Walking to School

This morning I was walking with my 9 year old; he was chilly in the 70 morning air and I was telling him about how, when I was 13,  my wet hair often froze during the walk to school.   When I got home, I dug this old story out. When the story was written in 2002 the kids often were driven; since, they have done a lot more walking.

Kids nowadays are missing out on one of the most enjoyable things about being a kid. Walking to school. This has nothing to do with exercise, though most kids could probably use a bit. It has to do with the range of emotion walking to school brings to a child: fear, anguish, heartache, foolishness.

I fondly remember the stress of the bully Mitch who told me to meet him at the gas station at Broadway and 6th after last bell -- fat chance -- just because I made fun of his little sister, Leslie, who I happened to have a major crush on. He slapped me with his winter glove to officially acknowledge the duel. I chose the weapons, which turned out to be my feet, and ran straight home. And I can still feel the dread of the bully Frank who looked just like my best friend from thirty feet behind or I would have never thrown that dirt clod at the back of his head. Frank preferred the Uhaul station, behind the 22-foot trucks, next to the flatbed trailers, for his beating up lessons.

Oh, and what about the first bully's little sister, Leslie, the one I made fun of simply because at age ten you really don't know what to say to a girl you have a crush on? When I was ahead of her walking home I could set records for the making motions of walking, going absolutely nowhere, forcing her to pass and maybe to say something. I don't know what I expected her to say, probably it wasn't a marriage proposal, but maybe something along the lines of how much she liked me and how cute I was.

I'd prefer to walk behind her in the hopes that she'd drop her homework, or even a pencil -- please, drop a pencil! -- and I'd be ready to pick it up and return it to her. It would be the much sought after ice breaker, though I'd most likely end up stammering out a 'here, you dropped your pencil' and run off home as she called out after me: 'thank you'. Then, at home, I'd take off the shirt and pants I was wearing and store them away because they were now my good luck charms, the shirt and pants I was wearing when Leslie said thank you to the back of my sprinting body. If I had a spare pair of shoes, I'd have bronzed the pair I was wearing.

My oldest child has never walked to school. She's been driven, she's taken the bus or she's been driven. The school isn't that far, and it's not really because she isn't capable of walking, but it doesn't seem safe anymore. My parents didn't think twice of letting a first grader -- me -- walk a good distance to school, with only the company of two other first graders. It was sheer luck that we arrived to school at all and not because of kidnappers or random shootings but the lure of the crabapple tree in Miss Benson's front yard, or the short cut through the little league field with the four-foot centerfield fence we had to scale going to and from. Every winter's snowfall meant a barrage of snowballs and snow angels until socks had snow bunnies and underwear was soaked. If there was a creek between home and school, I'm sure we'd have been wet from head to toe most days.

The shortcuts were a good deal more fun than taking the sidewalks, and probably twice as long. The sidewalks also contained the usual assortment of older kids. I found out later in life that fifth graders didn't necessarily seek out second graders to beat up, but at the time anyone older than me was a threat. High school kids were terrifying.  Shortcuts meant alleys and walking three blocks up and two blocks over from the route you knew the area fifth graders took. Who needs recess when you are tuckered out from just walking to school? A shortcut now is to get into the SUV in the garage and to disembark on the sidewalk mere steps from the front entrance to the school.

Kids missing out on walking to school are also missing out in the fruits of unsupervised shopping sprees. Each day after elementary school just about everyone in my neighborhood would head over to Joe's Market, where Joe would stand behind the counter and exchange our nickels and piles of pennies for bubblegum and Cherry Chans or Lemonheads. I don't know what the margins were for ten cent packages of Cherry Chans, but Joe probably bought his wife a fur coat based on my contribution alone.

Even when my parents decided to move to the remote "suburbs," also known as the middle of nowhere or the boondocks, walking to school was fun. Not 'fun', fun, but 'fun because I can now honestly say that I had to walk uphill one mile to the bus stop in a blizzard' fun. Of course, at the time I was in junior high and I was trying hard to be cool.

The lack of insulation in a light winter jacket, Levi's button fly 501's, white althetic socks and canvas basketball shoes serve to authenticate the stories about how I froze to and from school. On the way to, fresh out of the shower, my hair often froze. I forgot to comb it one day and arrived at the bus looking like a young Rod Stewart. It's a miracle I lived. It would have been more appropriate to have ended up one of those tragic Reader's Digest short stories about pneumonia. Had I any sense I'd have worn my moon boots and puffy oversized winter coat along with the wool cap my aunt knitted me.

But I didn't have any sense, I was a seventh grader.

I don't embellish those stories about the old days with how it was uphill both ways. The trip down Cave Road Hill was much worse, a dirt road at an incline that would frightened a hardened crew of loggers, sending them down the hill screaming like... me. In a blinding blizzard I couldn't see the cars that were out of control coming down, which was good because they couldn't see me either and it saved us both unnecessary stress.

The cars weren't any better going up, because they had to have some speed at the bottom to make it all the way to the top and no matter whether you were in their way they weren't touching those breaks, guard rails not being a part Cave Road Hill's roadside geology. If a car couldn't make it all the way to the top, it slid down backwards to the bottom where the driver had to work up enough nerve to give it another go. In the spring it was icy going up in the early morning and a mud slide coming down in the early afternoon. I would have taken gym class with the eighth graders for it to be uphill both ways.

Each winter around Christmas break, during the shortest days of the year, it would be pitch black dark the entire one mile walk each morning.    Our hillside neighbor Silvia had two dogs, a sweetheart black lab named Sheeba and a wolf dog of some sort. The wolf dog had one normal eye and one albino eye, the sort you could see from a good distance even in the blank darkness just before the dawn. After a flurry of minor heart attacks and sprints through the small forest behind our house to the road and up the hill with what I was sure was a wolf close on my heels, I figured out that they were just early rising domestic pets and that having them along for the walk, at least until I was joined by other lucky kids whose parents also decided that they'd prefer to live in the boondocks, was a good thing. A little beef jerky saved over from my Christmas stocking from Santa had them trotting at my side like police dogs. Good thing, too, because right behind our house wound a stretch of forest reminiscent of a slasher movie, whose most gruesome scenes would pop to mind at every shadow or eery noise. I quit watching slasher movies because my morning walks were already interesting enough without Freddy or Michael on my mind.  Don't even get me started on Bigfoot.

My kids can watch any old scary movie they want, though, safe in the knowledge that Mom will drive them from the garage to the front steps of school and then back, and in broad daylight, even in winter. How my children will ever learn how to get beat up or talk to the opposite sex is beyond me. They will never know the thrill of being chased by an imagined wolf or the sensation of trying to outrun a Subaru up an icy and narrow dirt road. I know they've never even tasted a crabapple.