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There are few things I can say with precision about much of my youth. The years are a blurred mess of jumbled memories and flashes -- themes more than scenes.
But the years when my family lived in California in the 1970s stand out to me more clearly than any others. Perhaps it was because of the change of scenery, perhaps it is because with less time to make friends I remember better the ones I had. Or perhaps -- and this is what I'd argue most strongly -- the abrupt shift of my life to California is cemented in my mind along with the equally abrupt shift back because it had a defined beginning and ending.
Dad moved us to California because his job as an aerospace engineer took him to Vandenberg Air Force Base when the Viking lander was nearly ready to launch. He was on the project at Martin Marietta in Colorado during the early stages, but for the lead-up to launch, he needed to be in California. We left on a beautiful January day from Denver, snow on the ground but blazing sun above in blue skies, and arrived in California a few days later. He and Mom bought a home in a development fairly separated from any other neighborhoods in an area outside of Santa Maria.
Our subdivision was surrounded on all sides by agricultural land. Highway 101 ran by a couple of miles from our neighborhood, but other than that we had vineyards and avocado fields forever. It was ideal for kids, because as long as we didn't stray near the freeway, our parents were content to let us wander and come home on our own.
Two recurring things stand out to me when I look at my activities and behavior back then. One, my friends and I were astoundingly good at taking reasonable, fun, creative activities and getting them banned by authority figures. Two, I did so much stuff at age nine that would have gotten me arrested had I done it when I was sixteen.
At school, we had a component of the curriculum that was apparently meant to teach us the value of money. Each student had a "job" in the classroom, for which he or she would earn fake money. Jobs were transferable, so someone could switch with someone else after consulting the teacher. But each job paid the same, so not many people swapped out of the swanky tasks. The money was only good for one thing -- placing bids at a weekly auction in class after Friday lunch. Students could bring in anything they wished, and after presenting it to the class, they'd take their seats and have the teacher begin the auction. At first, it seemed like a treat. Kids would bring in old books or toys they no longer wanted, and everyone else would bid on them. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the only really good stuff cost way more than a week's wages. To get something really neat, you had to resist the urge to buy a trinket every week and save your money. The problem was, by the time you'd saved a good wad, someone might not have good stuff to auction. My friends and I wondered how we could make sure to have cash on hand for the really good stuff all the time. We began bringing the junkiest crap you could imagine -- castoff jewelry and glorified chunks of wood, half-toys that had no value on their own but at some point belonged to something much cooler. We would bid up each others' crap, often just trading our dollars back and forth. But every now and then some sucker in class would join in the bidding on something worth nothing, and we would let them win the auction, adding their money to our combined pot. After just a few weeks, our collective had enough money to outbid anyone when something really cool was brought in for auction. And the pattern repeated -- we'd bring in our crap, inflate the price a bit, and soak the other kids for their hard-earned fake money. Eventually, someone figured it out, and the auctions were shelved in favor of using the job money for small, individual treats available from the teacher at the end of each week. And those treats weren't really that cool, certainly not worth wasting the efforts of an ingenious economic bloc.
My friends and I were avid maze-drawers as well. I'd guess there were four or five of us who drew them for each other the same way some kids doodled hot rods or spaceships. It became a contest to see whose mazes were the most difficult to solve. I remember the utter admiration I felt when one of my friends realized that, with a complex enough maze, he could run his lines right to the page edge, inserting an exit to the back side of the paper, then entering again somewhere else. Without that secret path, the maze was unsolvable. Brilliant! It sparked an evolution in maze creation, and before long we were more excited about presenting to each other our mazes than we were with schoolwork (or, I'd wager, that crap auction stuff we'd managed to ruin for everyone else). We were shocked and left feeling completely empty one morning when the teacher announced that our fun was so much of a distraction, mazes would no longer be allowed. Neither drawing them nor solving them. Crap.
We still had our marble games to keep us going. The schoolyard was divided into three areas: The hardtop court nearest the building, with basketball courts and lines painted for other activities; the sand-filled playground with climbing equipment and swings; and the athletic fields beyond that, mostly covered with grass and well worn in areas where games were played most often. It was at the edge of the grass area, near the property fences, that we played marbles. The ground there was worn so hard from use that the soil was essentially solid. We'd dig our holes into the ground, trace our circles in the dust, and shoot marbles before school, during recess and after school for as long as we could. Every kid worth his salt had a marble bag with him at all times, and we played for keeps. There were days I went in to class at first bell nearly in tears from losing one or more of my favorite marbles. Likewise, there were days I beamed all day at capturing one I'd had my eyes on. Apparently, we got a little obsessive about marbles too, because before the end of that school year, the teachers school-wide had banned marbles.
