Way the hell before I had kids, when I was about 11 years old, my friends and I found a sweet little swamp in the middle of a farmer’s field just outside of the city.
It was just barely within biking distance, and therefore within our immediate universe.
No, no, no. I’m not talking about a nice, big, marshy ecosystem worthy of environmental protection and deserved of the Swamp Proper label . . . no, more like a big, smelly, disgusting hole full of fetid standing water that we referred to as a swamp.
In fact we referred to it as “The Swamp” – creative bunch we were.
This thing was disgusting.
It was full of garbage, slime, mold, some old rotting mattresses and lord knows what else. In other words pretty much a 11 year old boy’s MOST BESTEST THING EVAR.
Naturally, there were rumors that The Swamp contained a Dead. Human. Body.
Believing this was not at all unusual.
As a pack of ill-behaved 9 year old boys in the era of Stand By Me, we assumed that pretty much any body of water deeper than a paddling pool contained at least one dead body.
During the many, many hours we spent at The Swamp, we fashioned rafts to carry us over and through the fantasmalogical world that was our own little Water World.
Note: by ‘fashioned rafts’ I really mean ‘found pieces of dirty Styrofoam large enough to temporarily keep us from drowning.’
Like any good mother (and my Mom is and was a very good mother), my Mom allowed me to go to The Swamp with the other boys, but ABSOLUTELY FORBADE ME from riding on the Styrofoam rafts (or any other rafts for that matter).
Now, being a very well-behaved young man (I was, in fact), I honored my Mom’s rules for several months, and many, many trips to The Swamp.
Being an 11 year old boy, however, I was eventually goaded into taking “a quick ride” on one of the rafts. Something along the lines of “hey Carey, what are you chickenshit you little Momma’s boy?” was probably the oratorical technique employed to sway my stance. And really, what debater can stand up to such an engaging argument?
So I took a ride. It was fun for a while. Then my “paddle” got stuck in the mud, I grabbed for it, it didn’t give . . . and I fell in. Face first. I got precisely what I was supposed to get at Japanese Language Camp – total immersion.
And after a 20 minute bike ride home, dripping with stinky, swampy mold water, probably lousy with head-to-toe Giardiasis bacteria, and quietly sobbing the whole way home because of the monumental amount of trouble I was going to be in for disobeying a direct order, I showed up, shame-faced and slime-faced, at our back door.
And how much punishment and scolding did I endure?
None whatsoever. Because Mom knew me well enough to realize that I had already spent an excruciating half hour heaping more scorn upon myself than she could ever hope to inflict. I’d more than learned my lesson.
With my own children, I only hope that I am granted a whiff of that subtle genius of being able to take into consideration not only what my child has done, but also to fill in the blanks in terms of what my child really needs at any given moment. I have big shoes to fill indeed.
I got cleaned up, never contracted Beaver Fever, and never went anywhere near a Styrofoam raft again.
As for The Swamp? The city has since expanded and that area is now a suburb. Last I heard, that batch of houses has had mysterious, chronic problems with water in the basements.
(No word on whether or not they report an above-average number of hauntings.)
