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By Roy Pace
Copyright 2010 Roy Pace
Miss Deadman’s Kindergarten School was aptly named. When I was four, I walked miles to get there every day, and I remember feeling so tired from that long walk that I thought I would die. The path was always the same. I left the front door of our house in Old Hickory, went down the steps, and then passed the huge tree in the front yard on my way to the street. There were no sidewalks, so I walked in the wet grass most mornings. The first stop sign was a mile uphill from the house. I crossed the street there and walked several more miles down to Miss Deadman’s house. I had to be there by nine to be in time for Romper Room. I usually trudged down the stairs to the basement just in time to watch the black and white program on the big console television.
After school, at about noon, I had to repeat my arduous journey back home. I was always starving and ready for lunch and a nap after such a tough day.
I followed many paths growing up. Some were short journeys; some much longer. Some paths were familiar, while others were ripe for new explorations. Back then, I didn’t know I was adventurous. I just did what the day called for.
On most days, I explored the woods in my back yard. We had moved from Old Hickory by then and lived in some hills northeast of Nashville on New Due West Avenue. Of course, it wasn’t an avenue, and it was a little too crooked to be due west, and it certainly wasn’t new, but the hills and woods provided endless journeys for kids who were desperate for things to do. Our house was in a little valley between Water Tank Hill where the city had built a new tank for drinking water, and Cactus Hill, a large hill covered by prickly pears. A creek seeped out of a spring on Water Tank Hill and ran all the way to the road in front of our house. I built more dams in the fifties and sixties than TVA and the Corps of Engineers combined, and my dams had more character than theirs.
My sisters and I spent years digging our swimming pool alongside that creek. It never got more than three feet deep, and it never made it all the way to swimming pool status, but we held out hope every year that we would get it deep enough to be a swimming pool. In the meantime, it was the site for forts, whole cities with buildings made with stray bricks and toy cars completely out of scale with the buildings. Every spring, we’d clear away the leaves and sticks that filled the hole, dig every day into summertime until it got too hot to dig, and then gradually abandon the hole in the fall to let it again collect the winter’s debris. I didn’t know until I was grown that Daddy loved that hole in the ground almost as much as we did. For the price of a couple of rusty shovels and an occasionally “borrowed” grubbing hoe, he provided us with nearly continuous activity, and he and Mother knew exactly where we were.
The path into the woods was just back of the mowed part of the back yard. During the summer, it was just a hole in the underbrush, but when we got past the edge of the woods, the path was a clear road to adventure. I found all kinds of things down that path, including a rusted part of a pistol, an old well, and the foundation of an old building. After we discovered the foundation, we thought of the pioneers that once lived there. In truth, the well was not that old. It had an iron pipe about six inches in diameter sticking out of the ground. My friends and I dropped rocks down the tube to see how long they took to “ploop” in the water below. Sometimes they didn’t.
For all of us, the hike up Cactus Hill was the greatest adventure. Once, when I was no more than ten, Granny wanted me to take a walk with her up the hill. She lived next door to us, right at the foot of the hill. It was spring, and the walk was easy. We talked about the weather and school and other things I’m sure, but my talking ended when she led me into a small meadow completely covered in buttercups. We sat in the sun, gazing at the thousands of yellow flowers that surrounded us. I always thought Granny was magical in some way, but I couldn’t believe she knew of this place I had never seen even though I explored that hill every day. The picture is vivid to this day, but I never saw that little meadow again. She never took me there again, and I was never able to find it for myself.
The path from my house up Cactus Hill was not much more than a scuff on its flanks. It was steep, and climbing the path invited scores of briars and stick-tights to reach out and cover us with scratches and seed pods. Reaching the top was always worth the trouble. The view was spectacular. The summit was over a thousand feet. Standing there, my friends and I were the kings of the world long before Leonardo DiCaprio was born. On one Boy Scout hike up the hill, we had just finished making a big foot-tub full of hunter’s stew. Scotty filled up his mess kit bowl with a big helping and went to find a place to sit. Unfortunately, he didn’t look closely enough and sat on a prickly pear. We spent the next two hours studying the scoutmaster’s technique in pulling cactus needles from Scotty’s butt and, of course, laughing.