Don't get me started about what happened when one kid came to school and told us that there was a thing called a "bajina," and all girls had them. The reaction from the recess attendant when one of my friends worked up the courage to ask her about it was priceless, and yet it confirmed for all of us that bajinas were real, and they were not to be taken lightly.
That kid, incidentally, was most famous for burning his house down. We had all shown up to school one morning and, with no marble games to play anymore, stood around waiting for the bell. "Where's Jamie?" one of my friends asked. It was odd that he was late, not because he wasn't the kind of kid not to be late but because he lived only a couple blocks away. None of us knew, but before the class bell rang, someone noticed a plume of dark smoke rising from behind the trees near his house. We heard the sirens as we ran inside at the sound of the school bell. Jamie didn't show up for class until much later, and he was notably quiet and a little bit freaked out. We all learned later that he and his two younger brothers had been playing with matches (how cliche!) in his attic after his single mother had left for work. No one really mentioned it out loud, but I think we all secretly loved the danger in the story and the monumental scale of his mishap.
Oddly, my family lived far enough away from school that most of my school friends were not my hanging-out friends when I was home. Instead, I hung out with the kids from my neighborhood who were in different classrooms than me or even different schools altogether. But the one thing we all did was ride our bikes, and everywhere. Mom and Dad let us go as far as our legs would take us, which often meant our getting deep into the nearby vineyards or up to the chain-link fences that surrounded the oil pumps that worked up and down in the fields. For some reason, tree houses were hugely popular around there, and you often couldn't pass a grove of trees without seeing a structure of some kind. We didn't think of them as someone else's territory, just as we didn't think of our own tree houses as "ours." So we had a sort of mental map of the land, with tree houses etched in our minds as forts along the way or great spots to hide and confer. We even had code names for them, which we'd use for confidential meeting purposes. And we'd plot away the afternoons there, which is where the criminal activity creeps in.
It doesn't take long for nine-year-olds to go from plotting an imaginary dirt-clod raid on fake enemies to devising an assault on real property. The odd thing is, we were almost always caught and yet never really suffered any consequences. Perhaps that's the charm of a nine-year-old?
I remember planning a foray into the yard of a girl we thought of as particularly stuck up. In our minds, the best way of striking back at her attitude was to rip up the garden her parents kept. We dropped over her fence from a tree, pulled greens like we were finding gold under each of them, and hopped out of there before the father had time to yell out the door at us. We heard later we had been spotted, identified and warned. We apologized at the father's front door, rather than risk his telling our parents.
That, apparently, didn't stop us from planning a similar raid on a tool shed a few blocks away. My friend, who was a huge Roger Staubach fan, had peeked in through the cracks of the wallboards and spotted a Texas license plate hanging inside the shed. The door was held shut by a combination lock. That license plate was such a magnet for him, we hung out by the shed every afternoon for what seemed like a week, wondering how to get in. All that time hanging out led us to explore every inch of the shed, and finally he saw a series of numbers scratched into the wood. The combination? Indeed, the numbers worked, and we were inside!
I was terrified, probably too aware that we had ratcheted up our liability, but I agreed to stand lookout while he got the license plate loose. Plate in hand, we sped out of there back to our main tree house, where we stared in awe at the thing. But, really, a license plate isn't much. There was a lot of other cool stuff in that shed. The adrenaline had us feeling braver than we should have felt, and we went back for more, taking tools, hardware, string and chain, and pretty much anything we could gather and sprint with. We scraped away the gravel at the foot of our tree and dug into the hard ground with rocks, making a cache for our loot. We didn't know when to quit, though, and our next trip turned into our last. We were nabbed by the teenage daughter of the family as soon as we entered the shed. She said the thing we feared more than anything: "I'm going to tell your parents." But she promised to let us go if we'd apologize to her folks. We marched up to the house with her behind us, and we almost tearfully told her dad what we had done. He made us promise to bring back everything we'd taken and leave it in the shed, and then had us further promise never to do anything like it again.
We never really did do anything like that again, but not for trying or lack of opportunity. My family moved away at the end of that summer.
I'm not sure what happened to most of my friends. I traded letters with a few of them after my family moved back to Colorado, but the correspondence habit dies quickly when you're just ten years old. I heard that one of them went on to run competitively at UCLA. Another attended UC Santa Barbara and really got into surfing. As for me, I kind of became the kind of kid I'd have never hung out with at that age. Maybe it was getting caught one too many times, or maybe it was just that special place where we lived. Trouble didn't find me so easily back in Colorado, but perhaps that's also why those couple of years on the west coast stand out to me so brilliantly.
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