Canebrakes and Other Magical Places

Today, I found a very old copy of “The Swamp Fox” which I decided I must read because Francis Marion came from the PeeDee region of South Carolina, where my parents’ people came from. Also, the name Marion (or Marian) recurs on both sides of my family, being my middle name as well. So, I was reading about young Francis and his friend, Budde, creating a secret tunnel through the canebrake from the plantation houses down to their fishing boat, and I had no idea what a canebrake was. So, I looked it up on the Internet.

Then I looked outside my windows on three sides of my house, here on the banks of a creek in tidal Virginia, and discovered a canebrake is the exact monster threatening to completely devour my house! This 12-foot-high bamboo is like vertical kudzu! It might hold the banks of the creek in, but it is a ravenous colony of a singular plant. Were I a 10-year-old girl instead of a 71-year-old woman worried about losing her house to nature, I’m sure I’d find it to be a magical kingdom for exploration and hiding out, just like in the book!

Yes, children find magic where adults find problems. Would I ever have worried about running into a copperhead or a black snake in my childhood? Would I ever have figured out why I was forever breaking out in poison ivy? Would I have done anything to prevent those dozens of itchy lacerations on cheeks, arms, and legs from the serrated bamboo leaves? And how about those chiggers that turned my legs into a topography of thousands of miniscule itchy volcanoes? Nope, I’d be having too much fun to be worried about that stuff.

The same magnificent towering trees that surround my house today, the oak, hickory, and yellow tulip poplar would have been great for climbing and building make-shift treehouses, the higher the better, are now ominous giants that could fall through the roof in the next hurricane or ice storm. They’ve already dropped limbs across the drive the size of mature trees. But I won’t cut them down because I know they are magical!

And how about the dock down there on the water’s edge? In the right circumstances, in a flood tide, not only is the step-down under water, but the main platform could be six inches under, with just the posts marking its edges. At low tide, the dog loves to hide under it and roll in the marsh muck before coming up to the house and demanding to be let back in. As a child, I would have been right there with her, hopefully in the company of a friend or two.

Children can FIND those places, even where adults don’t think to look. When I was eight in Middletown, Rhode Island, we lived in a house with an adjacent undeveloped lot. Separating the yard proper from “the jungle” was “the mountain,” a huge, long mound of black dirt, 4-5 feet high, with the biggest black earthworms tunneling through it that I have ever seen! We practiced running off of the edge of it in an effort to prove that we could fly. We did get pretty good at crash landing. I’m sure it was the dirt dug out for our basement that was simply left there and sprouted its own vegetation. Beyond it was a thicket of scrub and milkweed under which we developed a secret living clubhouse with several rooms. Of course, you had to crawl through all the passages and could barely sit up straight in the “rooms” with the highest ceilings. The important thing was, Mother couldn’t see us at all when we were in there, not that she ever tried to find us. She knew we’d come in when we got hungry, and hoped we’d come in if it started raining too hard. She got so tired of trying to pull cockleburs out of my hair that she cut it off.

The years before, we were in the Brookville area of Alexandria, Virginia before it was completely developed. Our house was a couple of blocks from Holme’s Run, which we just called “The Creek.” Several miles downstream it ran into the Potomac River, but we didn’t know that.

The water was clear, swift, deep in a few rare areas, but mostly floored with shallow slippery rocks. There were sparkling patches of sunlight blinking through the tall green canopy overhead. We’d either walk down there or follow the bigger kids down on our bikes, looking forward to playing Tarzan or Jungle Jim and swinging across the water on giant vines. (Those vines were probably either wild grape or poison ivy.)

That was fun, but the older kids had discovered something really neat down there. When they played baseball in the neighborhood streets, sometimes the ball rolled down the storm drain. They discovered they could enter the culvert where it emptied into the creek and find all kinds of lost balls down there besides their own! You might think it was dark and scary, but the glaring summer sun reflected into the huge concrete tube through curbside openings every 30 or 40 feet, so you could always navigate to the next patch of sunlight. Tommy and I could actually ride our 20” bicycles inside the culvert, although we had to get to an intersection to negotiate a dicey turnaround. After a few times of having to back our bikes out for more than a block, we decided foot travel underground was better, and a great way to cool off those sidewalk-burned bare feet in the persistent trickle of cool water.

In the absence of constant parental oversight, my childhood was magical. I was one with the Earth, crawling through ditches and culverts digging up clay to make Mother neat gifts which she secretly threw away. I spent hours on my belly in the dirt and grass constructing buildings, roads, and tunnels for Matchbox cars, hopping through hedges with a toy bazooka, wearing an Army helmet, or shimmying up and down sticky tree trunks. I’d go home covered in sweat, mud, and bicycle grease, hoping for a hug from Mother, which rarely occurred.

I never thought of it then, but maybe I didn’t smell too good. She made me take a bath and wash my hair every Saturday night!