Footloose in America: Dixie to New England (43 page)

Patricia laughed. “My mom and dad weren’t too happy about it. But that was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I had my own dog. We had family dogs before. But Chance was my
very own
dog.”

The population of Avon was almost three thousand, and it had a nice hometown feel to it. Patricia said, “It’s been forty years, but I’d have to say the town still looks the same–especially around the square.”

Some of the homes and buildings were Victorian. Others would have been modern in the 1920’s and 30’s. Before the Civil War, Avon was a resort destination. Water from a nearby mineral spring was piped into bathhouses and promoted for its healing abilities. Avon no longer has a bathing industry. Cool Whip is made there now.

Patty lived on Lacy Street in a two-story, white clapboard house with a front porch, yard and trees. “What a great house! I loved it. We had wonderful neighbors. There were the O’Brien’s. I’ll never forget Brian O’Brien. And the Marschkeys, and Quackenbushes. It was such a sad day when we moved away from here. I’ll never forget it.”

Patricia and I were pushing our bikes along the sidewalk on Lacy, headed for Main Street, when she said, “Dad got transferred to Illinois. None of us wanted to go. That day me, my sister, Rita, my mom and all our friends, the whole neighborhood was crying. We loved it here.”

Right then, my wife sniffed back some tears. “But there was nothing we could do about it. So we all got in the car and drove off with everybody crying. Then my dad stopped on Main Street in front of a house. I don’t know which one. It wasn’t anybody that I knew. Anyway, he turned around to me and said, ‘This is as far as Chance goes. We can’t take her with us. I gave her to these people.’”

Patricia stopped walking. Her face was red and wet. The tears were about to be sobs. I took her in my arms and she cried. “I think that’s the meanest thing anyone ever did to me. He hadn’t told me, my mom, nobody. He just took Chance out of my arms and carried her up to the front door. I never saw her again.”

Later in camp, as my wife cooked dinner she said, “I don’t remember much else about the trip to Illinois. Except that when we unpacked at our new house I couldn’t find my rock and fossil collection. I had it in two boxes. When I asked if anybody had seen it, Dad said he left them in the driveway in Avon. He told me I could find more.”

Patricia spooned stir-fry onto my plate. “My feelings for Dad were never quite the same after that. I still loved him, but I didn’t look up to him like I did before.”

The next morning, while we stuffed the tent in its bag, my wife said, “The last time I left Avon a lot of me stayed here. But not this time.”

Then Patricia reached over, pulled my face to her and kissed me. “No sir! This time I’m not leaving anything behind.”

Before Patricia’s family moved to Avon, they spent two years in Marcellus in New York’s finger lakes region. It was a small village about ten miles southwest of Syracuse, and Patty was nine when they moved into the house on Bradley Street.

“That’s it right there. Look!”

We were on the west side of town, and Patricia was ecstatic. Just moments earlier she seemed down because she didn’t recognize anything. But when we came to Bradley Street, she spotted it right away. Maybe because, besides the typical green residential street sign, at the corner was an eight-foot flower box with BRADLEY ST. on it.

The moment we turned onto the street, Patricia began to recognize things. “Used to be a little grocery store on that corner. When I walked down here with mom I always got a piece of candy.”

Now on the corner was a modern concrete block building with a beauty shop in it.

Bradley was a dead-end street that was probably developed in the 1920’s. It was a block long, with split level homes of various description on each side. They all sat about thirty feet from the street with lawns, shrubs, trees, paved driveways and sidewalks. It was a sweet old middle-class neighborhood that had the feel of home to it.

Beyond the guardrail, at the end of Bradley, was a steep downhill covered with pines and all sorts of deciduous trees. Impromptu foot trails led down the slope into the heath. “I sure spent a lot of hours playing down there. We built forts and climbed trees.”

Patty was a tomboy. “Down there is where Lafayette Jones kept trying to kiss me.”

I had heard about Lafayette Jones. He was Patty’s first kiss. “But it didn’t happen here. I wouldn’t let him because my sister or someone might see it.”

“Excuse me. Are you folks lost?”

The woman was stepping down from the front porch of the last house on Bradley. “I read about you in the Auburn paper today. Did you make a wrong turn?”

Patricia said, “No. I used to live on this street. In the Ryan house.”

“I know the one. I think that is the cutest house. When did you live there?”

“About forty-five years ago.”

“Really?”

The woman’s name was Kathy. A stocky woman whose parents probably didn’t even know each other forty-five years ago. Now she was the athletic director for Marcellus Schools. She asked, “Are you going to stick around for a while?”

After we told her we’d like to spend a couple of days in Marcellus, Kathy said, “You could stay in my back yard.”

A camp on Bradley Street seemed too good to be true–and it was. After Patricia went back and checked it out, she said, “Della would have destroyed it before dawn. I told Kathy about the place we heard of by the creek. She knows the spot. It’s close to the school, and she thought it would be perfect.”

