Two hours later, I got a call. “Dad, you have to come here. Something happened. Right away!” Cubby sounded very worried. I called back but didn’t get an answer. I called the coach, and his line was busy. Frightened, I got into the car and headed for the park.
When I pulled into the parking lot, I could see flashing lights everywhere. It was obvious that something bad had happened. Pushing my way past the gate attendants, I rushed into the park in search of my kid. That was one of those times that it’s good to be six foot three and two-hundred-some pounds. I can see over most people and move through them pretty fast.
My eyes were drawn to the mob around one of the roller coasters. The first thing I saw was the uniforms. Then I saw the kids from Cubby’s camp. What had happened to them? Was my son hurt? I parted the crowd like a snowplow and covered the hundred yards to the coaster in a matter of seconds. As I was making my way onto the platform, I caught sight of Cubby. He looked all right, but scared. “What happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Something happened to Joel,” and he pointed to a circle of EMTs who huddled around a small form, motionless on the ground. As we watched, they lifted the stretcher and headed for the park gate at a trot. As they ran, an ambulance backed through the entrance to meet them. We watched the medics load Joel inside and shut the door. With a chirp of the siren, the ambulance pulled past the gate and accelerated out of the parking lot. As they raced toward Baystate Hospital, I turned to find a parent, to see what happened.
Being kids, the gymnasts had gravitated toward the fastest and scariest rides in the park. The big roller coaster was an irresistible attraction. Most of the kids were eager to ride it, but a few were scared. “Come on,” their campmates said, “we’ll all ride it.” They got on. The gymnastics kid pack made it through every scary and dangerous-looking ride at the park. There was the Cyclone, Mind Eraser, and even more aggressive rides that just about ripped your head right off. Then they arrived at the Twisted Train.
The park brochure said, “This is a great coaster for the little ones. Not too fast, not too rough, but still enjoyable for adults and children alike!” Finally, they’d come to a coaster that even the parents would ride. They all piled aboard.
About halfway around the ride, something went wrong. Joel panicked, threw up, and began choking. With all the noise and excitement, no one noticed. The ride circled the track, over and over while Joel struggled to breathe. As the ride coasted into the station, the kids around him realized something was horribly wrong and started screaming. The ride operators sounded the alarm as worried gym camp chaperones gathered up the kids.
It was too late. Joel died. He was twelve, just a year and a half older than my son. The pictures we took at camp that afternoon showed a smiling, happy kid. I thought I’d be giving my pictures to his parents as souvenirs. Instead I sent them to the coach, who delivered them at the funeral.
Cubby never said much about his experience at the park, but I noticed that he became more cautious. I often wondered what he felt about the events that day, and I tried to understand by relating what happened to earlier experiences of my own. More than one person had suggested that autism insulated me from the emotional ups and downs of life. That certainly seemed to be the case here. There was no question Cubby understood logically what had happened, and of course he was sad that his campmate died. Yet he did not seem terribly sad himself. However, he became very agitated by the very mention of Riverside Park. From that day on, the park remained the one topic that was conversationally off-limits for my son.
Now, when I think back on that time, I realize our son was holding quite a lot in, probably because his Asperger’s prevented him from fully understanding what had transpired that day and expressing the feelings. It’s regrettable that we didn’t know any of that at the time; we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
Cubby never went on a roller coaster again, and he never returned to Riverside Park. A short while later, Six Flags bought the place and spent millions to update and remodel the park, and still he stayed away. Me too. That was the last coaster ride for both of us.
The following year UMass canceled its gymnastics program in the midst of a budget crisis. Coach Roy was laid off and the athletes scattered to the winds. Shortly afterward, Hampshire Gymnastics replaced Coach Cal with someone new. Cal had always worked with my son one-on-one, and the new fellow didn’t do that. Cal explained everything carefully for Cubby and helped him through every new move, one step at a time. The new coach was almost nonverbal in comparison. He’d say, “Watch me and imitate” and expect the kids to follow his demonstration on their own. Cubby couldn’t do that, and when he floundered the new coach barked out instructions too fast for my son to follow. Cubby fell behind, and within a few months he was out of gymnastics.
