riotheclown

No Trees Grown Yet

It was called the “Golden Mile of Industry” in the early 60’s. There was the junkyard where you could watch the cars getting crushed and then a bit beyond that the train tracks and then the factories.

The neighbourhood, slightly higher in elevation, was not built up yet: there were no trees. Fences were just the loose wire ones put in for free by the developer and so from my bedroom window of our little post-war-box-of-bliss I could see the sunrise glinting off the tracks, the junk yard cars and the flat factory roofs.

The single-story factories with their loading docks were abandoned on weekends and behind them there were just some stubborn farm fields mostly gone to scrub. In the back roads, behind the houses all made of tickly-tacky, a kid could ride her bike uninterrupted by traffic, long and fast enough to get winded.

Saturday I’d watch happily as the sun’s first rays reached my bedroom window, looking forward to a day of freedom with my friends, Mark and Myles; digging through the bins outside the Bubble Gum Factory and the Dirty Book Factory and challenging each other on our bikes to take the loading dock inclines vertically, without wiping out.

If it rained we’d head for the big sewer and sheltered in its mouth, chewing on the hard lumpy discarded wads of sugar and blushing as we passed the books back and forth, trying to make sense of the passages that contained any words we recognized as naughty, like “bosom” or “manhood”.

We'd spend the day like this until the sun began to set and then beat a path to our homes on our bikes as fast as we could, racing the streetlights to get there before they could turn on and cause us to suffer the obligatory spankings that were required of good parents or worse, being "grounded". 

Exhausted and happy I would fall asleep, still dirty above my ankle socks.

Sunday would be the day for scrubbing it all off and dressing in an itchy dress for church. That wildness gone I would shrink to the size of a quiet child who did nothing but sit with hands folded in her lap, not even swinging her legs that hung from the hard bench, nor singing with the congregation because her voice was "bad". Instead, head bowed, pretending to read the words like my sister, mother and father, not offending God's (or at least my father's) ear, while others happily sang shrill and loud and yet escaped God's wrath. 

In bed whenever an airplane passed overhead, I imagined it was God reminding me that he knew what I was thinking. I was often thinking bad thoughts so I would be terrified, wrenched from the revelry of imagining a life that was very different, one that didn’t include my family. I would pretend that the sound of the transport trucks passing in the night were waves on a beach. This was such a successful method of lulling myself back to sleep that when I took a babysitting job one summer away from home when I was twelve, at night I pretended the waves crashing on the beach were actually transport trucks passing my house.

If a place could be a person or visa versa, I sometimes feel like a small crack in pavement that has been run over repeatedly, but sometimes too, if I am honest, I am a kid riding her guts out, full tilt on a back road, breathing deeply the joy of freedom.   

We were supposed to write about a place that influenced who I am today. I admit that wasn't what I was thinking about when I wrote this. The neighbourhood and I have changed but writing this made me think about the dichotomy that still exists in me, that wildness that is now mostly tamed inside and what I show the world.