The Firey Gloom

I was thinking of things that had happened in the past, dialing back the decades twenty and thirty years. An old journal turned up these stories.

Bleachers, Downwards and Up – -December 29, 1987

About a year ago – it was probably a holiday for I have a custom of taking long walks on holiday mornings – I was on a walk along Rock Creek in the woods behind my old schools Carl Sandburg and Broome. I wound up at Rockville High on the football field. I climbed up into the bleachers and sat for a while thinking of things that had happened in the past. I counted the number of bleachers. Assigning each bleacher three years, I moved to the one representing my age then. I made a time line. I pulled pictures from my memory and placed on each bleacher the events of life: Rapid City, Jacksboro, Altus, first grade, high school, graduation, marriage. Time shrank. Three years is only a thousand days. When I take my boy out for a walk some holiday, I’ll take him to these bleachers and tell him stories. They will be his pre-history, exotic with the names of the places I’ve been. For me, the nineteen-fifties are distant and obscure. For my boy, my youth will be hard to place in time.

I wonder if there are some bleachers somewhere where you can sit in your spot and look up the rows to see what sits on them three and six years from now.

Pirates, Pirates and a Man o’ war – November 26, 1988

Yesterday, I had the day off since it was the day after Thanksgiving. We drove in the country, going up to Sugarloaf Mountain. Luke, 18 months old, gets so excited when we stop the truck and he thinks we are going to get out. He is quick to imagine things. I recall when I was five years old, I was on a ship with my mother and Grandma Hughes and others. We were sailing through alligator-infested waters. A pirate ship came alongside. A cannon fired. We were going to be boarded! I began to cry and hug onto mom. She and the others comforted me: It was only a ride. A ride in the amusement park. Someday, Luke will be frightened by something comparable. Someday Emily. And somedays I am frightened, too, by things that are not as real as they seem.

Perhaps the reason that I was so frightened on that ship was because even at that age, I had already some prior experience with pirates. It was on Christmas Day, two years earlier in South Dakota. I was three. My present was a book of a paper cut-out of a pirate ship, eye-patch and pirate hat included. Dad put the intricate ship together – Tab A in Slot B. I took the ship to the basement for adventure. I was plying the ocean when around the cape came into view an enemy ship. We exchanged cannon blast.   My ship was hit once, then again. It was disabled and then destroyed. Ripped into pieces!   Dad appeared at the top of the basement stairs and saw the debris. The ship had not lasted the morning. I got a spanking. Bad pirate, bad!

Computer Monsters at Meadow Hall — February 16, 1993

In the fall of 1969, we moved to Maryland from Massachusetts. I had just begun in third grade – eight years old. Paul was five. So I was started in school at Carl Sandburg Elementary, coming into the class a couple months after it had begun. I hate the ill feeling of being the new kid. Others already had friends and knew all names. The only name I knew was Brian Williamson as he lived just a few houses down the street. It was Williamson who first developed the figure he called “the computer monster”. This is a classic computer monster with its tracked feet, great teeth and menacing claws.   Finding myself those first few days among all these boys in class who, upon free time, would draw computer monsters, I joined with my own version. I have recollected it from memory. It had a tape drive for eyes and a less fearsome mouth. Once those boys saw it, I was laughed at, scorned for my silly attempt.

The older boys in the school, the sixth graders, told stories of the old mansion, Meadow Hall.   Our school was new and had been built on its grounds. The year before my arrival the empty mansion had been torn down. The others told of exploring it while it sat vacant. Some year later, digging among the histories in the Rockville Library, I found mention of Meadow Hall. It had been remarked by travelers on Veirs Mill Road as it stood proud on the hill top, stone stairways descending the hill to terraces that lined the mill pond. The only traces that remain are brickwork of a patio, foundation markings and stairs to the terraces, once the place of promenades, now overgrown in woods. It can be seen just east of Carl Sandburg, that is, on the cafeteria side of the building.

If you go there, also walk behind the cafeteria towards the playground. You will pass by the library. In there, they kept a bee-hive so the children could watch the honey bees at work. A tube led though the window. It was at that tube Williamson and I once waited to catch a bee for science class. But it was we who were caught by the principal.

Further around back, look for a giant tree with tremendous roots. We would spend many idle minutes of recess walking in circles on the great roots. Round and round, I’d tune out the many kids playing ball. I was at ease walking about on those roots under the tree or wandering the edges of the field looking for rocks. Seeing the lesser seen places. O, how I would daydream. I would imagine building clever little electric carts and zipping along. Or spread my arms and I became a B-52 lumbering over the terrain. How many lessons did I miss for being engaged elsewhere? As often as the teacher called my name a second time.

God has brought me along paths I no way expected, of daydreams and dreams and yoke-work and adventure. Now I have a boy who is nine. O dear Lord Jesus, call this boy. Let him treasure the many events of his boyhood. I pray for him each night, teach him all the lessons a nine-year-old boy needs.

Deep Devil Woods – March 13, 1997
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Karen was away this week in Florida and I had to work but we arranged for the children to stay with others for the days, two to one family, two to another. After studies, Claire and Emily would take walks with their friends into the woods and to their friends’ fort in the woods.

I retrieved the two and treated them to a stop at the candy store. Behind the glass were gold-coin chocolates. Emily and Claire hatched a plan. I bought some.   At home, we prepared the other aspects of the plan. Claire found a dark glass soda bottle and a cork. We made a cup of tea and soaked a paper in the tea, then let it dry, giving the appearance of many years.   Then Emily described for me in great detail the features of the woods approaching their friends’ fort. With a candle we burned the edges of the paper, then illustrated in ink a careful and elaborate map. Everything Emily described, I drew. The fallen tree, the creek, the steep bank, the crooked tree, the mud, the thick woods. Claire and Emily gleefully offered names: “Dead Man’s Cliff”, “Quick Mud”, “Deep Devil Woods”.

On the morning of their last day, the map, rolled up and tied and placed in the bottle, and a tin with the chocolate coins went with Emily and Claire. They did a super job getting those pieces out to the field and hidden in the woods in advance. Later, with the other girls, they found the bottle.

The map worked so strongly that their friends did not want to return to those woods.   They feared what they imagined.   Claire and Emily had not expected that.

The Firey Gloom – April 28, 1997

Last week, Claire sat in the front hall drawing and asked occasionally for the spelling of a word. Later, while I sat outside on the front steps, she came around from the back yard. She held out a paper, rolled up and tied closed with a piece of grass. She excitedly spoke, “Dad, I found this in a hole. What could it be?”   We broke the grass string and unrolled it.

We studied the illustration. She and I took it in hand and explored until we determined it to be of the front yard. Around the edges of the paper, we read,

“From the Firey Gloom to the Poyson Boosh; From the Ant Hill to the Hy Wedes.”

 Drawing lines between each of the pairs of landmarks, it was an elementary matter to find the “X”. We dug there. A treasure! Two plastic milk jug lids, snapped together, and holding small coins.

The Poyson Boosh was one of the azaleas. My favorite term was her clever, “Firey Gloom”. This was the lamppost. I do wonder how she pieced together such a wonderful – or dreadful – name, the Firey Gloom.

More Bleachers Upward — August 27, 2017

Thirty years and twenty years have passed since these stories. I had wondered, can you somewhere find bleachers and look up the rows to see what sits on them in your years ahead? Yes, ahead there are pirates and monsters and the deep devil woods. But there is also the light of the firey gloom, and under it’s good light, treasure.

 (C) 2017 Bryan Dubois