The Swing
Molly and I were walking along a familiar dirt horse trail just half a mile from where I grew up, and emotionally and nostalgically worlds away from where I am now. I had not gone to the swing since before I graduated high school, a phenomenal time filled with phenomenal friends and phenomenally bizarre things that we used to be able to do without alcohol. I have romanticized this swing in my memory, I have remembered it like a soldier gone off to war.
Our afternoons when school would let out would be filled with a composition of numerable activities, not entirely spontaneous, but an arsenal of events that could be done at any moment and that everyone always agreed upon. If it was immediately after school, we would often go back to my parent’s house and play Mario Party on my Nintendo 64, always very competitive, and always played very sincerely. Afterwards, we might go into the Jacuzzi naked, entirely oblivious to the fact that it would almost always be completely light out, and we thought nothing of bringing our bits above the water and into full view of my parent’s neighbors homes, positioned voyeuristically across the canyon.
Or, we might climb into someone’s car (usually mine, I had the SUV) and drive around with scissors wearing dark hoodies and eye-black trying to find a home with an impressive looking collection of rare and beautiful flowers, the objective being to dash out of the car and cut and steal the flowers from the yard. We would return home after several hours of this to make a bouquet and decide to whom we would give it. One time we gave them to Dylan Ramsey when he became potentially terminally ill. He was such a little dickweed all through high school, but when you find out someone is potentially terminally ill, you tend to forgive them more easily.
If it was a Monday or Wednesday, we might go to Chin’s Szechwan where Otis, a smiley black man with a healthy black laugh and a sequined sports coat would host karaoke night and listen to us joke our way through songs. Well, some of us did sincerely joke, I however would only joke when it was a song I wished to sing with great pathos and emotion that I horrifically sensed was spiraling dangerously away from emotive or even tolerable. It was important in these times to be able to goof my way through the rest of it, so that people didn’t think that I was a terrible singer who couldn’t tell the difference between myself and a real singer like John, who did a mean Billy Ocean.
There was also a swing draped from a rope of unknown origin over the creek by the branch of a great eucalyptus. The piece of wood that made up the seat hovered over the middle of the water so that we had to find a stick of the right length and curvature to hook the rope and bring it to shore. The creek ran through a canyon that was enclosed by a ribbon of mountains and cliffs entwined with strands of horse trails. Pillars of eucalyptus constructed the edge of the creek and rose up out of the canyon, and we could picture people in flowing white garments leaping from treetop to treetop. To get to the swing itself, you had to cross the creek at a relatively expansive point, and there was a tiny dam not more than a hundred feet from the eucalyptus that was wide enough to walk comfortably across if you could brave the algae that grew over it, slipperier than socks on polished marble, and the water rushing by your feet creating long, elegant tendrils of slimy moss, braided by the water as the creek poured over the side. Those with shoes would be carried on the back of those with easily removable sandals.
We became continuously more daring with the swing’s usage as we learned the rope’s durability, and the thrill of getting higher and higher continued to entice us. We slowly made our way up the tree trunk, testing new heights that would allow a greater swing radius until we reached the apex of our climb, a branch hundreds of feet above the water where we could leap off, white knuckles grasping the rope, and soar down towards the swirling glass, leaning back and letting our fingers graze it if we wanted to or slapping it hard with our foot, sending shards of crystals into the air that called us upward with the arc of the rope until we lay with our backs parallel to the water and sky until we reach the peak of our swing and float back to earth to begin the passage once more.
My nostalgia for this came in an arbitrary manner, as does the affection for an old toy that sits unnoticed but in the same place for many years until it is in danger of being taken away. When Molly and I arrived at the field that ran along the creek, it was smaller than I recalled, and the trees didn’t provide it with the secrecy that I remembered, and the sun was invading everywhere, presenting this place to the unappreciative world. The lawn on the field had been freshly cut and was bordered by a white plastic picket fence, and a swing-set with two swings had been professionally installed at one end, placed inside an area cut out from the grass, neatly carpeted with woodchips. The creek had been closed off by centuries of careless shrubbery, and during some storm between then and now, the great eucalyptus had crashed under the weight of so much responsibility. It now lay on its side across the water, inviting us tauntingly and conveniently over to the other side of the creek, rampant with brush and without a rope swing.
We decided to walk over to the newly installed swing on the field. I pulled a box of ‘Nilla Wafers that I found in my parent’s pantry from God-knows-how-long ago out of the backpack I brought over. They were stale and the taste was diluted.
Molly and I swung for a bit and made talk about a contest to see who could jump off and land the farthest on the grass; neither one of us ended up competing. At a table about 20 yards from the swing set sat two boys, about fourteen, smoking pot. Molly walked over to the boys who looked nervous and frazzled about her approaching them. They quickly and inconspicuously tried to hide the pot and answered in brief, sheepish responses to her inquiring about what they were doing.
“Yeah? So what’d you make that bong out of?”
“Uh, like a whistle and a Slurpee straw.”
“Oh, very cool,” she congratulated.
We giggled as we walked away at Molly somehow reaching an age where she was a potentially intimidating authority against smoking weed. It appears that every year since moving out of my parent’s house, I’ve assumed that it’s come the year in which I must finally consider myself an adult, but I always in retrospect seem to understand that I was still very much a child “last year.” It’s not until I view these years as consecutively in the past that I can truly feel the embarrassment for having taken myself so seriously while at the same time understanding the future embarrassment I will feel for taking myself so seriously right now. We hopped the white fences and decided not to hike back along the horse trails towards my parent’s house and instead walked up the hill towards the cul-de-sac of the street closest to the creek. The sun was low in the sky and casting an orange glow and Boroque shadows across the landscape. The big, fabulous new houses being built along the road looked picturesque and vacant. We took a shortcut through the ranch and stopped to feed the horses.
