The Great Explorer

I felt more like an interloper, a trespasser, really, than a pilgrim returned to a place that once, long ago, I knew so well. It is strange now. The property, bordered by a rocky creekbed on one side and a railroad track across the back, was limited by a highway—now reduced to the designation of “road,” as it’s no longer used by cross-country traffic, across the front. Where the barn—converted even then to a garage—once stood, guarded by red-ant beds and scorpions and buzzing yellow jackets, and the corral beyond it that separated the domicile from the adjacent depot at the neighboring junction, there now is a concrete overpass, intrusively inserting itself into this pastoral scape, this place where, once, my grandparents’ home so proudly stood.
The house dominated the property, of course, with a large front porch that ran across the front, and two brick pillars supporting the gallery overhead. It was painted white—that I remember so vividly—with green shutters and an oversized front door guarded by a screen. The yard in front, hard-packed dirt mostly, was flanked by two huge elm trees, too big around for my childish hands to join in circle. The trees’ roots were also large, extrusive and emergent, a place for toy soldiers to hide from each other when I played there, staving off the boredom of visits, while my parents sat on the porch, talking, sipping lemonade made with the cool cistern water or eating ice cream that my father had hand-cranked. It was always summer, then.
Now, it is still summer, but there is none of that. The elms, long gone, ravaged by disease and, doubtless, fallen under their own weight, aided in their collapse by the incessant pressures of wind and weather, are replaced by an unruly thicket of mesquite and weeds, Johnson grass, mostly and its razor-sharp blades of spring now rustling yellow and dry in the sun, while the seed-heads, allowed to thrive indifferently bend to the heat, eventually shedding their pervasive fruit to make more of the same pestilent plant that, with its partnering mesquite, have become the scourge of this dusty, brittle country. It’s likely there are snakes about, or other vermin, so I step carefully.
And the house itself, of course, is also gone, long removed to the town five miles to the east, providing a home, first for my aunt and her family, and then, when she died and they moved on, for anonymous people whom I’ve never met and, after driving by slowly earlier that afternoon, have no desire to. It was no longer large, the house. No longer the imposing structure that seemed to be a fitting domicile for my patriarchal grandfather and deeply sweet grandmother, a place where my father grew up with his brothers and sisters. Now, it has become a repository for a collection of rusting junk, piled high on the same porch where I remember my grandfather sitting and rocking and smoking his pipe, a fly-swatter in hand, a Stetson on his head, his white shirt gleaming and khakis starched so stiff it seemed the creases would cut to blood. All the pride he took in that house, that home, was now buried beneath a jumble of corroding plastic containers, bent metal, and a random collection of undefined and useless detritus the present owners of the building had gathered there, almost perversely, it seemed, as if to insult the integrity of the structure’s memory. They had no respect for the dignity of those who once owned it, who made children in it, who reared a family and served Sunday dinners and decorated Christmas trees, and celebrated weddings and mourned losses in its living room. They had no memory of my grandmother skimming cream or gathering eggs or playing her beloved hymns on an antique upright piano, or of them sitting and listening to the news of their soldier son then overseas on the huge Philco radio, awkwardly jammed into a corner. I wondered, then, if the wall paper was still the same. I remembered that it was dark blue with yellow flowers that, even then, seemed faded from the grime of coal-oil lamps that had long before been replaced with electric lighting, and I wondered if the yellowed linoleum of the kitchen floor as still the same.
All that was a mere wisp on the empty lot that spread out before me, through the grass and weeds, and onto which I walked with a timid step. I looked beyond where the house stood and wondered who had torn down the stone cistern, and the hen-house, and who had filled in the cold cellar. There was no evidence that they had ever been there.
I made my way through the waist-high weeds to a spot where my grandfather had erected an A-frame out of pipe then hung a swing for my amusement. I had forgotten about that, about him swinging me when I was barely old enough to walk. I remember him lighting his pipe and asking me if I had ever seen a match burn twice? And when I shook my head him putting the snuffed out in of a Lucifer on the back of my wrist, and feeling the sudden, shocking sting of a light burn. I must have run crying to my mother—or grandmother. And she, whichever she it was, must have scolded him. And I’ll bet he laughed. And I’ll bet I fell for the same trick again, eager to please him, eager for him to love me, and to forgive me for tattling.
