Encounters with Strangers & Personal Posted by James Killus, 20 Jul 2007 06:32 am

Encounters With Strangers (#5): The Vacant Lot

Our house on Ironwood Drive, in Donelson Tennessee, in the 1950s, was a typical example of post-War construction, cinder block walls, asbestos exterior shingles, and shoddy construction. My parents discovered years after purchase that the overflow pipe from the attic water heater didn’t actually exist; there was a short pipe in the attic and another short pipe beneath the house and nothing in-between. “Shoddy” doesn’t actually cover something like that, since it was pure fraud to fool the building inspector. There was something similar with the septic tank, which, after we’d left, turned out to be covered only with plywood that finally rotted through, much to the distress of subsequent inhabitants.

It was an “all-electric” house, electric stove and electric “radiant” heaters that were nothing but wire wound around ceramic cores. The heating and cooling expansion made little clicking noises whenever they turned on or off. The electricity was cheap, though, courtesy of the TVA, a fact that made Goldwater’s loss of Tennessee in 1964 inevitable. He’d gone of record as wanting to privatize TVA, even saying he’d “sell it for a dollar” if he could. The voters of Tennessee thought that the fight against socialism could maybe be first started in another state, for example, Arizona, where there were plenty of Federal water projects to privatize first. The Senator from Arizona never quite grasped that logic.

Before tossing up the masses of houses, the developers had done some landscaping, which is to say that they’d bulldozed the tops off the hills and used them to fill in the gullies. One of these landfills was in our back yard, where some trees had been half buried, but still managed to grow. So the soil on the downslope was rich (for that part of Tennessee), while the soil around the house proper was not.

The slope started about halfway to the property line in the back yard, then leveled off in what we always called “The Vacant Lot.” The nearby roads were twisty turny, and the vacant lot was an orphan plot, surrounded by hastily built homes on their hastily graded lots, but it had no direct access to any road. I have no idea who owned it; possibly the power company, since we also were graced with a nice, high transmission tower only a few hundred yards away.

The lot was where the debris from the construction had been dumped, as I vaguely recall. I recall more vividly the lot clearing operation that the neighborhood mounted sometime after we moved it. It culminated in an enormous bonfire, fueled by the leftovers, some of it entire tree trunks, one of which burned for days after the bonfire was over and which still wasn’t completely consumed. It left a charcoal husk that seemed huge at the time, though I’ll guess it was chest high to someone who is only four feet tall. Nevertheless, it was there for years afterwards, on a little ridge-let behind some houses that were behind us. The little ridge was cool because there was a full ‘dozer cut in it, so I can say with authority that our particular area had layers of sandstone under it, with clay sometimes sandwiched between those.

After the clearing, the vacant lot went through what I now know as ecological succession, first weeds, then short bushes, finally small trees, though we kids tended to cut down the small trees, using the ever popular “machete,” which I believe was actually a WWII vintage bayonet. I recall it as being Bill’s property, Bill being the alpha male of our particular group, one year older than me, and notably larger and more physical. As the weeds grew, we used the machete and other cutting tools to create paths, then sometimes tunnels through the weeds, culminating in hidey holes of various kinds that appeal to children before the age of reason.

I think there was another weed clearing, years later, after I’d started school, because my memories of the vacant lot later show a less jungle-like terrain, though some of it is probably also just physical growth, with we kids “growing like weeds” and, if not outpacing the actual weeds, holding our own.

One gray day in winter, my sister and I were playing out in the back yard, then down into the vacant lot, since we could go pretty far that way and not disobey the dictum of her not crossing any streets. Given our ages, it was probably a matter of me playing and her tagging along. Or maybe she was out exploring and I was being a good brother and making sure she didn’t get into trouble. I’d guess that I was somewhere around 7-9 and she would have been 5-7, so either of those was plausible.

I don’t remember how it was that we came to look into the tool shed of the people who lived all the way on the other side of the vacant lot, at the corner of Cottonwood and Sinbad. We were definitely trespassing, though without felonious intent. In any event, the thing that trumps all other memories of the day was the monkey.

It was young; I’m pretty sure of that. I don’t know what kind it was, but I can say that its arms were very long. I don’t remember if it had a tail, so it could even have been a chimpanzee, though I doubt it.

