Emerald Mountain

These past few months, I have been forced to come to terms with the frailty of my own body. This summer, I was indestructible. Easily I was the strongest, fastest, biggest, and most conditioned I had ever been in my entire life. 205lbs, 5'9" I really thought I couldn't be touched until a preseason injury yielded me unable to effectively exercise my legs for the next 11 weeks (and counting). The anguish from a ruined football season is nothing compared to the helplessness I feel at being unable to function as I did this summer. Now, I sense that God has allowed this in order to show me how unimportant that part of my life is, and how relevant the areas I neglected are. With this dimension subtracted from my life I've been forced to look at other outlets for my energy and time. School was already a very large factor. The largest increase has been in my spiritual life. I have also renewed my interest in reading, writing, and music.

I heard a commercial today that said being young means knowing that the best part of your life lies ahead. Certainly it is a pretty thought, but I tend to disagree - unless they are saying "best part of your life" and meaning heaven. Is it necessarily negative if you've passed the apex of your life? Perhaps the topic is different from a Christian viewpoint because the world we live in is only a temporary blip on the radar compared with the rest of our existence. So far, I believe the best time of my life was when I was about 8 years old.
Reflecting on my childhood is like reading a modern day Twain novel. I lived in a sprawling, island of a suburb in Elmore County where all the kids came out on the communal lawns during the summer evenings and played together.

My best friend was a kid named Daniel Vanderberry. He lived about a mile, or a six-minute bike ride away. His house was down a significant hill and then maybe a half a mile of flat pavement away. I was so ecstatic the very first day my parents let me make the trek on my own, making me promise to call the moment I arrived. I practiced the trip so many times while my parents jogged, pedaling furiously down "Hickory Hill" so that my momentum would carry me as far across the flat pavement as possible. I even learned to ride without using my hands. Then I'd do something obvious with my hands like adjust my helmet strap so that the girls on the main street who probably weren't watching could tell, "he's not using any hands!" Then, I'd arrive at Dan the man's house and we would immediately grab a drink and begin the journey down the drop-off behind his house to the valley below, absolutely filled with trees and forest and wild. I think that neither my parents nor his knew exactly what went on down there, for if they did, our escapades through the woods would have been halted immediately. Sometimes we'd have bottle-rockets left over from the Fourth of July, or if it were spring, we'd bring our snake-hunting sticks we fashioned ourselves.

Looking back on these adventures, I realize many things could have seriously gone awry. Deadly poisonous snakes, at least deadly to the average 9 year old, were in the plenty down there. Steep ravines - seriously some were about 20 or even 30 feet tall - nearly vertical clay walls. We would crawl like spiders down the steep sides of the ravine and climb back up (a team effort) with shirt loads of clay that we would mold into action figures we didn't already possess. It was not unusual for one of us to get a whole leg stuck in the putty-like wet clay, and on at least one occasion Dan lost a shoe for our cause. I don't remember what the said objective was that trip but likely it involved M90's. Some expeditions were far more planned out. We used the entire [school] week to pack things in our backpacks: water, comic books, firecrackers covertly secured from our respective houses, flashlights, matches, walkie-talkies, various snacks also covertly secured, and depending on the expedition's proximity to Christmas, the latest Comanche Jr. Bow and Arrow Set may be brought along.

We would disappear in the woods on Dan's side of the neighborhood and reappear in the ravine across from my house. I can remember medieval, untouched landscapes like those you see in movies. We would walk along streambeds, through gullies with emerald greed trees embracing overhead, water clear as glass running swift and shallow or slow and deep over sand - real white sand - creek beds, with smooth skipping rocks scattered about. Then, the clay ravines would have every color from solid white to pink to red to purple, perfect clay, painted upon the steep sides of the ravine as if some ancient abstract painter covered the place in his nonsense frescoes. These are the memories you can never seem to capture the whole beauty of - even the day afterwards. There is simply no way to remake the 8 year old conscience - to say I was carefree was quite the understatement.

An entire nature trail infrastructure was financed by the neighborhood in the surrounding woods, including wooden bridges, benches, signs, and I think I remember a random water fountain somewhere. Hurricane Opal came through while we lived there - Dan and I were the first to discover a washed out bridge along with scores of fell trees. I want very badly to go back to these places, to walk where I walked as a kid 9 years ago, but I am afraid that my childlike impressions may be forever tarnished by adult perceptions. It is difficult for me to believe that school, sports, or anything else went on during this period of my life, because these adventures dominate my memories.

Ever since I moved from Emerald Mountain, it seems that these things have steadily faded, some of the real things being turned into myth, some of the myth being mixed with real things. I'm fairly certain of what happened, but some things can seem a bit unlikely - like finding Jim Allen (the neighborhood owner)'s walkie-talkie frequency and playing pranks on him. The four-foot long copperhead I almost stepped on in the creek, that just sat there and watched us instead of swimming away. The time the creek in the valley behind Dan's house froze, but nothing else did. The July we fried an egg on someone’s utility box. The night we rolled six houses on his street and put honey on the mailbox handles to watch the mailman come the next day. The - wait. I can't tell about that one yet.