My apologies in advance for the length of this one...
In South San Gabriel where I grew up, we lived on Arroyo
Drive. As a boy it was an extremely cool place to grow up with adventures
abounding in all directions.
The road that our house was on was fairly unique, in that it wasn't a typical tract home neighborhood that you would find in a suburb of Los Angeles. Our road didn't even have a name really. It extended up a small hill and as you drove up the hill there were 4 houses on the left hand side. At the top of the hill was my grandparent's house, but before you reached that house, the pavement of the road ended and gave way to a gravel drive that looped all the way around the back of their house and past another building that housed the business operations of my grandparent's trucking company. If you continued on straight up the hill around the house and the business, you would pass by the house on your left, the gravel road looping around to the left and eventually you would come back around to meet the pavement again.
To the right of the gravel driveway opposite my grandparents’ house was Potrero Heights elementary school. To the rear of my grandparent’s business was a lot where they parked the delivery vans of the company and beyond that was a little green house that my family lived in after we moved to So Cal when my parents divorced. I was a little bit older than 3 when this happened, so 1966ish. If my older siblings or parents read this they will probably correct me on the dates, but what the heck, I was 3!!
To the left of my grandparents’ house and our row of houses was an empty field that belonged to a nursery owner whose business was on the next street up from ours (Hill St.) and ran parallel to Arroyo Drive. For the longest time there was nothing but another empty field to the right of our row of houses too. This empty field butted up next to the property of Potrero Heights elementary where a chain-link fence separated the school's playground from the empty field. This empty field occupied what is now Astra Drive, and the lower portion of Potrero Heights Park. Across the street on Arroyo drive was a seemingly endless playground of rolling hills, gullies, trees and bushes. This was a land that held many an adventure. Beyond that area, heading west, was a cemetery and the cemetery actually owned all of that land up to the edge of arroyo Drive. If you have Google Earth, you can search this address and see the area that I am talking about - 7959 Arroyo Drive, South San Gabriel California. It still bears resemblance to the way it was back then, with some differences. The cemetery has expanded and destroyed adventures, an apartment complex was built up on the other side of the cemetery (actually this was done way before the cemetery expansion), and then there was the development of Astra Drive.
Astra Drive was a new area of houses that was built up next to our road, and literally wiped out a great area for playing and exploring. I really had this love-hate relationship with the development of Astra Drive. On the one hand it meant the destruction of a great place to play, but it also created some new, if not entirely "legal" forms of adventures. Before the construction of the new housing development, this was our primary area to play when we were growing up. Of course, when I say "we" I am referring to my best friends growing up, Salvador (Sal or "Little" Sal), his brother Sebastian, and Ronnie. There were also times that we would play over here with my sisters. Most often that would have been my sister Jessie, who was the closest in age to me and my friends. All of my sisters were older than me and they typically had more important things to do than run around in dirt fields with their little brother.
In the middle of this field was this huge tree. We all called it the "Old Oak Tree" although I have no idea if it was an oak tree or not. The tree was a source of numerous games and activity. It was great for climbing, there was a tire swing that devolved into simply a rope swing, and its large branches were a good place to take refuge if the tree needed to be defended by attacking "hordes" with wooden swords. Sometimes these wooden swords were the marker stakes that I mentioned in a previous post. Now that I think about it, maybe I was subconsciously trying to delay the inevitable development of my neighborhood by causing the engineers to make multiple trips to the construction sites. Hmmm, I wonder if the cost overruns pissed anyone off.
Anyway, "progress" eventually won out and our land was leveled and razed by bulldozers and men in hardhats. The result was a new set of tract homes set around a cul-de-sac named Astra drive. Without exception, the entire population of families that moved into Astra Drive homes was Asian. We tried to befriend one boy who was our age, and whose house was, sort of, right next to our road. We played a few times, but eventually he never really did play with us anymore. It might have just been a cultural thing, but I don't think his mom liked us very much. When I say that their house was sort of next to ours, what I really mean is that their house, and the houses on either side of theirs, towered over our road. What happened is this: The developers built this cinder block retaining wall right up next to the pavement of our road and in some places, this was at least 6-8 feet high and extended all the way from Arroyo Drive up to the corner of the elementary school property. Initially, they built chain link fences on top of the brick wall and these fences marked the borders of their back yards. The effect was somewhat disturbing as these homes and their yards literally looked down on top of ours. Eventually, some of the families built wooden fences to surround their yards. Maybe they didn't like what they saw on our side of the road!