Cubby took up fencing instead.
After what happened at Riverside Park, it was a relief to spend the last few weeks of that summer walking around and exploring our new neighborhood. It was the sort of place that lent itself to pedestrian activity. All the streets had sidewalks, there was very little traffic, and most of the dogs did not bite. The main road was quite busy, but our house was a quarter mile back in a little warren of looping streets to nowhere.
I’d gotten Cubby a new two-wheeler when we moved, and he still liked to ride it back and forth as I walked alongside him. We cruised the streets on our side of the highway, all of which were named for various spices. There was Sesame Drive, Honey Lane, Nutmeg Street, and Savory Court. There were Cinnamon, Citron, and Ginger Drives. Finally, there was Basil Road, the street we lived on.
If you entered from the main road, our new home was the fourteenth house on the left, which did not have any particular significance in and of itself, but was certainly better than being house fifteen. I assumed everyone knew fourteen was a better number than fifteen, but Cubby evinced both surprise and indifference when I reported that fact to him. From a practical perspective, being fourteen houses back from the main road placed us at a comfortable remove from noise and traffic. Fifteen houses back would be better in that respect, but fifteenth was otherwise a less desirable thing to be, since it was an odd number based on five and three, two more odd and unappealing numbers.
On more than one occasion, I explained arithmetical trivia to Cubby, but he never showed much interest. Numerical facts and coincidences seldom elicited more than the slightest of nods. Striking out on mathematical curiosities, I decided to highlight other characteristics of our neighborhood. I could never tell what might strike Cubby’s fancy. One of the first examples I saw was the street names. Our neighborhood was one of spices; his mom lived on a street named for a college. The streets around her were Cornell, Yale, Dartmouth, and Harvard. After explaining the meaning of those names to my son, and getting no response whatsoever, I realized he was too young to appreciate the relationships between street names and real places and things. He didn’t know much about condiments and he knew even less about colleges. His experience with spice was limited to salt and pepper, and the only college he knew was the University of Massachusetts, where his mom went to school.
He was more interested in differences we could see. One of our new neighborhood’s most visible features was the profusion of swimming pools. We had never been anywhere else with such an infestation of pools. There were wading pools in front yards, aboveground pools in backyards, and in-ground pools alongside yards. All were new to Cubby, for there was not a single swimming pool to be seen around our old house in South Hadley. There were no pools where I grew up, either. “This part of Chicopee must be unique,” I told him. On one occasion, Cubby and I actually walked the streets and conducted a count. An amazing 64 percent of the houses around us had swimming pools. They were as common as garages or barbecue grills in other neighborhoods. Of course, our neighborhood wasn’t short on garages either. More than 90 percent of the homes had garages. I know, because we counted them as well. We couldn’t be as sure about barbecue grills, becaus
e people often kept them out of sight when they weren’t being used.
Some say Chicopee is Native American for “plenty,” and that may be true. I know it is in the case of pools and garages. I don’t know how we came to talk of those two household features in one sentence, but there are important differences between them. Garages serve more purposes than pools, and garages need far less maintenance. You could see that on any quick walk. The pools that received care were clear and blue. Those that did not were deep rich shades of green—biology experiments in process. Some had dark misshapen objects floating atop the green. “What are those?” Cubby asked, and I pointed quietly to the pets, small children, and toys that were all around us. “They are the bounty of the neighborhood, returned to the swamp.” Cubby nodded.
“Maybe they grow the spices the neighborhood is named for in those pools,” I suggested. Cubby liked that notion. He always liked ideas that explained mysteries, and the naming of our streets was one riddle we never solved.
