If he thought he could have achieved the sublime in the Boston Common - the oldest park in the nation - he might have tried, but he didn’t believe it was possible. All of civilization might be a danger zone - if metropolitan madness does not maim you then a raging river or stray tractor in a wheat field might - but I cannot shake the idealistic, naïve suspicion that Ethan would be safer, freer, better in the wilderness, with a more complete affection for beauty, a want of the sublime.Ĭities are not entirely devoid of nature, I know, but their parks and reserves make it difficult to achieve what Thoreau named “a constant intercourse with nature,” one that leads to “the contemplation of natural phenomenon” and thus to “the preservation of moral & intellectual health.” For Thoreau, that constancy was not negotiable. If I send a ten-year-old Ethan into the Boston streets on a BMX bike it will be perhaps only a matter of hours before he’s pancaked by a car in Copley Square or else bullied off the curb by a sidewalk crowd on Boylston. Our small suburban town flanked by countryside made that kind of childhood possible, made Greg Borthwick and Pan possible, and I can’t help but doubt that my son - Ethan Jacob, age three - will have the equivalent of a Greg Borthwick or Pan obsession in his Boston boyhood. Last I heard, he’d moved to Virginia to preside over an amusement park: the perfect attempt to prolong the childhood sublime. Cavorting with Greg Borthwick was better sensory stimulation than anything electronic could have afforded me - this was a time before the ubiquity of soul-killing electronic distraction - and he looms large in the dome of my memory.
Splendid city crownd professional#
Because he was a maniacal fan of professional wrestling, Greg Borthwick organized matches in our front yard, a melee of Levi’s jeans and t-shirts, twenty-five kids in a multihued pile. We played basketball incessantly in our driveway, even in winter, even at night - my grandfather attached a floodlight to the porch for us. He picked apples from the tree in the field across the street from my house and chucked them at aluminum-sided garages and parked automobiles. He’d ride that BMX off the diving board into my godmother’s pool, or jump from my grandmother’s high brick porch on a pogo stick. His face mottled with acne, body scarred everywhere from recklessness and riot, he was the wildest son of a bitch on wheels - skateboard, scooter, BMX, ten-speed. Greg Borthwick lived on Bosel Avenue, the tree-lined street behind ours. Meals were wolfed down, barely tasted, and I was gone again. My grandmother’s voice - the Italian Catholic shrill of it - knifed the neighborhood every evening at five when dinner was slid onto the table. Even after my little brother shot our babysitter in the face - the BB got lodged in the bone of her chin and had to be surgically excised - I was still allowed to make merry with the gun.) For most of the day, my father and grandmother didn’t know my whereabouts, and nobody between the ages of six and thirteen ever lingered indoors longer than necessary. That nobody ended up disabled or deceased is a mystery fit for Newton. (My father’s handing over of a Crosman BB gun and compound hunting bow to an eight-year-old boy remains a curiosity I can’t fully explain. We concocted waterproof forts by the river and then prayed for rain, raked mountainous piles of leaves to grapple in, buried Star Wars figures in narrow graves in a field, donned camouflage and faded into the woods with BB guns and bows and arrows. While my single father labored ten-hour days, my pals and I biked all across town, cussing and spitting, each of us a veritable Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. I’ve never forgotten that feeling, never been able to forget.Īn ecstatic and engaged individuality defined my childhood in suburban New Jersey.
With a fashioned spear I hunted him up and down the block, through neighbors’ yards, and into the woods by the river, my imagination animated, stirred by sylvan possibility. I once spotted his horned silhouette near the ivy-strangled fence. He dwelled behind the pear tree next to the garage and left his hoof prints in the dirt, his half-eaten pears in a shrub. AT SOME POINT between my sixth and seventh birthdays, the Greek god Pan started haunting our backyard.
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