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The weather in July of 1969 was much like any Texas summer day—hot and dry as old bones and ashes.
There is something about hot, dry weather that makes the signals in the brain fire in a random and sometimes
impulsive manner, and when you're 9 years old and bored out of your mind, double that.
I was hanging out with the usual group of neighborhood misfits when we stumbled on a twin row of Black
Cat firecrackers left over from the Fourth of July celebration. This discovery didn't provoke much
excitement, but the fact that we had access to them with no parental supervision was just too good to be
true. After much discussion over whether to light them one by one, or set off the lead fuse and let them go
off in a 5-second round of strident, explosive glory, we settled on the latter.
"Who can get matches?" someone asked.
"Who can't?" someone else responded sarcastically. Back then almost all adults smoked -everyone we knew
at least.
Five minutes later, I was crouched in a vacant lot in the middle of the neighborhood with a book of matches.
I lit one and the flame sprang out from a fog of spent sulfur. There wasn't a breath of a breeze, so I didn't
even bother to try to protect the tiny flame. I just held it to the gray fuse until it began to hiss and sizzle in the
way that warns you to step back cause things are fixin' to happen. And boy did they ever.
The firecrackers worked magnificently—the noise was enough to raise the dead. What we hadn't counted on
was the fact that the old, dry, Johnson grass that made up about 90 percent of the vacant lot was going to
catch fire. Every jaw dropped as the flames in the grass crept out in an ever-widening circle. The wind,
which seemed to have been absent the entire summer, chose that moment to rear up and blow with all its
might.
There we were in our standard summertime uniforms; cut-offs, T-shirts and bare feet, and despite the fact
that we had no shoes, we promptly tried to do the right thing and stamp out the fire as best we could, but the
fire crept on, gobbling up dried weeds and grass - feeding. It didn't take us long to figure out that we were in
over our heads, so we did what we usually did when we had bitten off more than we could chew. We
disappeared like smoke in a wind tunnel.
My chosen route of escape took me through the backyard of a neighbor's house. I flew around the corner of
the house, tripped over a lawn chair, skinning both knees in the process, regained my feet and took off again.
I was halfway across the back yard when I discovered, with a certain amount of wonder, that I was
treading thin air. The ground had simply dropped out from under me and I was magically suspended over an
open septic tank, wishing suddenly and intensely that I had taken the time to learn how to fly.
Rudimentary knowledge of the laws of gravity tells me now that only a millisecond passed from the point
when I realized I was floating until I fell, but at the time it seemed like I hung there forever - hovering like a
hummingbird - long enough for several questions to pass through my mind:
"How deep is that?"
"How bad is this going to hurt?"
"What exactly is that smell?"
Naturally, I got the answers to all those questions in due time. The neighbor barely spared me a glance as he
rushed out of the house, grabbed the water hose and set about putting out the fire. Once that was done he
offered me the end of a yard rake and hauled me out of my miserable swimming hole. I cried all the way
home, which was only half a block away, and stood there dutifully while mother sprayed me off with the
water hose and made me undress in the garage.
We didn't get away with a dang thing. The neighbor put two and two together and had me and one of the
other kids cold, and once we were nabbed and the inquisition started, we systematically sold the others down
the river without a second thought. We got our rear ends torn up, sat through what seemed like hours worth
of lectures about the dangers of playing with fire and suffered through assorted other retributions, but no
punishment even came close to what happened to me on my mad dash.
Sometimes the biggest lessons are learned in the hardest way imaginable, and if I still associate the sound of
firecrackers with the smell of sewage, well so be it. We were lucky that day, that we didn't do any more
damage than we did, and while there have been several more instances over the years where I wished that I
could fly, I grew to accept that I never would - and that might have been the hardest lesson of all.
Kids do mean things to each other. I like to think that sometimes the cruel things they do are done out of
ignorance. Like grownups, some kids are afraid of some things and some of others. One kid may be terrified
of beetle bugs while another may collect them. One may be petrified of heights while another will climb the
tallest tree in the neighborhood and swing from the highest branch like a squirrel monkey. You just don’t
know what’s going to set some kids off, so I like to think that what happened to me one summer morning
was done out of ignorance rather than meanness.