Cactus Hill was even more imposing during the winter. With such big hills all around us, we always wanted snow so we could go sledding (and, of course, get out of school). Sledding down Cactus Hill was not a good idea, be we tried it anyway. I think I was the first one down during one eight-inch snow. Since the slopes were covered with briars and buck bushes, I tried to find a path that would be free of the most obstacles. By the time I reached the bottom, I looked like the victim of a veg-a-matic attack. I had cuts and scrapes over all the exposed parts of my body. The path I had chosen wasn’t free of the briars and bushes; they were just pressed down by the snow. Of course, when the group at the top yelled down to see how the slide was, I waved for them to come on down. I didn’t see any virtue in me being the only one to be flogged all the way down the hill.
Wintertime often made another path pretty promising. During a heavy snow, all traffic stopped on the road in front of the house. Sometimes, my sisters and I were allowed to go out and sled down the road. Just up from the house was a steep little hill in front of the holy-roller church. After four inches of snow, especially if we had freezing rain before the snow, we could get a start on the hill and sled nearly a half mile down the hill, around a curve, and down the straight part of the road almost to the highway.
My friends and I often found more creative ways to slide down the neighborhood hills. Behind Danny’s and Rayburn’s houses down the road was a cliff about twenty feet high. It wasn’t a real cliff, but a place where the hillside had been cut away to make building lots in front. The front yards of the houses were flat from the road to a big creek, the cut was between the creek and the hill, and that’s where their houses were built. One winter, we got to looking at that steep hill and the cliff and started figuring on how to slide down that hill and over the cliff without serious bodily harm. Prowling around the backs of the houses on that side of the road, we found the hood of a 1953 Ford. Finding car parts in the neighborhood was not that unusual, but I am not sure who that hood belonged to. In any case, we determined that the front of the hood was curved enough that the three of us, riding on the inverted hood, could slide down that hill, jump off the cliff, and somehow land bottoms down on the flat surface below. The best thing I can say for the attempt was that we all fell off by the time the hood ricocheted off of a couple of trees. The hood managed to drop over the cliff, hit nose first, and pretty much fold in half. Lesson learned—at least for Danny and Rayburn.
Another time, I took my sled up to Gerald’s house. He lived on top of a hill across from my house. We could stand in his front yard and look right down into my front yard. But to get to his house, I had to go down the road to a short lane called Due West Valley Road (that ran only due south), go up Due West Valley Road to where it ended, and then turn into the driveway that led up to Gerald’s house. The driveway was a long steep cut into the side of the hill that made a sharp switchback just below the house and then s-curved back around his house. One snowy day shortly after they had built the house
and the driveway, we decided to see if we could leave the house, go around the s-curve, and make it onto the long straight drive all the way to Due West Valley Road. We figured the hard part would be at the curves. We were wrong. We made the curves pretty well, but we overcorrected after making the straightaway. We plowed off the drive and into the deep ditch cut on the high side of the drive. We hadn’t counted on the ditch, so we also hadn’t figured on the ditch still being full of limbs and logs left from building the driveway. Since I had learned something from my Ford Hood experiment, I bailed out about halfway down, and since Gerald was riding on my back, I guess he had no choice but to bail out. The sled kept going, stopping abruptly at the end of a two-foot thick log a few yards further down the hill. Lesson learned.
I spent a lot of time up and down New Due West Avenue. I played baseball in Harry’s backyard, football in Danny’s or Rayburn’s front yards, and cowboys or war in any number of backyard woods. The local Bi-Rite grocery was at the end of the road where it intersected U. S. Highway 41, and frequent trips down to the store were necessary whenever money was “burning a hole” in my pocket or if Mother wanted something.