As a side note, I should mention that by this time, my family and I had moved into the first house on the row. This is the house that opens up onto Arroyo Drive. Ronnie's family lived in the second house, Sal & Sebastian's family lived in the third house. A few years later we swapped houses with Sal & Sebastian in this massive move. So, out of the 5 houses on our "block" we were the only family to live in 3 of them. I guess if you count the time that we lived with my grandparents when we first moved to So Cal, it would be 4 out of 5. That has to be some sort of record, so.....we've got that going for us!
Anyway, there was this weird place in the retaining wall where they built around a telephone pole. The wall was built directly in line with the pole and I guess that they decided it was better to have the wall take a little detour than it was to just move the wall a few feet back. In any case, I am glad that they decided to do it this way, because this little nook provided our entry way into the "illegal" adventures that I mentioned earlier. Now, please keep in mind that when I say "illegal" I am not really referring to any type of activity of behavior that would cause harm to a person, their property, etc. What I am referring to is simple curiosity. The way we looked at it was this: these houses, and by extension, their owners, had encroached on our neighborhood and it was our duty to explore their lands and make sure they were worthy to settle here. Nowadays they would probably call it trespassing. I kind of look at it as developing my education into the scientific method. I hypothesized that there was something interesting in those yards and it was my duty to investigate and try to prove my theory.
One day, while we were playing on our street, the idea of looking into their yards came up. So, with my three amigos keeping watch for parents and other potential sources of fun-killing, I shimmied up between the wall and the telephone pole to get a better look. Now, the yard that I was trying to get a look at belonged to the same family of the boy that I mentioned earlier that we tried to befriend. This was also one of the families that had built a wooden fence to further close off their homes from the view below. They made a fatal flaw in this effort though when they built their new fence inside the border of the chain link fence, and they failed to take the chain link fence down. And, as any real boy knows, a chain link fence is synonymous with a ladder. This provided the perfect pathway to get up and peer over the fence and down into their back yard.
At first, I didn't see anything terribly odd or out of the ordinary and this was somewhat disappointing. Then something caught my eye. Did I see movement? What was that? There at the base of a tree was a plastic bucket. With the light that illuminated the inside of the bucket I could tell that the bucket appeared to be about half full of something, and it was moving! I told my friends and they dared me to go over the fence and see what it was. I deliberated for a while….maybe 10-15 seconds….before I decided that I had to take the dare to save face and impress my friends. I quickly hopped over the fence and as stealthily as possible, made my way over to the tree and peered inside the bucket.
Inside the bucket was an equally wondrous and puzzling site - LIZARDS!!
As near as I could tell they were all alive and in fact they were as surprised to see me as I was of them. Fat ones, Long ones, Skinny ones, Short ones. It looked like they were trying desperately to get out of the bucket and were not having any luck at all. I was totally amazed and for a moment, I completely forgot about my friends. I was intrigued and curious about this bucket of lizards and what it meant. What were they doing with a half-full bucket of reptiles? What could they be using them for? Did it have something to do with the tree?
Suddenly my curiosity was interrupted when one of my friends called my name. "John, what is it?" they asked. I quickly went to the fence and climbed back up far enough to look over the side. "Lizards," I said. "Half a bucket full of lizards and their still alive." They looked at each other (my friends, not the lizards) and without hesitation they said, "Get it!" Crap! I thought. Now I was moving beyond trespassing for the sake of scientific inquiry into the realm of stealing, and to satisfy what? Peer pressure? Boyish curiosity? Nah, it really wasn't anything like that. I remember thinking, or at least maybe just rationalizing my actions to myself, that this really wasn't "stealing" since the lizards don't really belong to them. Lizards should be free to roam around the fields and become the playthings of young boys. They shouldn't have to endure the torture of being stuck inside a plastic bucket awaiting a fate of who-knows-what. I quickly made my way back to the tree, picked up the bucket and made for the fence.
Minutes later we had the bucket down on our street and we were in lizard heaven. Well, for us maybe, but not for the lizards. I doubt that they would have exactly framed their new predicament as heavenly. I mean, let's face it, we were boys and we had a bucket of live lizards, what did you thinks was going to happen? We had things to do and releasing a bunch of free-range lizards wasn't exactly high on the priority list. We dumped the lizards into a box and tossed the plastic bucket back over the fence. After all, we weren't thieves!
