It’s been a homestead weekend on the farm — rendering fatback into lard, salting down pork bellies for bacon, harvesting crabapples and then making rosemary-crabapple jelly, all capped by watching a magnificent full moon rise over the hill pasture.
As I watch the moon emerge, I glimpse the shard of a boyhood memory. Sitting 
on the bank of Contraband Bayou, a mile back through the dark woods of the old Barbe property, I am 10 years old, and fishing for alligator gar around midnight, the light of another full moon laying out a path across the sluggish water.
The years between 8 and 12 are the best for boys. It’s a time when they are no longer kids (at least in their own eyes) and before the awkward teenage years of figuring out how to fit in. When they are just old enough to be gone all day during the summer and often out at night without occasioning a search party. When parents, glad to be shed of them, give them greater latitude to roam, and when any hints of what adulthood might entail are only lightning strikes over the horizon.
That the character of a boy’s life depends on the locale and time frame as much as on his parents and family, I am fully aware. It also depends on his reading habits. For there is a vast literature for boys (or there was, before literary sanitizers came into general use) to guide him in the spirit of adventure.
That literature, as much as the era and place, steered the ways in which I lived my youth. Days spent building forts, riding bikes across town on quiet streets, exploring the length and breadth of the bayou in a beat-up jon boat, running trotlines all night or fishing for bass all day. Alas, guided by such books, filching my father’s pipe tobacco and, from an old pipe found in a ditch, smoking it with my friends until the tears ran down our faces.
Tom Sawyer (he of the pipe instruction, among other wholesome activities) and other boyhood literary heroes loomed large in my imagination. Theirs were the templates for a well-lived life. I read scores of books during those years, and of them, five were my bibles: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Twain), Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era (North), Ice Falcon (Ritchie), Rifles for Watie (Keith), and My Side of the Mountain (George).
How to survive being lost in a cave and then attend your own funeral. Build a canvas canoe in your own living room. Befriend a raccoon. Stow away with Vikings and explore medieval Iceland. Serve on both sides in the Civil War. Fall in love with a Cherokee girl. Run away from the city and live in the Catskills. All the life lessons I imagined I needed were found in those pages.
Indeed, each has shaped me in ways that I cannot fully touch, conjuring the ghost of memory, of innocence, of adventure, of a boy. One that even now I glimpse from time to time, usually, often, in the light of a full moon rising over the farm.
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Reading this past week: Three John Sandford mysteries, Holy Ghost, Bloody Genius, Neon Prey
Who needs literary sanitizers when attention has already turned heavily toward video games and other decidedly indoor exploits? The models and lessons (real or imagined) you cite have been replaced by property theft (Grand Theft Auto), warfare (Call of Duty), alien annihilation (Doom), and medievalism (World of Warcraft), among others, typically with heavy doses of violence and sexuality. Even mischief associated with boyhood traverses of the local landscape seem quaint and wholesome by contrast.
I couldn’t help contemplate that while writing these words.
There’s a good moon on the rise…
Two things –
1) Really like the metaphor:
…hints of what adulthood might entail are only lightning strikes over the horizon
2) Trying real hard to settle on 5 books to list along side yours above. Tom Sawyer is the only title we have in common… Others for me include:
Robinson Crusoe; The Spinning Tops of Naples; Gulliver’s Travels; Huckleberry Finn…
Short fiction from Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain always provided a place to turn when it was too nasty to be outside.
Thanks, I was partial to that one as well. And, nice additions to my list. There are so many one could add. So much depends on when you were first introduced to the book that determines where it lands in your own particular hierarchy.
“Jefferson-City, die Hauptstadt des Staates Missouri und zugleich der Hauptort des County Cole, liegt am rechten Ufer des Missouri auf einer anmutigen Höhe, die einen fesselnden Blick auf den unten strömenden Fluß…………….”
Are you a fan of Karl May? Had to do some old fashioned google translating and searching to come up with that name.
Like many little boys, I used to be one. I’m not sure how many American boys get to read him, and I have never reread him, so I’m not quite sure whether he really was as strange an influence as I later thought him to be.
Well, I know Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes has kept me out of small-town carnivals my entire life.
I think the melange of rugged scenery, exposure to extreme thirst in the desert, self discipline, honour, and regular and minutely detailed torture scenes may count as somewhat of a Christian education.
Btw: Can you recommend ‘The Story Of Gardening’?
Glad you asked, nope. It is written in a style that is a little too “precious” and not that informative. His bedside book for gardeners, on the other hand, is pretty fun. It consists of daily entries on his gardening activities.
Good to know; thanks. I’m wondering what kind of ag books I’m going to be reading in the future anyway. There’s only so much redundancy I can bear reading when it comes to apples. I’ll probably switch to illustrated ones.