The Black Leviathan And Other Short Tales

I started my walking career by walking to school and one or two local landmarks. It seemed like a mile at age 6 but in reality it was no more than the length of two football fields to my old school which was brand-spanking new at the time. It was from this school I ran home in November 1963, crying, after we were let out of school the day President Kennedy was killed. To get to the school my siblings and I trudged up a scrub brush covered hill (looks more like a small wooded mound today) to reach the road towards North Branford center that lead by the school which at the time was called Cedar Lake Elementary (It’s now a business park). Several hundred feet further were the tracks of the Branford Steam Railroad, a relatively short line which ran to and from the trap rock stone quarries above the town of North Branford to barges at Juniper Point near Stony Creek on the shoreline east of New Haven, Connecticut.

About the time I was about six my Swiss mother would walk myself and a couple of my younger siblings up to the railroad where we would watch the black leviathans that shook the earth, looking like a snaking Satan himself which created an alarmingly loud but exciting spectacle. I still remember the engineers waving to us as they passed by. On one occasion we walked, looking back at it now, a surprisingly long distance on the Old Northford Road south to Branford to a dairy barn to look at the moo-moos and their attendant dairy farmer. I remember we stopped to picnic and eat Swiss cheese and yellow mustard sandwiches along the way. We ate a lot of those back then. I would later walk those same tracks when I was older, a short time after my mother died of cancer when I was thirteen, the three-quarter mile to the town center to buy my first 45 rpm records at a small music store in the tiny stripmall that also anchored our volunteer fire department building. The small adventure, one of the first things I ever did on my own, was cathartic and I did it quite a few times. My first two purchases were Stevie Wonder’s My Cherie Amore and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary.

Later on as we grew older, dad started to bring us RVing to state parks throughout Connecticut. The trails we walked were reasonably distanced for our varied ages, the five of us kids were spaced six years apart, and uniquely interesting in their own way. One had a lush wide waterfall, another was a former eighteenth century village with remnant cellar holes now overgrown. They all had that verdant petrichor that was enticing and enchanting. The weather was usually cooperative and mostly we went during the crisp autumn months, which probably explains the reasoning behind my favorite time of year. Summer was usually out of the question as my brother Fred and I were shunted off to Camp Sequassen, a Boy Scout camp in the northwest part of the state. We would go for very long car rides to the Canadian Maritimes or out west to Indiana where my dad received his first military training. We did very little walking then. Probably Mammoth Cave in Kentucky was the longest walk of any vacation spot we went to. At Sequassen we walked through disgustingly humid hot air along a shadeless road lined with Queen Anne’s lace and poison ivy, perhaps a short distance but it seemed endless, to the camp 22 caliber rifle ranges.

I always hated hot humid air, something my Florida-native wife simply doesn’t understand. In fact I would rather jog at night in my Florida housing neighborhood rather than walk it’s many popular trails through sub-tropical broadleaf forests, palmetto prairie and nasty sawgrass. Hiking? Maybe one fine winter day but not in summer mud season. I’ll have to start sometime I suppose. It’s just so damn flat! And did I mention the fire ants and alligators and now boa constrictors? How about those LOVELY 900 species of Florida spiders? Aren’t they cute? I can’t wait to carry home some hideous critter in my backpack after a foray into the swamps. I just know it will first find a home in my car and make its presence known while I drive 80 miles per hour on the highway. It’s just that there are SO many trails here. I don’t get the enjoyment part yet. Somehow I feel less threatened by a black bear than a Florida insect. I’ll think about it.