It was shivering from the cold, and it climbed onto my back, no doubt trying to get a little warmth, and maybe also because young primates ride their mother’s back. I heard its breathing, because it wheezed. I imagine that it had a respiratory infection and I doubt it lived much longer after that.

I now know, of course, that the way that monkeys were captured in the wild is to shoot their mothers. They were then loaded into cages, shipped to foreign lands, then sold, as “pets,” often to owners who had no more knowledge of how to care for them than did the owner of the unfortunate simian that I met briefly that day. Maybe it was an impulse buy, later repented, but without an exit strategy.

It’s a long chain of accountability, and it’s ever so easy for everyone in it to shift the blame. The pet owners don’t know how the system works. The store owners are only meeting the demand. The hunters are just trying to make a living, and besides, they’re only animals.

The monkey in the tool shed, of course, immediately peed on my back, and I peeled him off of me and we put him back into the shed and closed the door. I was pretty anxious to get back home and clean up, after all. We didn’t tell anyone about it because we were snooping where we had no business being. And I rarely think about the way the monkey looked at me, or how human his eyes looked, and how much misery was in them, or that we might have done something for him if we hadn’t been afraid of the consequences.
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Responses to “Encounters With Strangers (#5): The Vacant Lot”

  1. on 20 Jul 2007 at 10:19 am 1. Oaktown Girl said …

    OK. That ending truly haunted me. I’m super-sensitive to cruelty of almost any kind. And ever since I learned about what happens to animals (just as it it for humans - also animals, I know) taken away from their mothers and not given any comfort, contact or love, this sort of thing really shakes me up.

    I like the way you broke down the “chain of (avoiding) accountability” in this story. Everybody’s got an excuse, indeed.

    This story is truly an apt metaphor for our time.

  2. on 20 Jul 2007 at 10:31 am 2. JP Stormcrow said …

    I think vacant lots were/are one of the best capital investments in the intellectual/social and creative development of youth. Yes, they are often eyesores and in certain situations become scary havens for criminality, but I think that the characteristic of being relatively unsupervised places of which no one is too overly invested in any particular physical feature of the property - provide the right environment for kids to discover themselves. And most well tended “green spaces” don’t cut it.

  3. on 20 Jul 2007 at 10:41 am 3. JP Stormcrow said …

    Ha! Mr. Spam Filter*** just caught a spam trackback to this article from a website that apparently aggregates medical articles and news stories. The key word was “shingles” and this article was one of many other similarly unrelated** items.
    http://www.universityupdate.com/Medical/Shingles/4002397.
    ** “Similarly unrelated” - oxymoronic phrases are us. Reminds me of my favorite internally oxymoronic word - monopoly.
    *** Ha encore! Spam Filter then proved its consistency by blocking this comment.

  4. on 20 Jul 2007 at 11:12 am 4. Oaktown Girl said …

    JP – what I think you’re saying (and I couldn’t agree more) is that children need play/exploration time outside of the tightly structured “play dates” and other activities organized by adults. We’ve got a whole new generation of middle class kids virtually helpless to entertain themselves, and it’s really sad. A big part of emotional development for children is learning how to deal with group dynamics for themselves. This includes learning how/when to rebel and stand up for yourself, and a host of other valuable skills and tools.

    So it’s about maturation and development, and while a green space won’t “cut it” in suburbia, it has a very opposite effect on children in urban centers. I know someone who could share a wonderful story here about this very thing, and I’ve asked them to do it. But it hasn’t happened yet. And like I said before, I’m done wearing myself pleading for participation.

  5. on 20 Jul 2007 at 11:19 am 5. JP Stormcrow said …

    it has a very opposite effect on children in urban centers

    Yes as I was posting, I was thinking that this was so defining me as a middle-class white boy from the suburbs (well, the semi-suburbs) that I should have just spelled it out with Wonder bread crumbs.

  6. on 20 Jul 2007 at 11:27 am 6. JP Stormcrow said …

    JP, then

    and now.

  7. on 20 Jul 2007 at 12:17 pm 7. Oaktown Girl said …

    Oh JP - thanks for the laugh! Too funny!

    I only wish more people would cop to it. It’d be a good first step in an honest conversation toward better understanding.

