MatTag Sailabout

Flying down the hill behind my son's bike along Berkeley's Cesar Chavez Park at the edge of the San Francisco Bay, I am transformed backward four and half decades. Back to Indiana summers riding my pink-trimmed, white Schwinn with Lisa racing ahead, up and over the dirt hills behind "The Farm." Those 25 or so acres somehow remained intact within our otherwise suburban neighborhood in Evansville, a growing town of 100,000 back then. Our bare legs pumped up and down, as we stood to let the full heft of our 80-pound bodies load alternate pedals. When we reached a downhill stretch, or wanted to coast, we'd lean onto one leg, our non-hips cocked outward to the down-foot side, confident like a man smoking a cigar on a street corner.
- - -
"Which way do you want to go?" Glen asks as we speed toward a fork in the asphalt trail. To the right is a narrower, dirt trail rimmed with lanky fennel and low dark shrubs with what look like small tufts of cotton.

"You choose," I say, suddenly aware that I forgot to put on bike gloves. We are riding fast. I am making instantaneous decisions to dodge a three-inch rock centered in the trail, swerve around that pocket of fine silt that might bring my first wheel to a sudden, quicksand halt. I am squinting through the setting sun's glare as we zoom downhill, barely in time to detect a concrete ditch ahead seconds before it is too late to squeeze the right break harder, avoiding a wheel-bending sudden stop. I imagine myself flying over my handlebars, but I don't.

Glen offers advice on breaking in soft dirt and encourages me to be more confident. I am once again chasing his dust-spinning rear wheel.
- -

Two hours earlier, Glen and I helped Jim unpack the eight components of our two Montague folding bikes from their tucked-under home in the aft lazarette. We had arrived in the Berkeley Marina the afternoon before, after motoring here from Alameda. Kneeling next the vertical locker, Jim extracted four full-sized tires, handing them to Glen, one by one, who handed them to me to set on the dock. Next came the folded up bodies and finally the two seats on their pedistals.
"I'll put the bikes together while you two take care of homeschooling," Jim offers.
While Glen works on Geometry, I figure out how to deal with a computer incompatibility with the DVD we'd received for Glen's Spanish. It would not work with the newest Mac Operating System. We would have to create a second partition on Glen's computer before he would have access to these essential materials. We’ll have to buy Windows 7 software. He'll need the DVD when we sail or anchor out of range of the internet.

- - -
One summer day Lisa and I rode our bikes to the tilled section of the "The Farm" behind the White's family's fenced yard. We laid our bikes in the waist-high grass to climb a tall, thin maple tree. That summer, we climbed a lot of trees, honing our skills at reaching that first hand-hold and seeking out the best route up. Usually, Lisa laced her fingers and bent to a partial crouch, offering me that first step up. Then, she'd have to jump to grab the horizontal branch that I was straddling. As soon as it was close enough, I'd grab her wrist and pull, or hold steady, like a safety cinch. After we each made it to level one, we'd rest and talk or laugh before climbing up and up. But not so high that you could not snake back down. Like that time Lisa had had to call out to Pat White - a teenager who was sometimes mean to us- for help because I had climbed on to a skinny top branch that left me too shaky to overcome my fear of scaling down. Going up was easy. Getting down was the challenge.
On another day, while we were up a different tree, eating smashed peanut butter sandwiches on Bunny Bread stained Rorschach purple with Welches grape jelly, we spotted two boys walking across the field - one a full head taller than the other. We shushed each other and strained to see their faces. "Who is it?" I asked, leaning down to peer below a half curtain of lime green leaves. "I don't know," Lisa rasped back. We knew most of the kids in our neighborhood, but the The Farm was on the far edge of our territory. One boy had a brown paper bag in his hand, a medium-sized bag like what you might get at the hardware store - not a grocery bag. The top was twisted shut, not folded over into a crisp one-inch border, like my grade school lunches.
As they approached almost within hearing distance, we froze in our arboreal perches, ignoring a mounting stiffness from not moving - the pressure of that lower branch cutting the circulation from our thighs. A warm breeze suffused with soil dust and fertilizer aromas flowed through the branches, barely twisting only the loosest, star-shaped leaves. A sparrow landed nearby, sang a short song, then flitted off. As the boys moved out of our views, we stayed still, only feather-whispering. I don't know why we understood or sensed that there was something wrong, something not safe about their proximity. We waited and waited.
Lisa got my attention, "Bethie, I think it's safe to go down now." "Okay," I agreed, not because I wanted to leave the tree's protective envelope, but because my leg hurt and the urge to pee was overwhelming.
We climbed down slowly, pausing every half minute to listen and look, barely breathing enough to compensate for our efforts. Were the boys still around? Finally landing on the ground with two thuds, we crept over the mound of dirt that lined the ploughed field to look. Without the leaves blocking half of our view, we see more. No sign of the mystery boys. Still on alert, we ask each other with raised eyebrows and tipped heads, "Shall we go over to see if we can figure out what was in that bag?"
We were both avid readers of the Nancy Drew mystery series. The gray-blue collections lined our bedroom bookshelves, from volume one, The Secret of the Old Clock, to volume 42, The Phantom of Pine Hill. Lisa flew through the books at twice my pace. We wanted to be Nancy Drew, a smart, ahead-of-everyone detective - a successful and admired girl.

