Growing Up a Free-Range Kid

It was pretty awesome growing up with free-range parents, especially during summer vacation, though I’m fairly certain they didn’t think of themselves as free-range anything. Shoving your kid out the door on a July morning and not expecting them until dark was just what parents did. So long as authorities didn’t come into the picture and wounds could be patched with band-aids and Bactine, few restrictions were imposed, fewer questions asked. Did they worry about us? Did they wonder what we were doing? I suspect both parties thought it best they didn’t know.

Lunch was scarfed at a friend’s house or skipped altogether. Everything else was the great wide open. Within the eight or so blocks of my nominal range, there were patches of forest and field that seemingly no one owned, a wooded park that followed a creek for miles in both directions, public tennis courts, ball fields, a community pool, and a convenience store with cheap candy and off-brand Slurpees. The neighborhood was quite hilly, and all the good stuff was downslope of our house, which made mornings effortless and evening returns a slog. I learned the hard way about skateboard speed wobbles, and I figured out for myself how to switchback my one-speed to get home. I was a constant sweaty mess thanks to the mid-Atlantic heat and humidity, but that’s what the pool was for.

On the cusp of my teen years, I became friends with a kid named Parker. Parker’s family was into sailing, and when we were old enough to drive we spent many hours sailing their Hobie Cat on the Potomac River and the Chesapeake Bay, but at age twelve and limited by two feet or a bike, the coolest thing about Parker’s setup was that his backyard opened right onto that park. There was an actual white picket fence and the back gate led to a small grassy field and then the woods. A paved bike path was maybe a hundred feet away, the creek another fifty after that.

We did the usual kid stuff. We threw rocks. We hit rocks with sticks. We threw the sticks after the rocks. We made dams in the creek and caught minnows. We built jumps for our bikes and buried treasures in jelly jars and knocked on doors to see if friends could come out. We debated whether eating too many Pop Rocks could make your stomach explode and if that really happened to Mikey from the Life cereal commercial. We made bets to see who would spot the first firefly of the night. And of course, we always kept our eyes open for a body dumped in the woods and were disappointed when there never was.

The summer I turned thirteen, a girl entered the picture. She was my age, visiting her grandparents for a week a few doors down from Parker’s, and she was from California. I wasn’t yet interested in girls but was entering the stage where one or two of them might not be that bad, and, indeed, she might have been the first who wasn’t that bad. We’d meet in the late afternoon, after she spent the day doing tourist things with her grandparents, after Parker and I grew tired of each other. We didn’t do much, the two of us. Mostly, we sat on the curb, talking, in a world of two. Those nights, I got home long after the streetlights came on.

I don’t remember her name or what she looked like, and after that summer I never saw her again. What I do remember, as the ink of night spilled over our heads, was the feeling of floating, and I understood even then that such moments were special.

When I got home, my mom, despite my protestations, would make me take a shower, then I’d eat dinner, and I’d watch some reruns and I’d climb into bed with a book until ordered to turn the light off. But I always had a hard time falling asleep for the flutters in my stomach, my legs still twitching with energy. It was a crush, of course, but not just on a girl. It was a crush on beetles that glow citrus in the twilight, on building forts with friends, on creeks and sticks and bikes, on the blurry boundary between childhood and adolescence, and, most of all, on the sense that, lived right, a summer day could last forever.