When we walked around it was fun to speculate about what our neighbors did or what they were like. Seeing a green swimming pool, it was easy to see what they did not do. Seeing what they did do took closer scrutiny. As I told Cubby, you can deduce a lot from the cars, toys, and machinery in people’s yards. The guy with a van marked Collins Electric was most likely an electrician, though it’s possible he was a spy masquerading as a harmless tradesman. His neighbor, with a Massachusetts State Police car in the driveway, could have been a cop. Either that or he’d stolen the cruiser and was headed for serious trouble with the law himself.
Then there was the house with the gravestone in the front yard. “Does he have his own cemetery?” Cubby asked. I didn’t know, but the ground out back was certainly soft enough. Cubby had accepted all the other houses and occupations we’d seen with equanimity, but that one troubled him. One day we met our neighbor, a jolly fellow named Kenny, who explained that it wasn’t a gravestone at all. “It’s a monument,” he said. “I don’t even know who’s buried beneath it. I have a business making monuments here in Chicopee. Some are gravestones, but others are just nameplates for homes and buildings. If you die, we can make a monument for you.” I thanked him for his offer; it’s always good to have a monument in reserve, just in case. When I was a kid in Georgia, they sold caskets that way, and farmers kept them in the barn, paid for and ready for use.
My son never did figure out if Kenny had something buried under that stone in his yard, or if it was merely a piece of lawn ornamentation. Kenny sure wasn’t saying.
Then there were Kenny’s other eccentricities. On hot summer days we’d see him at the edge of his yard, shrieking as he plunged a bayonet into the ground. One spearing episode might have been an aberration, but Kenny did it repeatedly and purposefully, walking around his backyard with his eyes focused on the ground. I asked what he was doing, and he told me about his woodchuck problem. “I’m gonna spear the beasts in their lair,” he said with pride and determination. Cubby was puzzled by that, but I explained that Kenny had been to Vietnam to fight in a war and had come back kind of different.
Two homes at the end of our road had tricycles in front. “Those houses have kids living in them,” Cubby announced. Indeed, that was a likely conclusion, but not the only one, I was quick to point out. “The people might not have any kids yet. They may have put the toys outside as bait, the way people dangle shiny lures in front of fish. Maybe they are trying to catch kids of their own, using trikes to entice stray children.”
Unfortunately, as I said the words, two tykes emerged from the house we were passing, climbed on the trikes, and rode them around the house. “Dad! Those are not stray kids!” Cubby crowed.
There were a few places where the grass grew a foot tall and everything was falling apart. We looked closely at those houses, and sometimes stringy-haired, wild people looked back from darkened windows. “Listen close, Cubby, you can hear them rattling their chains inside there.” We speculated about what went on inside. Cubby had not yet seen many horror movies, so his ideas were limited.
“Witches and demons,” I said. “Yeah,” Cubby agreed. “They are probably ready for Halloween every day.” He remembered Stone Kid Road, and the child the wizards had turned to rock a few years before. We agreed it was probably best to stay clear of houses like that, even though there were no stone kids in evidence here. “Maybe this wizard turns them into toads instead.” There was no denying the large toad population in our backyard, and one of the nearby homes had a stone toad a foot tall.
Then there was the house on Sesame Drive that had rocks for a front yard. Not big rocks, mind you. Smaller stones, one to two inches in diameter. The kind of rocks that might once have been cats or beagles, if wizards were in the area. They lay in a nice, well-manicured layer. A stone lawn. They were the size you might pick up and throw, or chew on if you were in the desert. Then there were bigger rocks making little walls around bushes and other ornamentation. Even the front steps were rock; big slabs turned on their sides in place of concrete stairs. That house certainly stood out from all the others.
“Those people must be geologists!” Cubby declared the first time we saw it. That was an immeasurably better, and less threatening, explanation than wizardry. I was sure he was right, and very proud of his deduction. All we wanted was a chance to find out if he was right. Yet as many times as we walked by that house, we never saw anyone outside. We lived in that neighborhood five years, and all that time Cubby never got the chance to discuss rocks and science with the people who created the most unique yard on the street.