As a child, I got picked on for a babyish fear of the dark, and struggled regularly to overcome it—always
pushing myself and testing. One summer day while playing hide and seek with the neighborhood kids I
decided to try a little self-induced immersion therapy, and swallow the lump in my throat and hide in the shed
in the back yard.
To this day I couldn’t tell you what was in that shed. I tended to stay out of there because to me it was a
windowless, airless tomb that stank of rotted lumber, gasoline and mouse droppings. To me, the battered
wooden door to the shed was the yawning gate of hell, and I wanted no part of it. But being a kid, and
understanding kids, and knowing that my peers knew me well enough to never expect me to hide in there,
was too difficult to resist.
I’d like to say that I caught no one looking and dashed inside the shed, never to be found and ultimately came
out the winner of that particular game. But we all suspect that that’s not the way it worked out, don’t we. It
wasn’t.
It probably took me a total of a full minute to work up the courage to cross the threshold. Once I did, I
stood immediately inside the door, close enough to the light to be able to breathe, yet far enough in the
shadows to feel adequately hidden. What I didn’t expect, was for the door to slam shut throwing the shed
into a heavy, dank darkness that so thoroughly sucked the air from my lungs that I couldn’t muster a
squeak, let alone a scream.
Every hair on my head stood at full attention and gooseflesh broke out so heavily across my skin that it was
literally painful. Thin strips of light from the minute cracks in the walls streaked the dirt floor, illuminating the
tiny motes of dust that floated in the still air of the shed like dandelion down. Once I broke through the
paralysis that accompanies sheer terror, I threw my body against the door frame … all seventy pounds or so.
The door not only didn’t budge, but I was rewarded with a shower of dirt, dust, and the remnants of
abandoned dirt dawber nests.
The sounds from outside were distressingly normal; the pounding of running feet, shouts of “I got you …
you’re it!” and random squeals as hiders were discovered and frantic races ensued. I stood there, foreign
objects trickling into the neck band of my t-shirt, so pale that I’m sure I glowed in the dark, and tried to
make my voice cooperate. It was then, my mouth working but nothing coming out, that I noticed the sound
that was coming from the inside.
Once I began to pay attention to it, the tiny clicking sound became more audible. There was a rustling along
with the clicking and despite my fear I was intrigued to say the least. The sound didn’t feel threatening, but I
made the conscious decision to identify it just in case. Following the sound I ventured a few more steps into
the shed, one hand out behind me as though to maintain some type of contact with the only escape route. I
didn’t have to go far before the clicking and rustling was joined by an insistent low humming. Squinting, I
allowed my eyes to travel up the wall until the ceiling came into view and there in the corner where the wall
met the ceiling, I found the stuff that nightmares are made out of.
The nest of granddaddy longlegs spiders was roughly the size of a beach ball cut in half. They writhed over
each other, in a squirming mass. There had to be thousands or ten of thousands of them, and as I watched,
the ball began to shift and lone spiders ventured out of the nest and began to crawl down the walls toward
the shadowy floor. In my mind, they were after me. I had made a lot of noise banging into that door and
they didn’t care for it. By now my goose bumps had goose bumps and I was sucking wind like a vacuum
hose with a bad leak. I eventually got enough air to manage a scream that I feel pretty sure could be heard
for three counties.
The door immediately opened and I staggered out into the brilliant sunshine, slamming into my brother, who
if I don’t miss my guess was the one who locked me in there to begin with.
“Big dumb baby,” he said predictably, as I found my feet and ran for the house.
Once again, the fear of the unknown had its way with me and I’ve carried the memory with me all these
years. I have since learned that the granddaddy longlegs spider is the biggest joke ever played on the insect
world. They’re deadly dangerous, but their mouths are too small to bite anybody. Even that knowledge
wouldn’t have helped me at the time, but does serve to keep me from running like an idiot when I see one
now.
