Ah, summer. Those sweltering, lazy days of respite from the rigors and anxiety of the school year. Summers in Carmichael were like that: days filled with nothing but time and opportunity.
Right in our own neighborhood we had loads of opportunity. For just up the street and around the corner civilization ceased and a vast, unexplored prairie began.
An empty field. Spreading out over one hundred and fifty thousand square yards, it sat entirely unmarred save for one gas station on a far corner.
This field was the setting for many a summer’s adventures.
Legends were born of its crossing. I remember bigger kids coming back to our street along dusty, foot-worn paths telling tales of conquest and exploit. It was a world of unknowns, a land of endless opportunity filled with thistles, dirt clods, rocks, killdeer nests, snakes, bottle caps, soda can ring tabs and countless other treasures.
From my earliest memories I had heard of the glories that awaited those who could make the distance: a grocery store where candy and slurpies could be purchased in air conditioned splendor, a gas station with a soda machine and free air to fill up your bike tires, a small diner that served charbroiled burgers and French fries, a frog-filled pond surrounded by trees, and other more apocryphal tales of the “Heere Be Tygers” variety, like the tale of the cranky old lady living in the woods nearby who had a shotgun loaded with rock salt.
It was a magical place.
There was an unwritten law amongst the neighborhood kids that traversing this expanse must be done barefoot. During the summer, unless in dire need, shoes were not to be worn. My oldest brother took his code of conduct from Mark Twain’s chronicles of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and enforced this barefoot rule despotically. Any and all who wore shoes during the summer were shunned. And if you were unfortunate enough to be caught wearing “Dude Shoes” (that is, dress shoes, such as those worn for church-going), you were openly derided.
Shoeless summers presented a unique challenge to those wishing to make the journey across the field. Because to get to it, you first had to cross the Glass Road.
This was a short stretch of roadway, no longer than 60 feet, that was entirely covered in broken glass. It began just past the driveways of the two houses on the corner and followed a short curve into the field. If there was asphalt beneath all that glass, I never saw it. The shards were of all shades and thicknesses, and were layered as deep as you dared try to feel down with your fingers. It stretched the full width of the two-lane road and covered it right on into the field where it was swallowed up with soil and weeds.
How the glass road came to be remains a mystery to me. Some had suggested that the children of the earliest residents of the neighborhood smashed bottles there so often that it became a normal, natural feature. Others said it was all that was left of the lumberyard that existed in the field while the neighborhood was being constructed.
But whatever its origin, the glass road was a fixture in my early life, a hard fact, an inevitable impediment, a very real demarcation separating the courageous from the cowardly. So it goes without saying that I walked that road barefoot more than a few times, to prove my worth to my brothers and friends.
While the night belonged to the bigger kids, the mornings were mine. This was the time when I would often find my next older brother readying himself for a field expedition. He’d invite me to go with him, and we would walk up the street and into the field (wearing shoes) to look for killdeer eggs, bottle caps or other treasures. One time my brother found a few glass tiles, such as those used for making mosaic table tops. He returned to the same spot the next day with a broken hoe, and began digging. He’d struck a vein rich with tiles, which he saved in a bucket. Over the course of the next few years, he filled that bucket with tiles, beads and other wealth.
We only realized how truly fortunate we were to have that field to explore when it was taken away.
At some point signs and stakes began to appear, followed by men with bulldozers. The inescapable claw of property development had arrived. Trenches were dug, forms were laid and pipes installed as plans for a new retail complex were realized.
We made the best of it, playing on the massive dirt mound they’d left as though it were a volcano, and running through the trenches like Theseus pursuing the Minotaur through the labyrinth.
Along with the erasure of most of the field came the destruction of the glass road. In what seemed a single day, where once the glass road had been lay a beautiful new road, straight and complete, creating a connection from our street to the main highway.
The developers built duplexes on one side of this road, and office buildings on the other side. Soon came apartments, a movie theater and a convalescent hospital.
By the time I’d reached my fourteenth birthday, there wasn’t a trace of our wonderful field. The dirt, the weeds, the paths, the possibilities: all gone.
Now, I couldn’t complain about the closeness of the grocery store, movie theater and doughnut shop. My friends and I had some great days just hanging around at the department store and drug store there, and some fantastic evenings at the carnival they would set up in the parking lot each year. And I spent part of one year working as a dishwasher in the new convalescent hospital.
But I would pay big money to have just a few more sunny summer days with that field, to show my kids what fun could be had without a dime or a cell phone. While barefoot.