Still, it piqued his interest enough that he never forgot. One of his friends at school had a mom who taught geology at the university. One day he asked Karl’s mom about the geologist’s yard.
“If you take a shovel and dig, you’ll find that whole area where you live is beach sand and stone. That’s because it was the original shoreline of glacial Lake Hitchcock, a huge lake that covered this whole area when the glaciers melted, fifteen thousand years ago.”
Cubby was very impressed and curious. It turned out that his own mother knew about Lake Hitchcock, and she told him even more. She told him that when the glaciers began to melt, at the end of the last ice age, they left behind a lot of gravel and rock. Some of that sediment formed a dam forty miles south of us, in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. The Connecticut River backed up behind the dam to form a huge lake. The area where our house stood was at one time submerged under twenty feet of water. Lake Hitchcock lasted three thousand years until the dam broke and the lake drained in a huge flood into the Atlantic Ocean.
“All the sand and stone underground here is actually old lake and river bottom. It’s like the stuff you wade on, when we go out in our boat.” Cubby had been boating with me on the river all his life, so he knew about river sand, but he had not imagined it would be under our house.
Still, that did not explain why that one house had a yard of stone while every other house had a lawn of grass. All the yards might be built atop a layer of sand and stone, but why were all the others covered up by lawn?
One day I got the courage to knock on the door and ask. “Us? Geologists?” The occupant of the house was taken aback. “Hell, no! We work for the postal service. And we keep those rocks nice with Roundup. Good old-fashioned poison.”
I was glad my water didn’t come from a well.
My mother tells me that my first word was car. I’d start repeating it over and over, and Mom would pop me in the backseat and drive me around until I fell asleep. After a while, she’d park and quietly carry me in and tuck me in bed. In time, I learned to say the words Mom and Dad, but talking really started with car.
I’ve sometimes wondered if autistic kids are more comforted by a machine than by a human. My friend Temple Grandin certainly feels that way. She famously made a “squeeze machine” at college to rock and hold her tight. I did something similar as a child when I piled pillows all over me. In fact, I still do that! As an adult, I prefer the compa
ny of humans to a car ride, but if my mother’s memory is right, the opposite was true when I was one. I’ve always loved the gentle roll of a train, and nothing can beat a ride through the country in an old convertible Jaguar.
When Cubby was born, I figured I should start him out the way my mother started me. When he got upset, if Mom wasn’t there to jolly him, we’d often go for a ride in the car. Just as they had worked for me, car rides calmed Cubby. He was usually a great passenger. He loved looking out the windows and pointing out the sights.
When I worked on cars, I brought him along and showed him everything I knew. When my Uncle Bill did that with me, I became a little mechanic. Cubby didn’t take after me, though. He just watched. But although he never showed much interest in fixing cars, when he got a little bigger he expressed lots of interest in driving. I couldn’t let him drive on roads with traffic, but I often let him steer around the yard at the marina, and on woods roads where there were no other vehicles. We had an old Land Rover that I drove in the woods, and he liked that because he could steer, we went slow, and there were no cars or pedestrians to run into.
He just loved turning the wheel and feeling the car move from side to side. He’d twist that wheel with the biggest grin! His enthusiasm for such a simple thing reminded me of a B. Kliban cartoon I’d seen long ago, with a little girl smiling at the instrument she holds in her hand. The caption read, “Just give Alice some pencils and she will stay busy for hours.”
By age seven, he was actually pretty proficient at steering. He could drive for miles on backcountry roads and hit hardly anything at all. His only limitation was his size; he could not reach the brake and gas pedals, so he had to sit on my lap. That was okay with me, though, because I was comforted by the knowledge that I could take over should Cubby suddenly aim us for a tree or a cliff.