Our afternoons when school would let out would be filled with a composition of numerable activities, not entirely spontaneous, but an arsenal of events that could be done at any moment and that everyone always agreed upon. If it was immediately after school, we would often go back to my parent’s house and play Mario Party on my Nintendo 64, always very competitive, and always played very sincerely. Afterwards, we might go into the Jacuzzi naked, entirely oblivious to the fact that it would almost always be completely light out, and we thought nothing of bringing our bits above the water and into full view of my parent’s neighbors homes, positioned voyeuristically across the canyon.
Or, we might climb into someone’s car (usually mine, I had the SUV) and drive around with scissors wearing dark hoodies and eye-black trying to find a home with an impressive looking collection of rare and beautiful flowers, the objective being to dash out of the car and cut and steal the flowers from the yard. We would return home after several hours of this to make a bouquet and decide to whom we would give it. One time we gave them to Dylan Ramsey when he became potentially terminally ill. He was such a little dickweed all through high school, but when you find out someone is potentially terminally ill, you tend to forgive them more easily.
If it was a Monday or Wednesday, we might go to Chin’s Szechwan where Otis, a smiley black man with a healthy black laugh and a sequined sports coat would host karaoke night and listen to us joke our way through songs. Well, some of us did sincerely joke, I however would only joke when it was a song I wished to sing with great pathos and emotion that I horrifically sensed was spiraling dangerously away from emotive or even tolerable. It was important in these times to be able to goof my way through the rest of it, so that people didn’t think that I was a terrible singer who couldn’t tell the difference between myself and a real singer like John, who did a mean Billy Ocean.
There was also a swing draped from a rope of unknown origin over the creek by the branch of a great eucalyptus. The piece of wood that made up the seat hovered over the middle of the water so that we had to find a stick of the right length and curvature to hook the rope and bring it to shore. The creek ran through a canyon that was enclosed by a ribbon of mountains and cliffs entwined with strands of horse trails. Pillars of eucalyptus constructed the edge of the creek and rose up out of the canyon, and we could picture people in flowing white garments leaping from treetop to treetop. To get to the swing itself, you had to cross the creek at a relatively expansive point, and there was a tiny dam not more than a hundred feet from the eucalyptus that was wide enough to walk comfortably across if you could brave the algae that grew over it, slipperier than socks on polished marble, and the water rushing by your feet creating long, elegant tendrils of slimy moss, braided by the water as the creek poured over the side. Those with shoes would be carried on the back of those with easily removable sandals.
We became continuously more daring with the swing’s usage as we learned the rope’s durability, and the thrill of getting higher and higher continued to entice us. We slowly made our way up the tree trunk, testing new heights that would allow a greater swing radius until we reached the apex of our climb, a branch hundreds of feet above the water where we could leap off, white knuckles grasping the rope, and soar down towards the swirling glass, leaning back and letting our fingers graze it if we wanted to or slapping it hard with our foot, sending shards of crystals into the air that called us upward with the arc of the rope until we lay with our backs parallel to the water and sky until we reach the peak of our swing and float back to earth to begin the passage once more.
My nostalgia for this came in an arbitrary manner, as does the affection for an old toy that sits unnoticed but in the same place for many years until it is in danger of being taken away. When Molly and I arrived at the field that ran along the creek, it was smaller than I recalled, and the trees didn’t provide it with the secrecy that I remembered, and the sun was invading everywhere, presenting this place to the unappreciative world. The lawn on the field had been freshly cut and was bordered by a white plastic picket fence, and a swing-set with two swings had been professionally installed at one end, placed inside an area cut out from the grass, neatly carpeted with woodchips. The creek had been closed off by centuries of careless shrubbery, and during some storm between then and now, the great eucalyptus had crashed under the weight of so much responsibility. It now lay on its side across the water, inviting us tauntingly and conveniently over to the other side of the creek, rampant with brush and without a rope swing.
We decided to walk over to the newly installed swing on the field. I pulled a box of ‘Nilla Wafers that I found in my parent’s pantry from God-knows-how-long ago out of the backpack I brought over. They were stale and the taste was diluted.
Molly and I swung for a bit and made talk about a contest to see who could jump off and land the farthest on the grass; neither one of us ended up competing. At a table about 20 yards from the swing set sat two boys, about fourteen, smoking pot. Molly walked over to the boys who looked nervous and frazzled about her approaching them. They quickly and inconspicuously tried to hide the pot and answered in brief, sheepish responses to her inquiring about what they were doing.
“Yeah? So what’d you make that bong out of?”
“Uh, like a whistle and a Slurpee straw.”
“Oh, very cool,” she congratulated.
We giggled as we walked away at Molly somehow reaching an age where she was a potentially intimidating authority against smoking weed. It appears that every year since moving out of my parent’s house, I’ve assumed that it’s come the year in which I must finally consider myself an adult, but I always in retrospect seem to understand that I was still very much a child “last year.” It’s not until I view these years as consecutively in the past that I can truly feel the embarrassment for having taken myself so seriously while at the same time understanding the future embarrassment I will feel for taking myself so seriously right now. We hopped the white fences and decided not to hike back along the horse trails towards my parent’s house and instead walked up the hill towards the cul-de-sac of the street closest to the creek. The sun was low in the sky and casting an orange glow and Boroque shadows across the landscape. The big, fabulous new houses being built along the road looked picturesque and vacant. We took a shortcut through the ranch and stopped to feed the horses.