Next: The Back Yard and The Flowering Pine
I’m sure your older brother contributed a great deal to the glass road. It seems he liked breaking glass bottles. He is still mad at his youngest sister for throwing a bottle one New Years Eve, at his urging, which hit a tree limb and went through his windshield. I had to work one New Years Eve, he and two of his sisters stayed overnight and when I got home the next morning, one of the neighbor women was sweeping all the broken glass off my driveway. He thought it would be fun to climb on the roof and throw bottles down on the cement. So, I’m sure he contributed quite a lot of broken bottles.
(MD) Good times. Goooood times.
Great story. It reminds me a lot of my youth. We had a patch of trees we called “The Woods.” Me and my best friend and neighbor spent every day out there. We hunted birds and rabbits with BB guns. We built forts. We climbed trees. It was our own little world. It is still there, but has been cleaned up some and now looks like about 25 trees. Not quite the same, but it was never as big in reality as it was in our mind. There was also a big field where we played baseball. Good memories.
(MD) Every kid growing up should have a vacant lot of some size to explore. There ought to be a law in place preserving vacant lots for kids exploration. I’m sure somehow it’ll prevent crime or anti-social behavior down the road.
Thank you for sharing that story. You made me remember my childhood, those carefree days when I used to only think about the time when I need to head back home. We will forever have those treasured moments with us forever. I’m wishing that our kids will get to enjoy these carefree moments because time flies by so quick!
Great story!
I was trying to think if there was an undeveloped patch of land near me growing up, but alas, growing up in Chicago, nothing, or so it seemed, was undeveloped in the neighborhood I grew up in.
Not to say I didn’t have my own “glass road.” The neighborhood kids had the alley. That stretch of rocks firmed up with concrete creating the entrance to garages, that constituted one of our playgrounds. We played softball, running bases, and raced our bikes down the alley. It was the place where you snuck your first cigarette and got caught by someone’s parents. It was a shortcut from your backyard to a your friend’s backyard. It also held the garbage cans, which those days were 55 steel gallon drums (that made a horrific noise if you dropped an M-80 into them.)
Wow! Somehow you transported me back to my youth and my summers in the alley. Thanks!
I can see where I need to step out of the shadows to defend my honor. The mystery of the glass on The Glass Road will remain just that as “dad” is way off (not the first time). The road was covered end to end and it is a true mystery. I actually wanted to clean up all the glass so the road could be walked on barefoot. It was a losing battle. Another phenomenon in the field were the very deep metal lined shafts. I knew of two, the biggest of which was right next to The Glass Road. The shaft provided endless fascination as we would drop something down and wait for what seemed like an eternity for the object to hit the bottom. My theory of the lumberyard was it was a construction site for the tract housing neighborhood. I remember playing with a friend in the abandoned office. Yeah, I hated the start of civilization there.
(MD) Yay! I was hoping you’d comment. I know you can remember about a hundred times more about that place than I can. I remember those metal shafts! They were maybe four inches in diameter if I recall, and we thought maybe they were “bottomless pits” like in some of those cheap cartoons on Saturday morning. I didn’t know you wanted to clean off the glass road, though. That would have been a monumental task! Would have yielded a ton of glass though. Would be nice to know who made it that way, but most of the original residents of that street are gone. Sad.
Thanks for commenting!
Now I have to add my two cents worth, the place was indeed a storage yard for construction materials and I very delicately helped myself to some broken pieces of molding to hang batiks on.
You can imagine my disappointment when they were finished with building all the houses in the tract; they simply burned up the leftover wood!!
It would have been a gold-mine for people such as myself of which there were none. But they could have put a sign saying FREE on it at the least!
The glass road it self is a mystery even to someone of my years.
Oh AND remember the crab apple trees we use to climb? At the park where my mom use to play tennis…. Oh that’s right!! I wasn’t there and we lived in different states. Now we both live in Oregon! Isn’t that swell????
(Hubby) That’s the best part. I had a great childhood, but I’m looking forward to the rest of my adulthood with you even more.
This brings back memories of similar fields and other ‘dangerous’ places that I got to play during my youth. However, I do have to laugh at the lack of thought you put into the ‘no shoe’ policy. How many bandaids and stitches did your family collectively go through?
(MD) It wasn’t my idea to go shoeless, trust me. I will say that at one point my mom simply stopped buying band-aids because we were spending half the family budget on them. We eventually just developed really thick calluses everywhere.