I had to do some mental gymnastics and math to try to remember when it was my father spent two years in Viet Nam. I came to the conclusion it was 1969 to 1971, when I was 7 and 8.
I have this spreadsheet, it goes from 1962 until today. Once you get back to 1974 the details get pretty sparse. I was a kid, I wasn’t paying attention to where we were when. No, I wasn’t using excel as a kid, Microsoft didn’t exist. I started the spreadsheet and started trying to fill in details around 1997.
We lived at the corner of the Bath Road and the Harding Road. Back then there was about a tenth of the traffic there is now.
We lived on the ground floor of a house, and a young married couple lived in the mother-in-law apartment upstairs.
I had a great time. there were hundreds of acres of woods to play in, frog ponds, Glacial Erratics, dropstones - those piles of rock that make no sense until you dig your brain into the fact that during the last ice age this part of Maine was under a mile of ice.
We were up at dawn, a belly full of raisin bran and we were out the door. We’d show up for a PB&J around noon and Mom didn’t see us again until the sun started going down and the bugs came out. It is kind of sad that kids today can’t live like that. It might also partially explain why todays delicate little snowflakes have so many allergies and health issues. They are never exposed to things that as a race we were exposed to for millennia. Dirt, and bugs and mold and reindeer moss, and wild onions and wild grapes.
The train tracks that run up the coast parallel to route 1 ran right behind the house behind ours. At night you could hear the trains every few hours.
At one point a huge derailment occurred, and several railroad employees were killed. Several of my friends and I snuck out, climbed down to the tracks and walked the mile or so to the accident site. The emergency vehicles were all gone by then, but the train cars were still laying on their side on the side of the tracks. By the time we came upon them we had already creeped ourselves out. Christ, we were 7 or 8 years old. We saw shadows moving around the train cars and convinced ourselves that we had seen ghosts.
Lickety split we were heading the other way, hoping to sneak back into our houses without being noticed. My mother had a 2 year old and an infant. I am pretty sure when she slept, she slept the sleep of the dead. I made it to my bed and stared at the ceiling until I fell asleep.
We never talked about our midnight adventure lest a parent overheard, when we would be sure to get a hiding.
I laugh about it now.
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