And I remembered a cloud-tossed night, with a moon streaming down through the window of the bedroom where I had been installed beneath quilts that smelled of lilac and lavender, and being terrified by a loud hooting noise outside, only to be assured by that same, large and gentle man, that it was only an owl, hunting for his mate, he told me, in the moonlit darkness of the creekbed.
I moved with some care to the small precipice that overlooked the creek, that I remembered had once had water deep enough for fish, even for swimming in the rainy season. It now was dusty, with sharp and ugly rocks and crackling weeds protruding from a desert ditch, with some twisted hackberry trees vying with the thorny mesquite for what little moisture might collect there from time to time. All rocky, now. Hard-scrabble and uninviting. Once, I recalled with a shock, all of this was grass, from the limestone edge of the miniature bluff all the way down to the bank. Buffalo grass. Tall and lush and soft as a breath, it was taller than I, then. I remembered. I remembered the game I played with myself, alone as I often was while the adults sorted out some difficulty or argued some point of family business inside.
With a hand-carved rifle wrought from a soft pine board, whittled by my grandfather’s Old Timer pocket knife, I would put on a miniature coonskin cap I had been given for Christmas, part of a Davy Crockett outfit made up of plastic- tasseled buckskin and paper-thin suede moccasins, the rest of which I quickly outgrew, all but the cap, at least, I would venture off into that tiny, grassy meadow and follow the descent with my imagination providing the wilderness that it became. I was exploring. Like Davy or Daniel Boone or any other intrepid frontiersman of my childish knowledge and imagination, I was seeking new lands, new sights, pushing back the corners of the frontier and making way for civilization.
As I wound my way down toward the creek, the recent admonishments to stay far from the bank and the water fading from my consciousness, I conjured wild beasts and wilder Indians. I made my way secretly around the camps of river pirates and roving gangs of bandits and highwaymen. I sought the opening in the grassy forest that would open and reveal to me a horizon of wonder that I was able, always, to see when I reached the limits of the imagined wilds, when I heard the distant rumble and felt the earth-shaking vibration of a passing locomotive, belching smoke and sounding bells and whistles as it approached the depot, and that would startle me from my imaginary adventure and thrust me, somewhat fearfully, back into the reality of childhood. For a time.
Now, though, the grass was gone, baked away by drought, neglect, indifference, choked by unwelcome and hostile vegetable encroachment that had no right to be there but that came with the inexorable force of the unwelcome, as invaders always do. The tracks behind the house were rusty and weed-grown from disuse, and the trestle over the creek—a point of adventure I had never had the courage to embark toward, although more out of fear of punishment for disobedience than of danger—was blocked by barriers and signs forbidding access to either steam leviathans or human soles. Now, there was nothing to remaining to explore. Civilization and practicality had come and gone, taking with it even the impression of adventure, taking with it the sweetness of romance.
As I strolled the limits of property’s perimeters, more comfortably now that I had exorcised demons and identified ghosts, I realized that what I was doing was once again playing the part of the great explorer. Sadder but wiser, of course, older and less given to dreams, I now found my frontiers in the forest of memory, my wilderness in the horizons of the past. What I searched for was not my grandfather’s shade, nor his stately and impressive manse, nor any of the tactile and corporal trappings of a bygone time. What I sought was to see, however inwardly and however fleetingly, was the great explorer in a small fake-coonskin cap, a brave and intrepid denizen of a dense woods that didn’t seem like a mere grassy knoll, with a trusty flintlock rifle that didn’t seem like a mere pine-wrought model, in a pair of deerskin moccasins rather than sneakers and greasy buckskins rather than knee-worn dungarees, pushing through a genuine wild that seemed like the dense hardwoods of a western forest, dodging and evading the evils and danger of the frontier that existed only in his eyes.
And I realized that I was, on that hot summer afternoon, standing on a vacant bit of ground that once had been foundation for home, family, and a world of hope, a place only I could see in my eyes, and I was still exploring, still seeking, and still believing that the possible could become real.