We learned something in that moment: Lizards are a little more adept at climbing out of cardboard boxes than they are out of buckets. I wonder it that has to do with the plastic? hmmmm
Anyway, we now had an afternoon of fun and lizard-based experiments to conduct. At this junction, I must say that another disclaimer is in order. While most of our "experiments" were harmless fun (again, for us, not the lizards), I have to admit that we did do some things that were a little heinous. I am sure that by today's standards we would probably be identified as kids that needed to be placed into therapy, but I honestly believe that it was just "normal" boyish curiosity. Heck, by today's standards you would have to go see a psychiatrist if you pulled the wings off of a fly. None of us ever progressed to torturing animals or birds, we never strapped fire-crackers to cats, nothing like that. We didn’t have “adjustment” issues and we all became productive members of society, etc., etc.
Among the "tamer" experiments that we conducted:
Lizard fights. Sort of like cock-fights but with lizards. We built little arena's out of boxes, placed two lizards in there, tried to rile them up a little bit to see if they would fight each other. They didn't.
Lizard races: We got a bunch of 2 X 4's and laid them lengthwise on the ground right next to each other to make lanes. Kind of like the drag races. We would each pick a lizard that we thought was the fastest, placed them at the starting gate and let them go. The races, for the most part worked really well, up until the time a lizard could figure out that it could easily climb over the wood railing and make a run for freedom.
Lizard Circus High Wire: We would see if a lizard could balance itself on a thin stick or a string held aloft by two people. Sometimes they could, sometimes they couldn't.
Lizard Escape: We would place a lizard in a variety of things to see if they could get out on their own. One variation was to place them in a pipe and roll it down the hill to see if the lizard could get out while it was moving. Most of the time they could not.
Lizard G-Force: We would place a lizard in a bucket (our bucket, not the neighbor's because we didn't have permission), tie a rope to the bucket handle and then swing it around really fast. We would let it stop take the lizard out and place it on the ground to see it the lizard got dizzy and disoriented. They did.
I always had the feeling that we were being watched when we were "playing" with these lizards, but every time I looked around, I didn't see anyone. Maybe that’s why the neighbor’s mother didn’t like us and never let him play with us.
In time we tired of these experiments and all indications were that the lizards were tired of it too. So, we took them all over the hills across Arroyo Drive and set them free. At first they really didn't know what to do, but one by one they quickly decided that running was their best option and away they went. Every once in a while we would catch a lizard in those hills and wonder if it was one of the lizards that we liberated from the bucket. We would play with it and eventually we let it go too.
The road that our house was on was fairly unique, in that it wasn't a typical tract home neighborhood that you would find in a suburb of Los Angeles. Our road didn't even have a name really. It extended up a small hill and as you drove up the hill there were 4 houses on the left hand side. At the top of the hill was my grandparent's house, but before you reached that house, the pavement of the road ended and gave way to a gravel drive that looped all the way around the back of their house and past another building that housed the business operations of my grandparent's trucking company. If you continued on straight up the hill around the house and the business, you would pass by the house on your left, the gravel road looping around to the left and eventually you would come back around to meet the pavement again.
To the right of the gravel driveway opposite my grandparents’ house was Potrero Heights elementary school. To the rear of my grandparent’s business was a lot where they parked the delivery vans of the company and beyond that was a little green house that my family lived in after we moved to So Cal when my parents divorced. I was a little bit older than 3 when this happened, so 1966ish. If my older siblings or parents read this they will probably correct me on the dates, but what the heck, I was 3!!
To the left of my grandparents’ house and our row of houses was an empty field that belonged to a nursery owner whose business was on the next street up from ours (Hill St.) and ran parallel to Arroyo Drive. For the longest time there was nothing but another empty field to the right of our row of houses too. This empty field butted up next to the property of Potrero Heights elementary where a chain-link fence separated the school's playground from the empty field. This empty field occupied what is now Astra Drive, and the lower portion of Potrero Heights Park. Across the street on Arroyo drive was a seemingly endless playground of rolling hills, gullies, trees and bushes. This was a land that held many an adventure. Beyond that area, heading west, was a cemetery and the cemetery actually owned all of that land up to the edge of arroyo Drive. If you have Google Earth, you can search this address and see the area that I am talking about - 7959 Arroyo Drive, South San Gabriel California. It still bears resemblance to the way it was back then, with some differences. The cemetery has expanded and destroyed adventures, an apartment complex was built up on the other side of the cemetery (actually this was done way before the cemetery expansion), and then there was the development of Astra Drive.
