Wild Child

Wild Child

I had lots freedom as a child and reflect on those rich years. I am sadden that my own children, grandchildren and great grandchildren are mostly city dwellers, growing up during a time when society had grown mistrustful and suspicion and missing out on encounters with nature.

            I open the back door of our cabin. I breathe the air, pine scented tinged with the spicy aroma of sagebrush, deep into my lungs and watch my exhalations billow into the cold clear day. Jeans are tucked into the tops of red rubber goulashes; I am wearing long underwear, my head is covered with a blue wool cap pulled low over my brow, hands snuggled into knitted woolen mittens and shoved deep into the pockets of my jacket. Soon my nose feels frozen and it drips.

            It is 1948; I am ten years old and we live in Mammoth Lakes in the high sierras of California. Days of bad weather have forced me to be cooped up with my two younger sisters and touchy pregnant mother. I have spent long afternoons alone in our upstairs attic bedroom carefully creating scrap books of cartoons cut from newspapers. They are organized by character: Nancy and Sluggo, Mary Worth, Terry and the Pirates, and Superman. Spring appears to be winning the battle over winter.

            I am eager to escape and I follow a game trail through quiet woods, trying to tread so that slushy snow doesn’t flow over the tops of my goulashes.  I make my way onto an old road and follow it north, trudging uphill on the deteriorating pavement, leaping over puddles, some with a crust of ice on the top. The meadows on my left are framed by the snow-capped Sierra Nevada Mountains. A few yellow wild flowers are sprinkled about. I am in a symphonic world composed by snowmelt in all its forms - roaring, rushing, gushing and trickling down the mountains through the fields, across the road, and plunging into roaring Mammoth Creek to my right. The calls of blackbirds, robins and jays add a certain harmony as they flit about in search of mates, insects and suitable nesting sites.

            I pause by a barbed wire fence and watch a small herd of cattle grazing on the shoots of grass that form green islands in the snow. They raise their heads, glance at me, and return to their job. The pond where we attempted to skate in the winter is mostly melted,  with just a rim of ice clinging to the sides. 

            I walk as far as I can go up towards Old Mammoth, stopped by huge drifts of snow frozen under towering pines. I retrace my path, not meeting a soul, hungry and eager to be in the kitchen warmed by a wood stove and devouring a peanut butter and jam sandwich.