The Best Times in a Young Boy's Life

Without a doubt, the best times in a young boy’s life – I’m talking pre-teens here, before the hormones kicked in and when girls were still ‘icky’ – were had during that magical time that only came once a year, took way too long to get here and was gone before you knew it, leaving behind wonderful memories and an anxiousness for it to get here again.

I’m talking about SUMMER VACATION, of course! (What, you thought I was talking about Christmas?)

Ah, summer vacation! A time of no school, sleeping late, lazy days with nothing special to do, pick-up baseball games, bike rides to nowhere in particular and everywhere in general, cook-outs, 4th of July parades, Boy Scout camping trips, and Summer Band. For those kids who were less fortunate – and less intelligent, in some cases – it meant summer school. I was no genius in school by any stretch of the imagination, but I managed to avoid that most dreaded of summer vacation killers, although a couple of my friends weren’t so lucky.

Most of my pre-teen summer vacations were spent in Highland Springs, Virginia. We lived on North New Avenue, and two streets over on Pine Street (the streets in Highland Springs were alphabetical, with most of them being named after plants or trees in the “new” section of town, and named after Confederate generals in the “old” part of town) there was a stretch of woods where the road dead-ended. This area was pretty big, about ten acres or so, I guess, and was the favorite hangout for just about every male child within a six street radius. The area was known, of course, as “The Woods on Pine Street.” If I was leaving the house to go outside, when my mom would ask where I was going I’d just say, “I’m going to the woods on Pine Street” and she’d know just where I was. (If you can know “just where someone is” in about ten acres of woods, of course. But at least she’d know where to send the search party if I didn’t show up for dinner at six.) And this being the mid- to late-sixties, she had no reason to worry about my safety. In those days you could leave the house at eight AM and stay gone all day long, not showing up until six for dinner and not have your mom worry about you.

And let me tell you, during summer vacation I stayed gone. I was never in the house, unless it was raining. If the weather was good, my happy little pre-pubescent ass was GONE!

The Woods on Pine Street was our own little world, the kid’s world, the place where we could go and have a good time just playing in the woods, knowing that the rest of the adult world was ‘out there’ and we were safe ‘in here.’ There was a stream running through the woods, which we always ended up falling into for one reason or another. And the woods were cool, temperature-wise, so if it was boiling hot out in the sun, you had a nice, cool place to go relax and have fun – that place being The Woods on Pine Street.

Of course, the woods had its disadvantages, and those disadvantages can best be summed up in one word: TICKS.

After a day of romping around in the woods in the summertime, your body getting damp with sweat from all of the romping around, once you went home it was time for the inevitable “critter check.” This meant checking every crevice, nook and cranny of your body for ticks, the little bloodsuckers that always seemed to attach themselves in the most hard to reach places, places that would require a mirror for you to even see, much less be able to reach to pull them off.

Which meant involving your mom in the “critter check.” Like I said, the Woods had its disadvantages.

I distinctly remember coming home with my sister Cindy after having been out romping in the Woods on Pine Street for most of the day, and when we got home we both did a “critter check.” Cindy found a HUGE tick embedded in her scalp, and it took my dad a good ten minutes to get the thing out.

She got off lucky. As for me, I managed to run into a nest of them, and my lower body and legs were covered with HUNDREDS of little baby wood ticks! They were ALL embedded, drinking away, and it took my dad nearly two hours with a pair of tweezers to get them all.

But most of the time you’d come away with one, maybe two of them, and you quickly learned the trick of lighting a wood match, blowing it out, and then touching the still-hot end to the butt of the critter to get it to back out so you could grab it with a pair of tweezers, put it in an ash tray, light another match and fry it. (They always popped when you did this!) And it sure as hell didn’t stop us from going back into the Woods again the next day!

I went back to Highland Springs in 2005 for my 30th High School Reunion – the one I was invited to, remember – and during the day before the reunion, I took a drive back into Highland Springs into the old neighborhood. The house we lived in is still there, the yard still enclosed with the chain-link fence; it seems smaller now, and old. The parts of New Avenue north of us towards Washington Street that were undeveloped lots are now filled with houses, and the old Crews house that was to the right of our house is gone. It was an old house when we moved into our newly-built house in 1964, and has now been replaced with two newer ones.

Of course I drove two streets over to my old stomping grounds, The Woods on Pine Street, and I'm very happy to report that the Woods are still there. The march of time and progress seem to have missed my "private Utopia," leaving it untouched while other parts of the old neighborhood have changed. For the better, I'm sure, but still, it's just not quite the same.

But the woods are. They are the same now as they were then, during the best times of this young boy's life.

That time of summer vacations, lazy days with no schedule, bike rides to nowhere in particular and everywhere in general, cook outs and parades, and best of all, The Woods on Pine Street.

IHC