Ethan Gilsdorf remembers the summer of 1977, the year he was ten, and the intersection of boys, violence, and the animal kingdom.
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“Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.”— Bob Seger
That day, we hadn’t even been looking for woodchucks. But a local farmer, Mr. Patchman, said he would pay two dollars for every one we’d spot in his cornfield and manage to kill. It didn’t matter how you killed the woodchuck, he said, as long as it was dead. The word spread through the neighborhood. Roaming the hushed toads of my town, we kept a look out for movement in the fields. The low, wobbly movement of rodents.
This was the summer of 1977. The summer of Star Wars, Smokey and the Bandit, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors and the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. The summer Elvis died and Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were blasted on a journey to the outer reaches of our solar system. The Six Million Dollar Man, Emergency!, and Happy Days ruled our fuzzy TV. I was ten, going on eleven, and about to enter sixth grade. One afternoon, as I was riding my bike with one of the Dudley boys, I spotted a woodchuck in Mr. Patchman’s field. I don’t recall the exact month, or which boy was with me —one of the twins, or Randy, or Russ. Probably Russ. But knew it was early summer: I’m sure of that, because the corn wasn’t tall enough to obscure the head of the woodchuck, which popped up at the field’s dusty edge between the rows of sprouting corn. We could see the burrow, and we watched as the rodent burst forth from its hole and dashed into the open.
But it didn’t run away. It ran towards us. The woodchuck charged.
Russ whispered, “Gimme a rock.”
So I fed him a rock. And Russ hucked it. But a puff of dust proved he’d missed his mark.
“Give me another.”
I did. Another miss.
Russ was out of rocks, and the woodchuck still surged. Like a running back, it ran low to the ground, fierce and wild. It was coming straight at us.
A woodchuck against two boys? It made no sense.
“Is he rabid?” I asked. Rabid dogs, rabid raccoons, rabid children: this was a popular fear at the time. I looked for the foaming mouth.
Russ didn’t answer.
I found that my hands had picked up a good-sized rock. It was flat, and triangular, and heavy.
The woodchuck kept charging, stupidly and gloriously barreling toward us. Towards me, it seemed.
I held that rock high above my head, and readied my skinny arms, and paused to see what I would do next.
In the mid-1960s, my parents had moved from Ohio and planted their Midwestern flag in a rural New Hampshire. I think they fancied themselves potential hippies, or at least latecomers to the homesteader life, and they bought what they could afford, a run-down, early 19th-century New England Colonial, because they wanted to get back to the land. Once my parents split up, my Mom did her best to raise me and my two siblings as organic-gardening, yogurt-making, nuclear-power-plant-protesting, cooperative-game-loving, non-violent kids.
The Dudleys, who lived just through a short stretch of woods from us, were their own kind of exotic. They lived in a ranch. Their five kids were a product of a half-Mexican Catholic Mom and an old-school Yankee Dad. They were land rich and cash poor. Mr. Dudley was a salesman for tractors, and Mrs. Dudley ran the corner store. They also operated an apple orchard and a campground, but they shopped at the Wonder Bread Factory Store and dinner was often American cheese and baloney fried between two corn tortillas. The kids never seemed to have proper winter clothes. I’d be all bundled up, and the Dudley boys would be throwing snowballs with their bare hands. I assumed they were cold blooded.
The Dudleys probably didn’t know what to think of their neighbors, and I imagine they were fascinated by my mother, who served dishes like ratatouille and miso soup and designed teepees on our kitchen floor, and held raucous parties and film screenings that spilled into our front lawn and sandbox.
“Hello, Mrs. Gilsdorf,” one of the Dudleys would say, as we passed through the living to my bedroom. Mom would be sunbathing under a heat lamp, wearing nothing but eye shades made from tin foil. All the neighborhood boys knew Mrs. Gilsdorf had a copy of The Joy of Sex, somewhere. Most likely, Mrs. Gilsdorf had also been their third or fourth grade teacher.
Despite our seeming class and social differences, we kids got along fine. A path through the pine trees connected our two worlds.
The five Dudley kids were of comparable ages to my sister and brother and I. Despite the fact that Mr. Dudley scared the hell of me, we’d all shuttle back and forth between our two homes, spending many after-schools and weekend days and nights at each other’s houses as we could get away with. Indoors, we’d build model fighter planes, watch Match Game ’77 or In Search of… and listen to The Spinners and the soundtrack to Rockyon the 8-track. Mostly, we loved to be outside. We’d play kickball or baseball, or run around the endless woods around us, building forts, building trails, and breaking bottles.
But something in a young man wants to see things dead. And despite my quasi-hippie upbringing, or perhaps to spite it, I wanted to wield a weapon, just to see if I could. Like an ape with a stick, I wanted to feel evolved. I wanted to feel the authority of inflicting bodily harm. To mete out and deliver destruction. To make death real, so I could also withhold it, and taste the power of restraint.
