Cavemen And Explorers

We used to ride our bikes to Wentz's farm in the summertimes when we were twelve and thirteen and might have for another year but it burned down when we were in our primes. So much seems to happen at thirteen. The Jews were tipped-off about thirteen in ancient times by God. "Today I am a man." They would say that when their time came, at thirteen. For me, the passage over would have to wait. "Today I am a kid." I'll be a man when the law decrees it: when I can drink beer and vote Republican.

Johnny Bertman and Frankie Sommer and Phil Schettinger and I lived in rowhouses in Germantown and bike-rides out to Wentz's farm were epochal, like excursions that we took to the Wissahickon to annoy nature. There's a parallel in purpose in these expeditions. We were on our own as a gang and our eyes were our guides.

At the Wissahickon, both stream and park, we would explore little caves that fat adults could never enter. We lit candles in their dank bowels and could peer out in to the lush forest that manicurists hadn't altered and we typed ourselves at once with cavemen and explorers alike. From our base we would foray away from the foot trails and trample (by accident) delicate ferns. We collected acorns and horse chestnuts and filled our pockets with them, treasures in our economy that would be currency and barter, like baseball cards and dixie cup lids. We would scrape mica schist from rocks, pull milk-weed pods, collect pine cones. We stared in awe at toad-stools, those mysterious poisons on the forest floor that elves and fairies sat upon in moonlight, and at Jack-in-the-Pulpits under their leafy umbrellas and spy on preying-mantises. At the stream we skipped stones across the water, counting each bounce of our own flat missile against our comrades' previous highs. In the afternoon we would go back to headquarters, the cave, and cook potatoes stolen from our pantries over a fire lit by matches stolen from our kitchens. We would agitate the embers with sticks and no matter where we stood or squatted the smoke would drift to us. We were human smoke-shifters, the oft-sought objects of scout initiations. When our cave got unbearably smokey we packed up and went home. The hikes to the Wissahickon would be repeated many times.

Our bike trips were more ambitious. The farm was far away, and it held an allure to us, city kids, that was foreign to our way of life. I don't think farm kids pedaled to Germantown to look with envy at rowhouses. Today they drive to slums to buy a noseful of powder that will make them feel funny.

One of my mother's sisters married a farmer and he and his brother grew veggies that were trucked off to the Campbell Soup factory in New Jersey and put into cans. In time the Wentzes gave up most of their fields and raised turkeys — hundreds of thousands of turkeys. But in those days when we bicycled out to Jarrettown the Wentzes still had a barn full of straw and hens and cats and some cows downstairs. They had a pond that was home to loud mouthed ducks and some ill-tempered geese and some frogs. What are dogs for? They ran around the pond barking and intimidating those lesser creatures, but they would never evict them.

We nicked some radishes and tomatoes and beans from the fields. We wrestled in the hay. We had egg-hunts. We poked around looking for bugs and snakes and mice. We collected acorns and a rarer currency — corn kernels to bring home to our treasuries.

A bike ride to Jarrettown would be inadvisable today. Cars didn't glut the roads in 1947. Roads weren't copies of the Autobahn. Drivers didn't suppose that they were always on the Indianapolis Speedway. Beyond Germantown the number of houses thinned out perceptively and once across the city line there was no question but that we were "in the country." The expression "suburbia" was unknown. Is that Latin? Yes? Suburbia must be near to Rome.

Today when people cross the city line they see chimneys to the horizon. Chimneys have replaced trees, houses have been built on what was farmland. When we pedaled out Limekiln Pike over two-million people lived in Philadelphia in about half of its 126 square miles. There still were farms in Philadelphia but they weren't as friendly to us as Wentz's and too close to home to be exotic. Developers bought up the farms in Philadelphia and the Northeast, sparsely occupied then, now has four-hundred thousand inhabitants. But overall, Philadelphia's population has dropped by about half-a-million. They're all out on Wentz's farm, a place where roosters crowed before any of them were born.