I learned many things on that road. I learned that riding my bike down a long slope into a creek with a near-vertical opposite bank would be painful. I learned that my older sister, who was pestered for her candy by neighborhood bullies one Halloween, was very creative when on the next Halloween she stopped in our driveway and filled the toe of a bobby sock with gravel before she went trick-or-treating. The bullies never bothered her again. I learned that my mother’s voice could carry nearly half a mile if she was mad enough, and I learned that my grandpa’s chitlin’ cooking smell could carry almost as far. I learned that standing by the road throwing gravel at cars can result in multiple spankings. But one day I learned a lesson I will never forget.
It was a minor thing when I was a kid, but not anymore. I was getting tired of walking up and down to road to visit friends or go to the store. After I got my bike, I got tired of riding it up and down the road because the two-lane road was too narrow to ride on the pavement and the shoulder was rough and uneven. Back then, we rode bikes that were made out of steel and had pretty fat tires and coaster brakes. The Schwinn bikes were too expensive and broke too easily for rough riding, and the idea of a mountain bike was long in the future. In short, I was looking for an alternative to either walking or riding my bike. One day, when I was about twelve and my bike was broken, I started to walk to the store. I was on the shoulder just past the big curve when I got the idea to hitchhike.
I had seen hitchhikers along the road. I had been in Grandpa’s car when he’d tell me to get over in the back seat so he could pick up some hitchhiker. I figured the half-mile trip to the store would go much easier if I could get a ride. I stopped, turned around, and stuck out my thumb. Nothing was coming. Determined to hitchhike and not walk, I just stood there, expecting a car would come along any time. Being at the end of the curve, I heard the car coming before I saw it. I stood up straight and held my thumb high. The Ford Falcon pickup truck slowed and pulled over to the shoulder just past me. The driver leaned over and pushed open the door. I walked to the door and the red-faced man inside growled, “Get in!”
I had no choice. I climbed in and closed the door.
“Where are you going,” he said, pulling his hat down over his eyes.
“Down to the store,” I answered.
He pulled back onto the road and drove silently to the Bi-Rite. I went in and got what I wanted. When I came out, he was still sitting there. The door was again open.
“Get in!” He again demanded.
I did.
He pulled the car out onto U. S. 41 and drove north, missing the turn into my road.
“Where are we going,” I asked.
“We need to talk,” he answered. “Do you have any idea what could happen to you when you hitchhike?”
“No sir,” I answered.
“People get beat up, robbed, and murdered,” he said. We were driving by the Sinclair station at the corner of U. S. 41 and Old Hickory Boulevard. “You remember what happened here?” he asked.
“Somebody got shot?”
“Look at the glass there at the corner of the building,” he said, nodding his head in that direction.
“Are those bullet holes?” I asked.
“Yep,” He replied. “You don’t ever know who people are or what they are capable of doing. When you get into a car with a stranger, you give them control over you. Don’t ever hitchhike or pick up hitchhikers. You don’t know what they are going to do.”
“But Grandpa,” I protested, you picked up a hitchhiker just the other day when I was with you.”
“I did,” he admitted, “but I knew him. He’s done work for me before. I picked him up because I didn’t want to see him hitchhiking. Did you notice that I took him straight home without asking him where he was going?”
Grandpa drove his little Falcon pickup into a local restaurant where he bought me a milkshake. On the way home, he reminded me that Mother and Daddy would get a full report on my hitchhiking problem. I squirmed a little, anticipating the coming spankings.
I remember New Due West Avenue and all the paths that led from it. Those paths led to here and now, and each taught me a lesson. I still take some paths that aren’t well-chosen, but I like to think that most have been shaped by all the ones previously traveled.
Oh, about Miss Deadman’s Kindergarten School. I drove by there a few years ago and was surprised to see that the house where I lived was only a block from the school. Paths sometimes have a way of shortening with time.