Astra Drive was a new area of houses that was built up next to our road, and literally wiped out a great area for playing and exploring. I really had this love-hate relationship with the development of Astra Drive. On the one hand it meant the destruction of a great place to play, but it also created some new, if not entirely "legal" forms of adventures. Before the construction of the new housing development, this was our primary area to play when we were growing up. Of course, when I say "we" I am referring to my best friends growing up, Salvador (Sal or "Little" Sal), his brother Sebastian, and Ronnie. There were also times that we would play over here with my sisters. Most often that would have been my sister Jessie, who was the closest in age to me and my friends. All of my sisters were older than me and they typically had more important things to do than run around in dirt fields with their little brother.
In the middle of this field was this huge tree. We all called it the "Old Oak Tree" although I have no idea if it was an oak tree or not. The tree was a source of numerous games and activity. It was great for climbing, there was a tire swing that devolved into simply a rope swing, and its large branches were a good place to take refuge if the tree needed to be defended by attacking "hordes" with wooden swords. Sometimes these wooden swords were the marker stakes that I mentioned in a previous post. Now that I think about it, maybe I was subconsciously trying to delay the inevitable development of my neighborhood by causing the engineers to make multiple trips to the construction sites. Hmmm, I wonder if the cost overruns pissed anyone off.
Anyway, "progress" eventually won out and our land was leveled and razed by bulldozers and men in hardhats. The result was a new set of tract homes set around a cul-de-sac named Astra drive. Without exception, the entire population of families that moved into Astra Drive homes was Asian. We tried to befriend one boy who was our age, and whose house was, sort of, right next to our road. We played a few times, but eventually he never really did play with us anymore. It might have just been a cultural thing, but I don't think his mom liked us very much. When I say that their house was sort of next to ours, what I really mean is that their house, and the houses on either side of theirs, towered over our road. What happened is this: The developers built this cinder block retaining wall right up next to the pavement of our road and in some places, this was at least 6-8 feet high and extended all the way from Arroyo Drive up to the corner of the elementary school property. Initially, they built chain link fences on top of the brick wall and these fences marked the borders of their back yards. The effect was somewhat disturbing as these homes and their yards literally looked down on top of ours. Eventually, some of the families built wooden fences to surround their yards. Maybe they didn't like what they saw on our side of the road!
As a side note, I should mention that by this time, my family and I had moved into the first house on the row. This is the house that opens up onto Arroyo Drive. Ronnie's family lived in the second house, Sal & Sebastian's family lived in the third house. A few years later we swapped houses with Sal & Sebastian in this massive move. So, out of the 5 houses on our "block" we were the only family to live in 3 of them. I guess if you count the time that we lived with my grandparents when we first moved to So Cal, it would be 4 out of 5. That has to be some sort of record, so.....we've got that going for us!
Anyway, there was this weird place in the retaining wall where they built around a telephone pole. The wall was built directly in line with the pole and I guess that they decided it was better to have the wall take a little detour than it was to just move the wall a few feet back. In any case, I am glad that they decided to do it this way, because this little nook provided our entry way into the "illegal" adventures that I mentioned earlier. Now, please keep in mind that when I say "illegal" I am not really referring to any type of activity of behavior that would cause harm to a person, their property, etc. What I am referring to is simple curiosity. The way we looked at it was this: these houses, and by extension, their owners, had encroached on our neighborhood and it was our duty to explore their lands and make sure they were worthy to settle here. Nowadays they would probably call it trespassing. I kind of look at it as developing my education into the scientific method. I hypothesized that there was something interesting in those yards and it was my duty to investigate and try to prove my theory.
One day, while we were playing on our street, the idea of looking into their yards came up. So, with my three amigos keeping watch for parents and other potential sources of fun-killing, I shimmied up between the wall and the telephone pole to get a better look. Now, the yard that I was trying to get a look at belonged to the same family of the boy that I mentioned earlier that we tried to befriend. This was also one of the families that had built a wooden fence to further close off their homes from the view below. They made a fatal flaw in this effort though when they built their new fence inside the border of the chain link fence, and they failed to take the chain link fence down. And, as any real boy knows, a chain link fence is synonymous with a ladder. This provided the perfect pathway to get up and peer over the fence and down into their back yard.
At first, I didn't see anything terribly odd or out of the ordinary and this was somewhat disappointing. Then something caught my eye. Did I see movement? What was that? There at the base of a tree was a plastic bucket. With the light that illuminated the inside of the bucket I could tell that the bucket appeared to be about half full of something, and it was moving! I told my friends and they dared me to go over the fence and see what it was. I deliberated for a while….maybe 10-15 seconds….before I decided that I had to take the dare to save face and impress my friends. I quickly hopped over the fence and as stealthily as possible, made my way over to the tree and peered inside the bucket.
