CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Fairplain

There are places that never really leave you.

I have not lived in Fairplain in decades, but I can still walk through it with my eyes closed.

I can see the garden.

I can see the garage.

I can see the field next door.

There was a slight rise in that field. It could not have been more than ten inches high, but every time I rode my bike across it I felt it. That little bump is still there in my memory all these years later.

The strange thing about memory is that it does not always remember what was important.

It remembers what was there.

When I think about Fairplain, I do not remember a particular day.

I remember a place.

The garden sat beside the garage. I remember helping lay out the rows. We made them about three feet apart because that was the width of the rototiller. Even then, I liked things that fit together.

My father helped when he could, but the garden mostly belonged to my mother and us kids.

One year I pulled up a carrot.

It was not much of a carrot.

Maybe three inches long.

Maybe a quarter inch thick.

Looking back, it was almost laughably small.

At the time it was magnificent.

I had planted it.

I had watered it.

I had waited for it.

Then one day it was there.

I still remember pulling it from the ground and eating it.

It tasted better than any carrot had a right to taste.

Not because it was special.

Because it was mine.

Nearby were grape vines. Behind them was the garage. Around them was the world I knew.

The garage was where projects lived.

Or died.

Sometimes both.

The front section was wider than the rear section that had been added behind it. There was a door where the two sections met. At the time I knew every inch of that building.

There was a Volkswagen chassis sitting there for what felt like forever.

There was also a dirt bike.

I do not remember whose dirt bike it was.

I only remember wanting it.

I wanted to fix it.

I would sit on it and pretend I knew what I was doing. In my imagination it ran perfectly. In reality I never got it running. I never even got close.

Still, I could not stop thinking about it.

Behind the garage sat a couple of old fifty-five-gallon drums.

I have no idea what had originally been inside them.

That was not important.

What mattered was that they rolled.

We discovered that if you stood on top while the barrel rolled underneath your feet, it felt a little like those lumberjack competitions where men balanced on floating logs.

At least that was the theory.

The reality involved a lot of falling.

Eventually I became pretty good at it.

Looking back, it probably was not the safest game ever invented.

Neither was climbing onto the garage roof.

The rear section was lower than the front, making it easy to climb up.

Once there, I developed a theory.

My theory was that if I landed correctly, I could jump off without getting hurt.

Like many teenage theories, it worked just often enough to convince me it was a good idea.

Near the garage stood a peach tree.

Not far from it, my brother Frank had left some golf clubs.

I took an old tuna can, buried it in the ground, and made my own putting green.

To me it was every bit as real as any golf course I had ever seen on television.

Nearby stood a larger tree.

That was Rufles' tree.

At least that is how I thought of it.

Rufles spent a lot of time tied there, and I spent a lot of time climbing it.

Long before I was fifteen, those branches had carried me to distant planets.

The tree became a spaceship.

The yard became a universe.

Children do not need much.

A tree.

A dog.

A field.

A couple of barrels.

A broken dirt bike.

A tuna can buried in the grass.

That was enough.

Somewhere around the garage one of my brothers was feeding a spider to see how large it would grow.

Nobody seemed to think that was strange.

In my family, curiosity was rarely discouraged.

Fairplain was full of things like that.

The field.

The garden.

The garage.

The trees.

The projects.

The dreams.

At fifteen I did not realize it, but childhood was beginning to slip away.

My attention was slowly shifting.

I still rode bikes.

I still climbed trees.

But now I spent more time thinking about machines.

How they worked.

How they broke.

How they could be fixed.

Eventually I got my first car.

Owning a car came with responsibilities I barely understood.

One day I learned the coolant needed to be changed.

My brothers told me it was easy.

Just drain it.

Refill it.

Simple.

So I did.

What nobody explained was what to do with the old coolant.

I drained it onto the lawn beside the house on Smyers.

It seemed perfectly reasonable to fifteen-year-old me.

The grass disagreed.

The patch turned brown almost immediately.

Years later it was still there.

A permanent reminder that there was often more to a job than the instructions people gave you.

Looking back, Fairplain was not where I learned how to fix things.

It was where I learned to want to.

The dirt bike I could not repair.

The projects I did not understand.

The car I was still learning to maintain.

All of them pointed in the same direction.

I just did not know it yet.

At the time, Fairplain was simply home.

A garden.

A garage.

A field.

A dog.

A tree.

A handful of dreams.

Fifty years later, I can still walk through it with my eyes closed.