Wild Women

From the age of four or five, Marilyn and I ran the neighborhood. We hid in bushes and spied on the neighbors and we knew all the great gossip before it became gossip. We used information and intrinsic coquetry as cash to gain cookies, candy, and above all building supplies. Because there was much more fun to be had in the woods. We allowed some of the other neighborhood children to run with us, both girls and boys. But together or separate we were the alpha females and the undisputed leaders of the pack. She was a loner and I was a loner with devious social skills. We were lean and mean, one a tall goddess and the other a petite wood nymph. We meshed together well and shared a common purpose--utter curiosity and the drive to be the masters of our domain. We were wise, wild women from an early age.

Wild Women are Earth Mothers. Wild Women are untamed and unpredictable. We own our sexuality and you won't see anything other than shampoo, soap, and a toothbrush in our bathrooms. The lotions and pots of makeup are stored away for when we want them. Yes, Wild Women will occasionally dress up like "ladies" or "other-than-ladies", mostly because we can, but that is not the entirety of our consciousness. We were lucky to grow up as a wild women in central Florida, shielded from mass media, knowing nothing of weight and diets, makeup and fashion, and with a small dose of the reality of being targets in a male dominated culture. It was a delightful test tube and we revelled in it, in spite of the hardships of our lives. She lost her father early in life, while I was the cat person raised by wolves. But I am the cat who walks by herself and all places are alike to me.

My fondest memory of our escapades was the taming of the wilderness surrounding us. We lived in a concrete block subdivision of surrounded by "the woods". The woods were a grand forest of towering pines with a low ground cover of vicious blackberry vines and treacherous palmetto's, stretching around us for miles. There were rattlesnakes, coral snakes, a vast assortment of bugs and mosquitoes, plus an array of fruits and benign looking foliage designed to lull the unsuspecting into believing they were safe. But we were children of the woods who were well-schooled in the false pretenses of both the wilderness and civilization.

Beware the blackberry that is actually lantana, a poisonous weed. Beware the poison oak masquerading as a mild bush. Beware the coral snake pretending to be a king snake. Oh, yes the woods can be very, very devious. "Red touching yellow kills a fellow; Red touching black is a friend of Jack" that was our code for deciphering the message in the coloration of a potentially deadly coral snake, and only works decisively in Florida because the coral snake is more devious than most throughout the continent. Lantana has no thorns, so we only ate blackberries from vines with lots of thorns. The more blood on your arms the safer the berry. And we used the Native American method of inoculation against poison ivy. We never got a case of it while running the woods in Florida. It is the reason that folks can get allergy shots today. We believe that the great spirit put the remedy with the problem, in all cases.

So we tamed the woods around us and made hidden paths that went for miles and miles in and around our territory. We built forts high in the pine trees and used them to defend our turf from rivals. There were hardly any disputes because all the kids wanted to be in our group. And you could join the group if you had tools and building supplies, and a willingness to be bold and to build in the clouds. If I could name our tribe today, we'd have been The Children of the Clouds. We rained terror on the lowly children of the woods who came later into our game. Pebbles, water balloons, and noxious substances. Wild Women can be ruthless.

Building supplies? That was simple. We found these things laying about, dumped at the edges of our woods, in back yard piles, and at the new construction sites. We favored large nails, long planks, plywood sheets, and shorter lengths of two by fours. But we used everything. Our dads had hammers and saws, and didn't miss them during the day. We carried water in glass coke bottles with corks we made from sticks when cork was hard to come by--there were no plastic containers available then. We carried nets and forked sticks to catch snakes and other animals, plus boxes and bags to carry them home safely--safely for us, not for the animals. My dad dispatched quite a few of my captured coral snakes before I started carrying the axe with me, which turned out to be great for hacking foliage and cutting firewood as well.

The first venture into an apparently impenetrable forest wall was my idea. Marilyn said she wasn't allowed in the woods, but I hadn't gotten those specific instructions because to my unsuspecting parents it didn't look like any human being could penetrate the sheer volume of foliage, much less one small daughter. One day we were playing in the back yard of her home on the edge of the subdivision. Her step-father had a woodpile behind the house, at the edge of the woods. All the parents were at work and their family's maid was ironing and she never paid attention to us anyway. I got Marilyn to help me grab a board and stand it on its end, right at the edge of the woods. We let go of the board and made a four foot long path directly into the forbidden woods. I scampered to the end and said "let's do it again!" And it was on! We made it at least twenty feet into the woods and included a ninety degree turn to camouflage our efforts. Because it was forbidden, we wise women gathered brush and debris to hide our initial hole into the dense jungle we had started to tame. We must have been about seven years old at the time. Running around the neighborhood was getting old, it was time to run around the woods.

It was the beginning of spring, and it was hot as hell already, but this was central Florida before air conditioning was easily available. It was just as easy to cool down in the creeks as it was to cool down on the concrete floor of a Florida room. TV was black & white and we weren't yet hooked on Dark Shadows, so the ideal situation was born. We were of the age where nobody really cared what we did as long as nothing was broken and we didn't scare the horses. There was no such thing as babysitting for kids in school. In that era, in the sixties, there seemed to be no need. Ted Bundy hadn't set up shop in Gainesville yet, so we were wild and safer wild than tamed in any event. There were a few incidents where we ran into men in the woods, but already being well versed in covert operations from running wild in the neighborhood, it was more fun to be discreet in the woods and watch the men without them knowing about us. We sensed danger from adults anyway, so strangers had to be doubly dangerous. We were very wise women, even then.