We walked over to where we thought the boys had stopped. In a slight clearing, on the ground next to clumps of dried combine-chopped grass and beige-yellow, snapped stalks of last year's corn, was the twisted paper bag. Next to it was a can of spray paint, the ___ [color?] cap tossed several feet aside. The bag's interior was slick with paint.

I had never heard of people getting high from sniffing paint solvents. The possibility that that was what was going on emerged slowly in my 12-year old brain, like the meaning behind the dark mushroom clouds we'd been shown from the clattering two-reeled projector at school. That is how we learned the "duck and cover!" drill -- to scoot our little bodies under skinny-legged metal desks where we kneeled, bent over as if in a yoga pose, arms folded up and over our bowed heads. Such threats were foreign to me, to my world of watching Lassie and Bonanza on our black and white TV as a special Sunday night treat. Only after my four oldest siblings and I (the two boys were still toddlers) all had our pajamas on and teeth brushed were we allowed to turn the T.V. knob to the "On" position, eagerly waiting as the black and white random static rustled into a discernable image.

As I think back on that day, twisting off the sardine can lid to that compressed memory of the spray paint and the bag, to the top-down views of the two boys' heads without faces, it took me years to grasp the possibility that they might have been "getting high" in a way that would surely damage some of their future potential, in a way that must mean that their lives were hard and sad, or devoid of something they yearned for - or something they had lost.
- - -
I focus back to the present and look up toward Glen's lean, helmet-topped body silhouetted on the hill, legs straddling his canted mountain bike. In this past year he has sprouted to one inch shy of my five and a half feet. This year he started riding his bike to and from school while we lived in Ojai. He now rides across Alameda to visit friends, as I learn to suppress my instincts to worry about the traffic or to call him when I hear a siren wailing across town any number of minutes after he has left.

"We should head back soon," I call into the wind.

He waves to me, "I'm going to circle around the hill and come down one more time. I'll meet you back here. Okay?" I resist the urge to shout back, "Be careful coming down!" I'd seen him riding fast down that steeper winding trail, on the edge of a spill. I know he needs to learn by making incremental mistakes, correcting himself by braking sooner that second or third time. Every parent eventually must face the realization that there will always be dangers in the world for their child to navigate. What I am learning--trying to implement -- is to let Glen have metered exposures, rather than sheltering him until it is time to be completely on his own. There are sad and depressing and threatening realities lurking. I barely knew this as I was growing up in an affluent mid-western neighborhood. Learning to avoid being sucked into a negative vortex is part of becoming a functioning, contributing and fulfilled adult. Indeed, correcting a turn down a destructive side alley is one of life’s best teachers. This path toward independence is not an easy road to traverse, but it is a road that we all must careen down sooner or later, steering and dodging as best as we can. Having some practice ahead of the real ride seems like a good idea.