  8. on 20 Jul 2007 at 12:22 pm 8. James Killus said …

    I’ve been putting out a metaphorical fire this morning, and I’m just coming up for air.

    The “shingles” linkback is funny. Odd that we didn’t get somethings similar for “asbestos,” asking if we wanted to sue someone.

    I entirely agree about the unstructured time thing. I was apparently offered a slot to a private school when I was young (a military academy, pardon while I shudder). I don’t recall being asked about it, and I’m glad my parents turned it down. I’m just as happy that I had to become something of an autodidact, then that I got properly challenged when I went to college.

    I’m thinking of trying to mute the font of this post; I’ll definitely need to do something about the copy and paste style that comes through all my own personal defaults.

  9. on 20 Jul 2007 at 12:51 pm 9. James Killus said …

    Ah, that seems to have done it. The font is now more collegial.

  10. on 20 Jul 2007 at 2:44 pm 10. Seattle said …

    Ok. I’m tangental brain today. 14 things came to mind on this post. The third was about all the abandoned dogs and cats that became my pets when I was a kid. We lived east of Vancouver WA and for some reason our road was a favorite for people who had unwanted pets. It became a family joke that Seattle would show up with a dog/cat in tow saying, “I didn’t do anything, it just followed me home…” Unfortunately, my father wasn’t always happy to accept the pet responsibility and did a little additional pet dumping on a couple of memorable and guilt inducing occasions.

    The second thing that occurred to me was “Soldier”. Why did I think of a second rate sci-fi flick? Because I watched it for the first time in a long time last night because I needed to watch violence and once again count the number of words Kurt Russel says in the film. I may be able to list them below:

    Sir!
    No Sir.
    I was replaced…by a better soldier, Sir.
    Fear
    Fear and discipline.
    Always.
    Stay close to me Sir.
    They’re soldiers.
    Because soldiers deserve solders…

    Anyway, you get the idea. How does it relate? Because Soldier for the most part took place in a planet sized dump, and vacant lots almost always end up as a form of dumping ground. Back to when I was a kid on 5 acres and we had our very own ancient dump care of the previous land owners. We found the coolest old stuff in there, as the property was originally part of a homestead. We “decorated” whole segments of the woods as our play house.

    Now my sons are very urban children who have to be dragged away from electronic entertainment, though they have fun once they are forced to go outside. Kids get a lot of joy out of just wandering the ‘hood’.

  11. on 20 Jul 2007 at 3:01 pm 11. Kiera PSI said …

    I only wish more people would cop to it. It’d be a good first step in an honest conversation toward better understanding.

    I’ve tried to “cop to it”. But the native american fellow I made the comment to blurted out “You’re not white.” My first thought was “Well, that would sure surprise my parents”. He never did come up with a satisfactory reason for why I wasn’t “white”. But hey…I’m middle class, all the way…with aspirations of grandeur.

  12. on 20 Jul 2007 at 4:00 pm 12. James Killus said …

    I’ve noticed in myself here a certain amount of avoidance reaction to discussing this story, or, upon reflection, anything having to do with the exact nature of where and when I was a child. I’ve flirted with it in a few essays I’ve written (and may salvage for posting here at some point). It all seems very strange to me.

    The suburbs are usually thought of as the destination of “white flight” and there’s certainly truth in that, but in thinking back on it, I wonder if there wasn’t something else going on back then. Because the folks in my neighborhood were not, for the most part, urban escapees. They were, like my parents, rural folks who had left the farms during the War and wound up in the new halos of suburban communities because there were jobs in the city and they went where housing was available, especially housing that did not give them the claustrophobic heebee jeebees. Certainly the ‘burbs were lilly white (not just in the South, of course, and in the South, oddly enough, rural areas were not segregated by real estate), but the decided unease of going completely urban was part of the deal.

    So across the street lived a man who kept a German Shepherd, rumored to have been Army trained; all I can say is that Taiser (the dog’s name) was so aggressive that he yanked the man’s son (who was in his early teens) completely off his feet to attack me, yet once he got my leg in his mouth, his teeth didn’t even break the skin.

    Three doors down, the two-year old brother of a buddy of mine was playing in the garage with a hammer one day and managed to find a round of live ammunition. The bullet hit no one; it wound up in the cinderblock wall.