The next day we would ordinarily have gone to my house to play as part of our unspoken reciprocity agreement, but being mind readers we hopped off the bus together and went straight to her house. We had three hours to make our way deeper into the woods. This time we prepared a little better and had a definite goal--to find water! Most of Florida is about an inch away from water at any moment and we already knew that if we didn't find a creek we could easily make one by digging a trench. So she carried the shovel and I dragged two planks. We fixed our entrance by setting it back behind a stand of palmetto's so that we could disappear behind it, and we made a place to stack our personal supplies and building materials. We had a fair idea of where the subdivision's drainage creek was located and that is what we set off to find. We didn't make it the second day, but we thought we heard it.

A few more days passed, and it rained a bit, so we went to my house to avert any suspicion over our activities. There we played a rousing game of Risk. "Crush, kill, destroy," that was our motto. We were long past The Game of Life or Monopoly. We rummaged through my father's tools and gathered a few more boards for our next venture. Then on the third day of this new adventure we found the creek. And not only did we find the creek, we found a relatively clean "beach" made of white clay in a cool depression along the sides of the creek. There was a tree down over the creek that made a great bridge, but the creek was only a few feet across at one point, so a few planks of wood solved the problem of carrying our supplies and tools. We made inroads into the woods with only a few planks at a time. As one plank was laid to compress the foliage, we'd trot to the end and lay down the second plank, taking up the first plank to use again. Once the foliage was compressed once, it seemed to stay relatively compressed as we used it as a pathway. At the creek, we eventually stashed three planks for use as a temporary bridge when we needed it.

On the third day we rested in the cool depression, covering our sun browned limbs with white clay as we laid in the shade, plotting our next moves. We were inveterate planners, always thinking several moves ahead, which serves us well to this day. As we lay there in the depression with our knees bent and our feet ankle deep in cool water we both seemed to spy the perfect tree house tree at the same time. We had made the prerequisite inroads into the woods, and it was logical to now build up. How on earth do two young girls build a tree house in a pine tree that has no lower branches whatsoever? We were two young engineers in the making and that part was easy. We needed rope for safety and short two by fours for the ladder, plus a hammer and the biggest nails we could find. Thus the next step of the project began to form.

Within days we had what we needed and it was a Saturday with hours and hours stretching out before us. In our plotting we arranged it so that I stayed overnight at her house. Her step-father went fishing, something we normally would have clamoured to do, but we let him go peacefully. We asked her mother if we could make a picnic lunch and go to the park. Naturally, she said "yes". Carla, the maid, helped us fill a small cooler with ice, four cokes, water, cups, and peanut butter sandwiches. Carla even gave us apples and a bag of Lay's potato chips. She didn't make the sandwiches the way I was used to, with maple syrup, but I wasn't arguing that day. Marilyn's mother and baby sister went shopping and Carla was watching TV. So we plotted how to get our lunch and our supplies to the tree house site as quickly as possible. At first we were going to make it in three or more trips. But mid-morning demonstrated how hot it was going to get. No way was I going to traipse several miles before starting the project, being very eager to begin. I grabbed a tarp from the carport and showed Marilyn a new trick. I was planning to make a travois like I'd read about in a book about the Plains Indians in school, but we managed to stack everything in the tarp, fold it up, and run the rope I brought through the holes to make a tarp sandwich around our stuff, like a hot dog with the ends closed. It didn't take us long to get to the creek pulling our travois behind us.

We organized our stuff, and had part of an early lunch, sharing a coke over two cups jam packed with ice. In Florida, everything is served over ice. It is inconceivable to me to drink a coke from a bottle or a can. It has to be over ice, otherwise it just isn't a coke. And everything's a coke. You order a coke in a restaurant and the waitress will tell you what they've got, sprite, coke, Dr. Pepper, etc. If all they have is Pepsi then you order yourself an ice tea. In Florida, in the south, everything's a coke. That's the way it has always been.

Anyway, after refreshing ourselves with a cold drink of coke (later it would be beer or Mad Dog, but we hadn't gotten to that yet), we worked out the plan. The first day we expected to hammer in short two by four's as ladder rungs to make it up the pine tree trunk to the first sturdy branches. And that is what we did. We quickly learned that one nail just wouldn't do, two is better, and the little engineers in us decided that three nails in a triangular pattern would work the best. When we ran out of two by fours, we used whatever fallen branches we could find. It took us 32 rungs to make it to the first set of sturdy branches, where we sat and looked around our domain, wishing we had our cokes and our lunch with us. Necessity is the not the only mother of invention, so is desire. We were well on our way to making our desires turn into reality. First we tried using the rope and tarp but realized it wasn't long enough, but I remembered my dad using a pulley to draw mysterious things up to the roof when he was working on it. I knew where the pulleys and the rope were stashed and he never was able to locate them again. Marilyn heard my description of his system and she knew what it meant. The idea of building a real tree house was born out of a simple desire to have an ice cold coke high in the tree, overlooking a vast woods filled with mystery and untamed promise.

It took us days to get the pulley system worked out permanently, plus a base set of boards secured, and place to hold our lunch and supplies. We learned to pull out the lowest rungs on the tree and carry them with us because we didn't want anyone to see that there was a path to our fort in the tree. We knew stealth, and we knew the limits of our potential rivals who would only see what they expected to see, not what we had introduced. Within weeks we had walls and a roof, and a stash of water and food. Because of the hardships in our lives we both talked of running away and living in the tree permanently. It was our haven and our dearest desires fulfilled. A safe place, hidden and discreet, far from the veneer of civilization. She had a step-father to dodge sexually, and I had the position of kitchen mammy in my home. We were warriors protecting our souls from the leeches of civilization. That is the way it has always been.