Thinking back to the farm this morning, and being a child. I was trying to remember at all what it used to be like in my brain. When make believe and reality were basically the same thing. I used to fight cowboys, because I was always an indian.
After my run last night I did a set of crunches then just laid on the floor thinking back. I have read about how as children we see more colors, but as we learn the names of colors all different shades tend to assimilate themselves into our generic names of them, so all shades of red basically become red. Eventually we don't really see all the colors anymore. I'm sure that is oversimplified, but I was sweaty and tired and laying on my back looking up at the ceiling, and I'm usually pretty easy on myself when I'm thinking because I have a bit of a short hand within my own brain.
I never did remember the sensation of my childhood brain but I did remember pretty vividly one of my special spots. There was what we referred to as a cliff on the north west end of our family farm. A creek stagnated below, or froze and occasionally even flowed. The cliff seemed to tower above the little stream and a top the cliff there grew an evergreen tree. There were not many evergreens on our little farm, and this one was most special. It was so close to the edge of the cliff that two large roots for the tree stuck out of the top of the cliff and then grew back in, making two unwieldy ladder rungs at the very top. I would sit on the bottom one many days and lean my back onto the top one, from there you were hidden by the top of the cliff from the biting breeze in winter or the mid-day sun in summer. I always love a simple sanctuary, where I can have my thoughts safely uninterrupted.
At some point I took it upon myself to make the cliff a permanently passable route from the upper bluff to the creek bed. To accomplish this I took an old blue garden hose and a dead bicycle inner-tube. I tied the inner-tube to the hose and the inner-tube to the bottom exposed root of the evergreen. I don't know when I did it or how I thought it would work but amazingly it did, and it stayed there for years. I if did not remember the day that I installed the hose it would seem in my memory to have always been there. Years later when I went back to that spot, I found that it had finally fallen when the inner-tube rotted, I found the blue hose in a pile of shale that had fallen down the cliff.
The hose rope was one of my finest inventions. It allowed one to climb up and down and it bounced if you jumped while holding on.
PS
I wasn't always an Indian, sometimes I was just a ninja.
3 comments:
That's the cliff where we invented (and spent endless hours playing) the game "Go Jump Off A Cliff!" I too have fond memories of that cliff and remember accidentally (?) dropping my Raggedy Ann doll in the creek right there. Also, for some reason, that spot under the cliff by the creek makes me think of Aunt Jan and Uncle Al.
I sort of remember a game but I don't recall the name "Go Jump Off a Cliff!". How was it played?
I'm not sure of the Jan and Al connection but I seem to have that too.
I feel like maybe once when Jan and Al visited we went on a walk there? And it seems like that's when I dropped Raggedy Ann into the water?
As for the game, I'm not sure but I think we called it that, and the point was just to jump off that cliff and slide down the slope without hurting ourselves too much.
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