    The girl next door to me committed suicide before she graduated high school, owing to a scandal involving a Nashville radio dj and some photographs, or so I heard. I only know she died.

    I could have died when I was 5, because some of us were playing cowboys, and part of the game involved a noose and a lynching. Oops.

    The street I grew up on had no sidewalks, only ditches, no sewers, just septic tanks. There was a curve in the road and I don’t think there was a dog in the neighborhood (except Taiser, who was kept chained in the back yard) that wasn’t hit by a car at some point, though most of them lived. We kids were nearly as reckless as the dogs, of course, and accidents did happen.

    But if I wanted to really try for a metaphor for that time (as opposed to now), I think it would be the time I was wandering on my Aunt and Uncle’s farm outside of Nashville and stumbled across a plowed furrow. What I found was a broken piece of spherical metal, hollow and pitted with rust. I’m pretty sure it was a burst cannonball and I wish I’d kept it.

    The farm was between Brentwood and Franklin, Tennessee.

    Sometimes I think I’m a just a middle-class suburban white boy, and sometimes it feels like just a veneer.

  13. on 20 Jul 2007 at 5:35 pm 13. Oaktown Girl said …

    When I was in 3rd grade, we moved someplace in Oakland that had a lot of open space between the houses, and between streets, even. Sadly, it’s all been built over now, as no open space can possibly be left open if there’s a buck to be made for some developer.

    But at one point those spaces were all grown over with oak trees, pine trees, blackberry bushes, elderberry trees, thick brush, grass, weeds, wildflowers, poison hemlock, stinging nettle, and poison oak. (Fortunately, I was always able to avoid that last one).

    We use to trek all around through that, the dogs following behind, sniffing every little thing, or running ahead. To beat out pathways pathways through the brush, we’d carry baseball bats, big sticks (often from plunger handles), and long, large, sharp, field gardening tools - the kind no parent today would let their kids even get near. Most of the brush and weeds we were hacking away and beating down had grown well taller than we were. We’d be carving out tunnels as often as open paths. No real harm to the environment - it would virtually all be grown back in a matter of weeks. Mostly we were following deer trails. We just had to open them up a little (a lot) more for us kids to get through without being totally scratched and cut up.

    Those were good times. It also made me extremely strong, agile, and highly skilled walking, climbing, and as needed, crawling on steep hills and narrow trails that were alternately muddy and slick, or very dry/dusty and slick. It contributed to my being stronger and more athletic than most boys my age well past the time when boys had usually caught up to and surpassed the girls in that arena. And in that respect, those were not good times.

  14. on 20 Jul 2007 at 8:50 pm 14. JP Stormcrow said …

    JP – what I think you’re saying (and I couldn’t agree more) is that children need play/exploration time outside of the tightly structured “play dates” and other activities organized by adults

    Yes, and to your point the vehicle for that can vary by environment. My “edge of a small city semi-suburban environment” sounds somewhat like James’ - maybe a bit more midwestern WASPish (but, for instance, the free roaming dogs - of which I was somewhat terrified - were everywhere). Our next door neighbor had horseshoe pits and on a weeknight, people would sit on the slope below his garage and watch the men play horseshoe or the kids playing sandlot baseball on the vacant lot behind that - right field “closed” or you were liable to break a window. (Sometimes I feel like I grew up in a freaking Norman Rockwell painting.) My mother came from a small-city urban environment and my father from a hard-scrabble tiny midwestern hamlet, but we did move to that neighborhood when I was 6 in an upwardly mobile, growing family move that could easily be classified as “white flight” given the demographics of the old and new neighborhoods a few short years later.

    But it was still a fair distance from today’s well-groomed massive maga-developments. But you could smell it coming, and given that I do cherish the opportunity I had for minor mischief and experimentation that the woods and lots provided (and yes, mistakes were made). I think that one of my reasons for leaving California (Orange County) right after my first was born, was that I was looking to replicate that for my kids. (We did to a certain extent, but … well a whole ‘nother story.)

  15. on 20 Jul 2007 at 9:20 pm 15. JP Stormcrow said …

    James,

    One of my fascinations is the whole old South/new South transformation (an oversimplicfication I know). And having attended a conference at Gaylord’s Opryland Resort earlier this year (it is just a couple of miles from the neighborhood James describes.), I can say it is a startling representative of the “new South”. Was wondering if you had been back there since it was built.