Inside the bucket was an equally wondrous and puzzling site - LIZARDS!!
As near as I could tell they were all alive and in fact they were as surprised to see me as I was of them. Fat ones, Long ones, Skinny ones, Short ones. It looked like they were trying desperately to get out of the bucket and were not having any luck at all. I was totally amazed and for a moment, I completely forgot about my friends. I was intrigued and curious about this bucket of lizards and what it meant. What were they doing with a half-full bucket of reptiles? What could they be using them for? Did it have something to do with the tree?
Suddenly my curiosity was interrupted when one of my friends called my name. "John, what is it?" they asked. I quickly went to the fence and climbed back up far enough to look over the side. "Lizards," I said. "Half a bucket full of lizards and their still alive." They looked at each other (my friends, not the lizards) and without hesitation they said, "Get it!" Crap! I thought. Now I was moving beyond trespassing for the sake of scientific inquiry into the realm of stealing, and to satisfy what? Peer pressure? Boyish curiosity? Nah, it really wasn't anything like that. I remember thinking, or at least maybe just rationalizing my actions to myself, that this really wasn't "stealing" since the lizards don't really belong to them. Lizards should be free to roam around the fields and become the playthings of young boys. They shouldn't have to endure the torture of being stuck inside a plastic bucket awaiting a fate of who-knows-what. I quickly made my way back to the tree, picked up the bucket and made for the fence.
Minutes later we had the bucket down on our street and we were in lizard heaven. Well, for us maybe, but not for the lizards. I doubt that they would have exactly framed their new predicament as heavenly. I mean, let's face it, we were boys and we had a bucket of live lizards, what did you thinks was going to happen? We had things to do and releasing a bunch of free-range lizards wasn't exactly high on the priority list. We dumped the lizards into a box and tossed the plastic bucket back over the fence. After all, we weren't thieves!
We learned something in that moment: Lizards are a little more adept at climbing out of cardboard boxes than they are out of buckets. I wonder it that has to do with the plastic? hmmmm
Anyway, we now had an afternoon of fun and lizard-based experiments to conduct. At this junction, I must say that another disclaimer is in order. While most of our "experiments" were harmless fun (again, for us, not the lizards), I have to admit that we did do some things that were a little heinous. I am sure that by today's standards we would probably be identified as kids that needed to be placed into therapy, but I honestly believe that it was just "normal" boyish curiosity. Heck, by today's standards you would have to go see a psychiatrist if you pulled the wings off of a fly. None of us ever progressed to torturing animals or birds, we never strapped fire-crackers to cats, nothing like that. We didn’t have “adjustment” issues and we all became productive members of society, etc., etc.
Among the "tamer" experiments that we conducted:
Lizard fights. Sort of like cock-fights but with lizards. We built little arena's out of boxes, placed two lizards in there, tried to rile them up a little bit to see if they would fight each other. They didn't.
Lizard races: We got a bunch of 2 X 4's and laid them lengthwise on the ground right next to each other to make lanes. Kind of like the drag races. We would each pick a lizard that we thought was the fastest, placed them at the starting gate and let them go. The races, for the most part worked really well, up until the time a lizard could figure out that it could easily climb over the wood railing and make a run for freedom.
Lizard Circus High Wire: We would see if a lizard could balance itself on a thin stick or a string held aloft by two people. Sometimes they could, sometimes they couldn't.
Lizard Escape: We would place a lizard in a variety of things to see if they could get out on their own. One variation was to place them in a pipe and roll it down the hill to see if the lizard could get out while it was moving. Most of the time they could not.
Lizard G-Force: We would place a lizard in a bucket (our bucket, not the neighbor's because we didn't have permission), tie a rope to the bucket handle and then swing it around really fast. We would let it stop take the lizard out and place it on the ground to see it the lizard got dizzy and disoriented. They did.
I always had the feeling that we were being watched when we were "playing" with these lizards, but every time I looked around, I didn't see anyone. Maybe that’s why the neighbor’s mother didn’t like us and never let him play with us.
In time we tired of these experiments and all indications were that the lizards were tired of it too. So, we took them all over the hills across Arroyo Drive and set them free. At first they really didn't know what to do, but one by one they quickly decided that running was their best option and away they went. Every once in a while we would catch a lizard in those hills and wonder if it was one of the lizards that we liberated from the bucket. We would play with it and eventually we let it go too.
None of them ever gave any indication that they recognized
us.
No comments:
Post a Comment