Mr. Dudley also collected antique trucks and guns. Early on, the Dudley kids got BB guns and air rifles for presents, then advanced to .22s. They hunted deer. One Christmas, Santa brought Mrs. Dudley a Tommy gun. They were that kind of family.
Naturally, my mom was against guns, or any toy that bespoke violence, and that included G.I. Joe. I never thought I could persuade her to buy me a real gun, but undeterred, I’d circle in the Sears Wish Book catalogue the G.I. Joe action figures I covtered: the one with the black buzz cut, the one with the orange beard, the one with Kung-Fu Grip and eagle eye vision. G.I. Joe drove jeeps, and helicopters, and Mobile Support Vehicles. I imagined the zip lines I’d string from kitchen beam to beam, way up high where desiccated, half-year-old apple rings and dried bunches of herbs hung from the ceiling. I had serious plans to integrate the realm of Lego, Lincoln Log, Tinkertoy and Erector Set with the G.I. Joe universe.
“Mom. MOM. I really want THIS ONE. Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb,” I pleaded with her one day. This set had the blond G.I. Joe, a pick, shovel and pith helmet, and a yellow, six-wheeled “Adventure Team Vehicle” with a working winch for hauling all the ancient booty. I figured that compared to the others, Archeologist G.I. Joe was more of a pacifist or conscientious objector, and the most educational; Secret of the Mummy’s Tomb even tied in with the “pyramids” unit Mom had just taught in school. “Mom, look. There’s a sarcophagus with a SECRET panel that’s got a GEM STONE in it.”
“You know how I feel about those toys,” she’d reply, cigarette perched on her lower lip, yanking a brush through my snarled hair like she was grooming a sheep for a 4-H competition.
“OWW! … but the … OWW! … Dudleys have … G.I. … OWW! … Joe! … Ouch.”
“But we’re not the Dudleys, are we?” she said.
Eventually, she caved, but with a caveat. If I really wanted a G.I. Joe, I’d have to save up my allowance, which was 35 cents a week, to buy one. This would take half a year, but eventually I’d have my archeologist with Kung-Fu Grip, and I’d learn a lot about ancient Egypt, as well as how long it takes a magnifying glass to fry an ant, and also if the Adventure Team Vehicle’s axels and sarcophagus’s secret compartment would still work if me and G.I. Joe went for expeditions in a real sandbox. (Not really.) By the end of the warm weather, the dog would destroy pacifist G.I. Joe, and the sandbox would claim the Mummy’s Tomb and its treasure. By winter, the toy, like all toys in our house, would disappear under what we called The Glacier, to be spit out in springtime, if at all.
But fairly soon after I’d finished grieving over the loss of Archeologist G.I. Joe, an even more destructive weapon entered my life—my own version of Mrs. Dudley’s Tommy gun.
To generate a little extra income, Mom rented rooms in our house. How this made any sense, I don’t understand, since we barely had enough room for the four of us. Two of us kids shared a bedroom, and the third got a room that was more of a glorified closet, exactly as wide as a single bed with walls covered with mustard-colored flock wallpaper, just like G.I. Joe’s hair and beard. My mother slept in coldest part in the house, and rented out her bedroom.
A year or two after my dad left, a gay macrobiotic couple moved into a small storage space on the second floor. They were recently graduated students of my Dad’s, and wanted to be radical independent filmmakers, but the geodesic dome they were building in a sandpit wasn’t quite ready and winter was coming. So they moved into this cramped room above our kitchen. Adults entered via a rickety wooden ladder that poked through a hole in the kitchen ceiling. If you were a kid, you could enter through the back of my bedroom closet, squeezing into a gap between the chimney and the rafters no wider than the biggest Dudley. You also had to hop a scary foot-wide abyss into which we dropped my sister’s Barbies. Adults hardly came up there, and if they did, they whacked their heads on slanted walls no more than four feet high at their peak. It was our playroom, that is, until the gay couple moved in.
Soon the radical filmmakers were gone, only to be replaced by a revolving door of other adults: babysitters and boarders, as well as Mom’s short-term boyfriends: carpenters and potters and lobstermen usually 10 years her junior. They had names like Don and Randy and Butcher, and they all looked like Meathead from All in the Family, which was ironic, because Archie Bunker was a lot like Mr. Dudley. After school, Mom would do her lesson plans at the kitchen table, and often some guy would arrive and stay for dinner, and he’d draw cartoons or tell stories about living off the grid in Nova Scotia. On weekend mornings, we knew Mom’s night had been a long one when we saw overflowing ashtrays on the kitchen table, and several empty vase-shaped carafes of Paul Masson.