    And my guess is that neighborhoods like yours now seem like a waystop in the transition from Yoknapatawpha County to today’s Charlotte (or Nashville itself … they have hockey teams for fuck’s sake!)

  16. on 20 Jul 2007 at 9:44 pm 16. JP Stormcrow said …

    I hereby declare: Open Thread and ***No*** Harry Potter Spoilers!!!

    .. but I actually did see the last page, and not to give anything away but let me just say; trucks can fuck you right up.

  17. on 20 Jul 2007 at 10:08 pm 17. Oaktown Girl said …

    Well, the classic race relations difference between the North and South was (is?) in the South, White folks were fine having Black folks as neighbors, as long as the Black folks didn’t make more money than they did. In the North, White folks were fine with Black people making more money than they did, as long as they didn’t live next door.

    JP -
    Because of the potential dog danger, you would never take a walk in my old neighborhood without a very large stick, and many folks also took mace as well. A lot of dogs were friendly and beloved by all, like my dog. But a lot of other dogs that were kept behind fences or tied up most of the time just became mean and were very poorly socialized outside their immediate families.(Sometimes they weren’t even well-socialized within their own families). And when those dogs would get out, well, let’s just say you didn’t want to be empty handed. The phrase that comes to mind is from that sportscaster (Keith Jackson, is it?): Whoa Nelly!

    When I got a little older and would go jogging in my neighborhood, often my dog would come along. And funny enough, there was a time in high school when 2 other big neighborhood dogs (unleashed, unfenced, and friendly with me) would join us. So it was me jogging with my own private dog pack. We’d do our run (which was quite a ways, hither and yon), and then I’d sternly say “Go Home! to each of the other dogs as we passed their respective houses. And they’d obediently stay at their houses, tongues hanging halfway to the ground from panting, but ecstatically happy to have gotten to go such a fun “walk”. And their owners were very happy too. Hell, looking back on it, I should have charged a fee for dog exercising!

  18. on 20 Jul 2007 at 10:25 pm 18. James Killus said …

    Ah, Opryland.

    Opryland is indeed just a few miles from where I grew up, near the former site of the Litsey Poney Farm, which got gobbled up by Briley Parkway.

    All this took place just on the edge of Donelson, and I have been back since it all happened. Downtown Nashville is totally changed, save for the Capitol and State museum; the downtown YMCA where I was a lifeguard is long gone, the site twice (at least) reconstructed since I left, Murfreesborough Road, completely changed, etc. etc.

    All except for Donelson, which is like a freaking time warp. I don’t know who’s been running the place, or what dark pact they made with Cthulu, but as of 5-6 years ago at least, you could plop me down almost anywhere within about a mile of Donelson Pike and Lebanon Road and I could find my way back to Ironwood Dr. blindfolded.

  19. on 20 Jul 2007 at 10:51 pm 19. Oaktown Girl said …

    JP - I take comfort in knowing you have to be joking about looking at the last page of the book. That is soooo lame. I knew someone who told me they actually did that, no joke. I can hardly think of anything more pathetic.

    Oh, and for the record, last night’s 4.2 earthquake in Oaktown was a manifestation of my outrage at Valerie Plame’s case being thrown out by a Federal Court cow-towing to BushCo. Probably more earthquakes to come. And just when I think I can’t take any more, I hear on the Mike Malloy show on the way home from work that Bush has just declared for himself powers that no King or even Roman Emperor has ever tried to claim.

    Oh Great Gojira, please show us your Mercy and grant unto us your cleansing and purifying Forgiveness of the Glorious Giant Nuclear Fireball.

    And hurry!

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  20. on 21 Jul 2007 at 9:48 am 20. JP Stormcrow said …

    Speaking of endings - an ending for The Sopranos more in keeping with the WAAGNFNP zeitgeist.

  21. on 21 Jul 2007 at 1:15 pm 21. Oaktown Girl said …

    JP - Indeed. With that ending, Don’t Stop Believing is the perfect WAAGNFNP song!

  22. on 24 Jul 2007 at 1:14 pm 22. The Constructivist said …

    James, I think you in particular will appreciate this post by a friend of mine! It’s about finding traces of the past in your wanderings in your neighborhood.