On the east side of town was a road that led to the sewer treatment plant. It paralleled a creek, and fishermen often camped alongside it. So everyone figured we could, too. And a village policeman said, “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Upstream from the sewer plant we found the perfect spot to camp beside that road. It had plenty of shade and nearby was lots of lush tall grass for Della. Although we were camped on the bank above the stream, we couldn’t see it because of the dense vegetation–but we could hear falling water.

We parked the cart near a trail that went down through the trees to the creek. After we had Della situated, the tent pitched and camp set up, Patricia and I hiked down. I was ahead of her as we worked our way down to the gravel bar. It was below an old stone dam that was once part of a large mill. Across the creek was the shell of an old three story building. Both the building and dam were dilapidated.

Behind me, I heard Patricia gasp. When I turned around she had both hands clasped on her face. A face that beamed like someone who had just won a prize. “I can’t believe it! This is where my daddy taught me how to fish.”

On our way to that spot beside the creek, we walked through the heart of the village. When we pulled in front of the church that Patty and her family used to attend, she said, “I’d like to go to mass tomorrow.”

But Sunday morning we had so many people stop and visit, that mass was over before we got out of camp. So we just pedaled into town, did some exploring and picked up a few supplies. That afternoon, on the way back to camp, we pulled into the school yard where Patty was in the third and fourth grades. Marcellus didn’t have a Catholic school, so she went to public school.

It had several red brick buildings, a gymnasium, ball fields, play grounds and a parking lot. The west wing of the main building was where the elementary kids had their classes. Thirty yards from that side of it was a thick wooded area with all sorts of trees–most were pine.

“This is it,” Patricia said. “Here is where I let Lafayette Jones kiss me.”

“Right here?”

“Well, not on this spot, but in these woods somewhere. Isn’t it pretty?”

Indeed, it was a lovely little forest with a carpet of needles that made for soft walking. I could see where being in such a place might render a young girl vulnerable to seduction.

“Bud, what are you doing?”

I had walked up behind my wife, put my arms around her and began to caress her breasts. I whispered in her ear, “What do you think I’m doing?”

Then I kissed the side of her neck, as she said, “Right here?”

“Not a bad idea, eh?” I slid my hands under her shirt and up into her bra.

Patricia whispered, “What if someone sees us?”

Nibbling her ear lobe I said, “You didn’t worry about that with Lafayette?”

She bowed her back so her shapely ass was pressed hard against the bulge in my pants. “No, I didn’t worry about it then. And I’m not going to worry about it now.”

Patricia turned around and I pulled her to me. Her face was radiant when I said, “Come on Baby. Let’s make Lafayette proud.”

“You should be ashamed of yourself!”

The woman had followed us down the lane to our camp in her SUV. When she got out of it, she had a cell phone in her hand, a scowl on her face and demand in her voice. “Is this your horse? This is animal abuse!”

I said, “She’s a mule. And how are we abusing her?”

The woman was in her late thirties, wore hiking boots and army green shorts. “You left her here by herself, tied up, with no water.”

Earlier that morning, Della kept getting her rope tangled around saplings and brush while she grazed. So I decided to tie her short, in the shade, with a hay bag in front of her. I had offered her water before we left for town, and I offered her some when we returned. She didn’t want any either time.

I was setting the bucket down as I asked, “Lady, are you a horse expert?”

“No! But anybody can see this is animal abuse. I’m calling the police and the humane society.”

“You’re nuts!” Patricia said, as she threw up her arms in disgust, turned around and stomped off. My hackles were up too, but I was restrained. Over the many years I’ve worked with equines, I have been accosted by many animal rights activists. They did it during my trip across the country in the 1970s. When I ran the mule trolley in Hot Springs, at least once a year someone accused me of animal abuse. And on this journey, we were lambasted for it a few times. It had happened enough that I came up with a routine to deal with it.

“Well lady, maybe that’s what you should do. Since you aren’t a horse expert, maybe you should get someone down here who is. I’d be happy to talk to them.”

She stammered a bit, then said “I will!”

“Good. That way between us we might be able to convince you that I’m not abusing this animal. See, I’ve been a horse-shoer for about thirty
years, and . . . .” I went on to outline my equine experience to the woman. “And I did all that so I would know what I was doing on this trip.”

By the time I had finished explaining why Della was tied in that fashion, the woman had completely mellowed out. When Patricia returned to the scene, the confrontation had turned into a conversation. During which, my wife said, “Now, if you want to see animal abuse, I’ll tell you where to go.”

The day before we got to Marcellus, we stopped at a barn with a lush green paddock alongside the highway. It was obvious no one was using it, so we thought it might be a good place to camp. A woman who lived in the house across the road tried to locate the owner, but never could find him.

While she was trying to track him down on the phone, she told us about a horse that was closed up in the barn. “It belongs to the man who owns this house and that barn. He asked me to feed it for him, but all he left was straw. I asked him about letting it out to graze, but he said no. So all it gets is straw and water. And it stays cooped up in that barn all day. I thought about calling the Humane Society, but I just rent here. I don’t want to cause trouble and get kicked out.”