One September, a boyfriend whose lush handlebar mustache looked like Jim Croche’s, arrived with a birthday present. I unwrapped the gift and turned the apparatus in my hands. Suddenly I believed in divine intervention. This now VERY cool boyfriend had bought me a beautiful thing—a Wrist Rocket.
The Wrist Rocket was the Rolls Royce of slingshots. Its high-tech design incorporated a molded plastic arm brace. When I slipped the brace over my left forearm and grasped the base of the Y-shaped part with my left hand, and placed a projectile in the suede pouch and pulled back the rubber cords with my right hand, and then found my target with the site, or just fired into the air, I was half Bionic Man, half Luke Skywalker, and all bad-ass.
But Mom didn’t let us have slingshots.
“Well, look at that,” Mom said to me while eying the boyfriend du summer, a guy named Larry. “That’s some …. Thing.”
“Wicked!” I said. “Can I go outside and try it out?”
“I’ll show him how,” said Larry, escaping my Mom’s Glare of Death as we bolted to the driveway.
“NO SHOOT-ing at PEO-ple,” she yelled. “Or BIRDS .. or at ANY-thing near ANY-thing or any-ONE. Under-STAND?”
Mom didn’t know that I had already played “BB-war” at the Dudleys. One of the boys would stand on their porch with an air rifle as my brother and I and a couple other boys ran around the lawn. The idea was for the shooter to hit as many of us as possible. Russ got a pellet about an inch below the eye. No more BB-war.
I used the Wrist Rocket for a few months, and savored being the “it” kid in my school. Then Russ Dudley borrowed it and chose blue jays for target practice. His parents found out, and even they didn’t approve. They told my Mom, and the Wrist Rocket was retired. Or disappeared into the Glacier.
But the Wrist Rocket loss wasn’t completely heartbreaking. Like all 11 year old boys, I had already moved on to the next thing — testing another border, another other way to be violent, and hurtful, and deal death. This was inbred. Even years before my Wrist Rocket, G.I. Joe and gun obsessions, playing in the sandbox, I’d smash toads between bricks, just to see their bodies transformed to flat and motionless goo.
When young boys like me get together, they can do bad things. As a roving gang, the neighborhood boys, in various combinations, would pester hornet nests with jets of water from hoses. We’d knock them down with long poles, add lighter fluid and burn them. Once, one of the twins Dudley boys hopped on my sister’s bike (the pale green one with the banana seat and sissy bar) and rode through the flaming nest with hornets in furious pursuit.
One of the Dudley boys had a friend, and this friend’s family had gone to Disneyworld for vacation. They had stopped at the fabled South of the Border, a touristy roadside attraction in South Carolina, and brought back a cache of fireworks. Some of the explosives ended up with the Dudley boys. Many summer days were spent blowing up things like anthills and tree stumps. It was not long before many of our painstakingly-built (or, more often the case, frustratingly-botched) Revell plastic model planes met their demise in the sandpit. We strapped packs of firecrackers or cherry bombs to their wings and tossed them off the edge. Then we’d set the wreckage on fire and watch it all melt. Sometimes a firecracker would go off, prematurely, in someone’s hand. It smarted, and we’d laugh about it.
We’d also go fishing in the stream. Catching a little trout, we’d watch it suffocate in the air. Just as it was about to expire, we’d jam a firecracker up its butt and blow it apart.
Not to mention the fate of other beasts. Like woodchucks.
As middle school evolved into high school, my family and the Dudley’s grew apart. For my seventh grade year, just before I turned 12, my sister, brother and I moved to live with my Dad and step mother outside Montreal. We returned to New Hampshire the year after, but a distance had already emerged between the Gilsdorf and the Dudleys. Perhaps not by design, but by osmosis. Somehow we sensed the future. My siblings and I were college bound. The Dudley boys took shop class, went into the Marines and enrolled in technical college to become electricians.
The common land between our two houses had shifted. A rift opened. As for the path, it was still there, barely, but overgrown. No one used it. No one talked about the alternated landscape between our two families.
I didn’t talk about that day with the woodchuck, either. Not that I can recall. Perhaps that was the beginning of when I left behind the Dudleys.
But there’s still that me, back in the past, the one still holding the rock high above my head, with the woodchuck charging.
I can still see its black eyes flashing in the sun. Its yellow teeth. The rock wobbling in my hands. I heave it forward and down and hear a half-thud, half-crack. I turn away.
Russ says, “Ethan … you …”
I can’t look. Not at Russ, not at the woodchuck. I don’t even go to Mr. Patchman’s door and ask for my two dollars. I just walk my bike home.
***
[Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.]
Images: [main] Joe Haupt / flickr, [wrist rocket] jbcurio / flickr, [GI Joe] superclops / flickr, [swat, walkie talkie, air rifle] wishbook / flickr
