Chronicles of a Benician: Part Three
Before I paste the nostalgic crap in, I should pause to let you know that I’m reading this book.
If you have a second to think about it (or remember or read about what it’s about), you’ll understand why.
Now, on to more pressing things: My bullshit memories–hardly worthy of publication.
The Hill
Finding my boyhood home on Google maps isn’t as easy at is reads. As I sit here looking at my pixilated screen from the vantage point of a circa.1989 NAVSTAR satellite, I can definitely pinpoint Southampton—a big swath of development-esque houses with their rectangle lawns and their cedar fences. But I have to do a little work to find my home. I have to start with that little green patch: the Southampton Park. Then I have to triangulate, using the sacred object of this essay: The Hill.
The Hill was where I played. It’s where I dreamed and imagined; it’s where I fought, laughed, cavorted, and cried. I fired my Crossman 760 Pumpmaster bb gun at inanimate objects placed on it; I dug my first foxhole in it. (It was a Somme-like trench, all muddy and sloppy, but it would undoubtedly stand up against a decent German shelling; I’m sure of that.) I broke my right wrist and nearly fractured my skull for the second time while zooming down The Hill—slamming into the fence at about 50 mph. (To blame: my penchant for installing things, such as Raley’s-brand bicycle handbrakes, without consulting the 1-fontsize directions.)
On The Hill I tasted anise for the first time—walking around with stalks of it wedged into my mouth like leafs of chewing tobacco, swaggerin’ and cussin’ like a 20th Century Tom Sawyer. I chased after black-tailed jackrabbits on it and stared up at the white-tailed clouds and the soaring red-tailed hawks while laying on it with my small head cradled in my dirty hands.
If you don’t know which of Benicia’s many prominences The Hill is, you only need for me to describe its summit to you–for Benicia only has one hill like The Hill: It’s domed; it’s the one that has those aging concrete cylinders. It’s got the stiff antenna and is ringed with vintage World War 1 barbed-wire fencing. I don’t know these days, but a quarter-century ago, white pickup trucks belonging to the cable company du jour used to ascend it. Mustachioed cable operators carrying metal lunch boxes and femur-sized wrenches did enigmatic work up there. (We spied on them as if they were Soviet agents; recall: those were the days of Reagan vs. the Evil Empire.)
My friends and I once built some great forts at the base of The Hill. My recent excavations of the grounds behind my house have failed, however, in uprooting any traces of their existence. Sometimes I feel like Heinrich Schliemann digging futilely for the walls of Homer’s Troy. I suspect that the clayish soil may have not helped sustain those crudely shaped plywood scraps scrawled with “KEEP OUT” or “GO AWAY!” messages. I suspect the briny moisture present in a Benicia morning’s fog may equally have not been too kind to all those 2 x 4s brimming with bent finishing nails. I theorize that all that’s long since rotted. Or perhaps these relics were carted away by Benicia’s equivalent of Troy’s Ottoman Turks: other generations of wandering neighborhood kids out to build a fort or some other less bellicose structure? If the British Empire could get away with stealing the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, I see no reason why a couple pubescent kids couldn’t help themselves to pieces of my memory.
On that same Hill, the same friends and I also built cardboard slides. Cardboard boxes didn’t last long in our homes; we scoured our garages for them (much to our parents’ chagrin around Christmastime and the moving season); we stomped them down flat with our sneakers. Then we carted them up onto The Hill and flattened out swaths of wild brown grass that grew along its steeper sections. It took time for us to groom The Hill properly. Decent, super fast slides required the ignorant patience and perseverance of Sisyphus. It was ironic, because by the time the chutes were at their fastest, the grass would uproot, surfacing clumps of that awful, clayish soil, slowing us down, causing us to retire that particular slide. But that didn’t stop us, because we had the whole Hill to carve out. It was ours—every hardscrabble inch of it.
Now, 25 years later, when I think back about those long, flat sections that we scraped out of The Hill, I fancy we were doing the city (and our parents) a service—creating free firebreaks during the worst of the dry season. The Hill never burned; our houses were never jeopardized. Was that because of us?
Some other time, I’d like to write about all the great and terrible things that we did behind The Hill—out in that once vast and undulating brown expanse that existed between the Hill and Lake Herman. But those memories will be harder to catalog, because that area has long since changed. It’s been paved and developed; cars and people; barking dogs and big boats have since replaced our free playground, our adventurous hinterland.
Only The Hill remains.