect of the job down considerably. You must also choose only the berries that are ready, as those that are not quite ripe are to be picked next week, and those that are too over-ripe will ruin your bunch as surely as the proverbial bad apple. When you have picked all of the available fruit on either side of your row you scoot your bucket forward a few feet and begin the process anew. Eventually you will begin to notice that kneeling hunched over a reeking plastic bucket in the dirt is not a very comfortable way to work, especially if you are going to be at it all day long. You might shift around to try to find a better position, but sooner or later you will have to resign yourself to the idea that such a thing does not exist. It is usually about this time that you will discover a dog pile in your row or be stung by a wasp, or maybe be startled by a snake slithering out of the bushes as you lift up the next section to be picked. It dawns on you momentarily that all of this hassle might not actually be worth the $0.09 per pound of berries that you're getting paid for it. There is really no time to think about such distractions though because you have to get that bucket filled as fast as you can. Once your bucket is full you pick it up, carry it back up to the start of your row, and empty the contents into a "flat." A flat is a large stackable plastic tray that is divided into twelve sections that are each about the size of one of those nice cartons of berries that you will see at the store. A full flat of berries will weigh between 15 and 18 pounds. When it is ready to go, you take it up to a scale to be weighed. To save time, you might wait until you have two flats ready to go before making the trip, although it is not a huge amount of fun to wait in line awkwardly holding 30 lbs. of berries out in front of you. Once the flats are weighed the person in charge of the scale punches out the appropriate number of pounds on your plastic punch card. These cards are turned in at the end of the season for whatever amount of money you are owed, so it is important to take good care of them and don't lose them. Once your card is punched it's back to the row to start the process over again. Does any of this sound like a good time? I didn't think so. Having said all of this, I am hard-pressed to explain why exactly it would be that I have mainly good memories about picking berries. There was only one summer that I made more than $100.00 at it, so it is not the money, and I mostly dreaded having to go at the time. I would certainly not ever want to go do it again in this lifetime. Yet for some reason I remember those days with a fondness that they do not deserve. There is very little that I remember enjoying. I remember that the lunches my mother would send were better than the standard school-type sack lunch that I was accustomed to, and that there was always a can of soda in it. Shasta cola, usually. Early on in my picking career another kid taught me that you could poke a hole in the very middle of the top of a can of soda by using a safety pin. With a little skill you could then drink the soda by shaking it up with you finger over the hole and then spraying the liquid into your mouth. It was fun, and it was also possible to hit unsuspecting fellow pickers with streams of pop if you didn't mind wasting some. The carbonation in a 12 oz. can of soda is good for propelling just over half of its contents through a pinhole after multiple shakes and sprays. When the pop is finally spent you are left with about 1/3 of a can of flat soda. Some people would toss the remainder out at this point, but I always opened the can and drank the rest, which resulted in a lifelong affinity for flat soda pop. Allow me to demonstrate. Something else involving drinking that I very much enjoyed were the water barrels that Old Man Chilton would bring out to the field. (I should probably mention here that Mr. Chilton wasn't all that old and no one ever referred to him by that name. I just thought that it would sound better that way, for the story.) So anyway, this senile old coot would drive his truck out to the field with a bourbon barrel on a trailer attached to it. The barrel would be filled with water and had a drinking fountain type spigot attached near the bottom so that once the trailer was disconnected from the truck it would tip back and the water would be accessible and have some pressure. I can only imagine that these barrels were the remnants of some prohibition era bootlegging operation, but what was not my imagination was the very strong whiskey taste and smell that the water they held possessed. Apparently these barrels had not been rinsed out all that thoroughly before being put into service in their new capacity. Some people would complain that the water tasted funny, but not I. I had developed a taste for the hard stuff early on by getting sips off of my dad's glass of Canadian Mist at my grandparent's house when I was very young. The adults most likely thought I would sputter and spit it out, that day that I pulled myself up to the table for the first time and reached for my father's glass, so it must have disappointed them to see how my eyes lit up when I realized that whatever this stuff was it tasted like the best candy I had ever had. As bad as this sounds, it was probably a blessing in disguise. When I would ask, my dad also used to give me a tiny amount of his beer in a plastic cup so I could sit there with him while he was watching football and be a little dude. This felt like a huge privilege. At some point though, possibly due to my experience with whiskey, I decided that I did not actually like the taste of beer and stopped asking for it, and never in my life have I developed a taste for it. This has come in handy for me over the last twenty years of my life, which I have spent completely sober. I have not felt like I was missing out on anything when those around me would be drinking beer and often encouraging me to partake. It is easier to turn down something that you don't actually like. The real test of my conviction occurs when it comes to the hard stuff, because I love it, and because I know that sip of my dad's Canadian Mist would taste every bit as good to me today as it did thirty or so years back. That is part of the reason why I never take that one sip. And those fantastic, alcoholic water barrels from the berry field would have to be off-limits to me now too. So that is pretty much that. About the only other thing that stands out from picking strawberries is the day that a girl in the row next to me spent the better part of an afternoon describing in great detail the plot of the book Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews. I was fairly enthralled, but that had less to do with the details of the story than conversing with this young lady all afternoon. I was beginning to discover that long conversations with girls were a good way to get their attention and that not a lot of other guys seemed to be all that good at this particular approach. The key seemed to be mostly just listening, interspersed with head nods, uh-huh's, and enough small questions to allow a young lady to continue to weave the complicated tapestry of whatever drama it was that she had to impart. This would serve me well over the next few years, as there never seemed to be a shortage of young girls with drama, but the first time I can clearly remember putting it into practice was sitting in that berry field hearing all about a story of kids locked away in an attic. I never have read any book by V.C. Andrews, but I always smile to myself whenever I see one on some bookshelf somewhere. Each of these stories can bleed into another and I could just go on and on remembering little details that string them all together in my mind. I could write so much more about all of it... Playing board games with my brother and getting so frustrated that I could never beat him at anything. Watching him in a fistfight after a basketball game at the Boys Club and his coaching me on the lie we would tell my parents about how his face got beat up during the game. How the whole thing was part of the code of being a guy, and how after the fight was over they said, "maybe now we can be friends." His blowing up my Dungeons and Dragons models with firecrackers in my room, and my smashing up and throwing out the window of his last three cigarettes. The rules he broke and the times he almost died. It really just goes on and on. I could find more stories of camp; adventures and crushes and half-serious two-day romances, and extrapolate those out to become stories about church related things. Playing on the church basketball team and being so bad at it. All night "lock-ins" and trips to Chuck E. Cheese's. The way that the kids at these events were so often just as terrible and trouble-bound as any others that I met in secular society. There are just so many things that I remember. The giant tractor tire mountain that they built on the playground at the grade school. School trips to the Conservation Site. The illegal playground candy trade. My first radio/cassette player that could pick up Seattle radio stations and using it to record songs by John Cougar, Rick Springfield, Asia, The Human League, and Quiet Riot. Mr. Gilda, the only teacher that could make me understand math. Making deadly boomerangs in wood shop. Randy and I being the last two left alive in "The Assassination Game" in junior high and ending it with a duel and splitting the money. So many fights that almost happened... On and on. Another time, maybe.

Click here for: Part Six - The Freshmen. (work in progress)