Yards (Part Two)

My second backyard was a rectangular patch like the first, but it was two or three times the size. When I was old enough to judge area I pressured my dad into conceding that it might be a quarter acre. The yard sloped down from the house. The first half of the backyard was terraced into three roughly even levels. Each section was held in place by a wall made from old railroad ties laid lengthwise, stacked 3 high. On the hottest summer days the smell of creosote reminded us of the their former life under steel tracks. The top terrace was home to the garbage cans, the dog dishes, and a pecan tree so old and tired it gave up making nuts. There was also a jungle gym, with its dull aluminum alloy pipes in a perfect symmetry of stacked cubes. We also called them “monkey bars” which was far more apt, especially when my brother was climbing on them. I rarely played on the monkey bars. I never liked the way my hands smelled after climbing on them. Also, once you’d climbed to the top and hung upside down by your knees, you’d done pretty much everything worth doing there. My brother, 7 years my senior, found the view through the window of the door to the garage especially useful when he sat on top with his friends, passing a joint between them, the sweet smoke drifting around the corner of the house. I had great disdain for that particular activity, and would give them wide berth, which further limited my use of the monkey bars.

The second level of the terrace, for years, was a grassy space with nothing but a metal chair at the base of a towering pine tree. One Christmas Eve, a few years after moving in, three men in white lab coats with “Sears and Roebuck” patches on the breast walked brazenly into the backyard. My indignation at the trespass changed to unadulterated delight and hopping up and down excitement, and much triumphant strutting as they assembled a trampoline. That trampoline provided many years of harmless entertainment punctuated by a few ephemerally tragic gonadal incidents. I quickly learned the sit, the swivel hips, and the somersault, both backward and forward, in that order. But by far my favorite trick was, when jumping with a partner, to syncopate my jump just ahead of theirs so that they lost their impetus and their knees would buckle.

The third level of the yard had a rusty two-swing swingset that leaned and rocked under the weight of adults who invariably sat on it, usually with a cigarette in one hand and a cocktail in the other, during the infrequent cast parties hosted by my mother. I spent very little time in this area. At the bottom of this terrace was a drop off to a creek that split the yard in half. I usually ran to get to the bridge which crossed the creek to the back lot.
The creek had coursed a small canyon into the yard. On maps the creek has no name, but my mother called it Savage Creek. In fact, our creek emptied into Savage Creek a few hundred yards past our property line. Savage Creek, in turn, empties into Echeconee Creek a few miles down. The canyon in our back yard was about 4 feet deep and 5 feet across. The bridge was made with two lengths of telephone pole crossing the creek; two-by-sixes provided a sturdy bridge deck. A branch or baby aspen trunk, weathered and silky smooth, provided the handrail along the upstream side. The handrail always smelled wet even on the driest day in August. The downstream side of the bridge had no rail. The creek itself was a shallow narrow stream with a tang of iron from the red Georgia clay it cut through upstream.
As carefully cared for as the first half of the back yard was, the second half was barely managed. My dad would mow it about once a year, mostly to keep the poison oak and ivy down. In summer every breeze carried the fragrance of honeysuckle and wild mint, in the winter it was moss and mud and moldering leaves. There were more haphazard trees, but it was not exactly wooded. The back lot is where the craw dads built their battlements: spitballs of mud in a tower around their own little hole in the ground. The back lot is where the lightening bugs paraded their private neon "open" signs. So if you were lucky enough to be in that back yard after a summer sunset, perhaps with a drink in your hand, the swings were the best seats in the house.