THE GEOGRAPHY OF A CHILDHOOD
By Sam Brown
      
When I was twelve years old, I was sent to a private school
I detested, where my most detested course was Geography. In that
course, I learned to trace atlas maps of various unknown corners
of the world (in order, I suppose, to make them less unknown to
lunkheads like me). We committed to memory place names and
geographical features of exotic locales, discovering as we did so
that the world was an extraordinarily dull place, void of motion,
characterized by unpronounceable names, and flatter even than the
pre-Columbians had hypothesized.
      
At the school day's end, I left the insipid traced
abstractions of the "real" world and returned home to about a
hundred acres of the most fascinating and variegated landscape it
has ever been my pleasure to know. The Geography of my school
classroom was decisively trumped by the geography of my
childhood.
      
The house I grew up in was on Hillside Road in Wellesley
Hills, Massachusetts. The street's name was apt; Hillside Road
arose steeply from the valley of Washington Street, crested
within fifty yards, and descended gradually thereafter into a
dell, crossing a brook there from which it rose again to its
terminus just short of a commuter rail station. From beginning to
end, it ran about 450 yards. On either side rose abrupt slopes,
some wooded, some in lawns. Over the ridge to the north, a short
dirt road spilled down into the glen where the nearby Charles
River meandered into the town of Newton, while along the ridge to
the south, a broad grassy path covered an underground aqueduct
which led to the city of Boston. Above the junction of aqueduct
and brook in the Hillside dell, a skiing and sledding slope had
been cleared; from the base of this slope, the brook then flowed
along another dirt road, emptying at last into a snail- and frog-
harboring pond connected to a private garden and nursery school
(which both of my brothers attended). The piece de resistance , as
far as we children were concerned, was the small playing field
across Hillside Road from the ski slope. In honor of its owner,
it was called "Yotz's Field," and it provided so many hours of
touch football, sandlot softball, and general roughhousing that
it should properly have been called a field of dreams. Today,
most fortunately, it is protected from development by a deeded
covenant.
      
We children of the 1950's roamed this neighborhood pretty
much as we wished. As an adult, I have often asserted that in any
housing development, the adults own the real estate but the
children own the neighborhood. This I learned on Hillside Road,
where we children respected the property of our neighbors but
crossed it freely, and utilized common space with proprietary
nonchalance. The amount of such common space was generous: it was
possible to enter the aqueduct from Washington Street, traverse
its length to the contiguous ski slope, descend to the brook and
follow it almost all the way to the Brookgarden pond without ever
setting foot in anyone's yard.
      
Following the aqueduct in the opposite direction, across
Washington Street to the east, one immediately entered the
grounds of the Annie F. Warren Elementary School, which accounted
for about 20% of our children's play space. School, as an
institution, was, of course, regarded by us kids with
affectionate contempt. The Warren School was nonetheless central
to our lives, geographically and recreationally, as well as
educationally. It was the anchor of the neighborhood, accessible
from and contiguous to our other common space. It was also a kind
of temple: built on small but prominent hilltop, it rose higher
than any building for nearly half a mile on three of four
opposing compass points (the Bird Hill Ridge loomed to the
southeast). Rolled out at its feet were a paved parking lot and
basketball court, a partially paved playground, and two groomed
diamonds used for kickball and softball. (I have never forgotten
the home run I hit on the upper diamond during sixth-grade co-ed
softball. A dedicated non-athlete, I was unprepared for the
attention. I never hit another, before or since.)
      
When you add the multiple play yards of the Warren School
to the common space of the residential neighborhood itself, you
have a child's world of enormous reach and lyrical variation of
terrain, a virtual haven, nearly free of traffic, strongly
naturalistic, and remarkably well-suited to children's
recreational penchants in all seasons of the year.
      
Geography, however, is not merely physical. It is also
commercial. Our neighborhood was blessed with store clusters
better suited to yesterday's child shopper than the best of
today's malls would have been. It was a five-minute walk from my
house to Ward's drugstore, a hole-in-the-wall shop featuring
glassed cases of the latest in disgusting candy and sweetened
wax, a tiny soda fountain (four stools), and a tinier photo-
finishing counter (where I proudly ordered 5x7 black-and-white
enlargements of snapshots I had taken of my first girlfriend). Of
greatest importance was Ward's display of the latest comic books,
which we bought profligately. In good weeks, Mr. Ward would have
an overflow and would allow us in to the back room of the store
to paw through what was not yet out on the racks. In bad weeks,
Mrs. Ward (this was a classic Mom-and-Pop operation) would grouse
at us if we didn't buy what we handled. Somewhere in the chaos,
Mr. Ward filled an occasional prescription.
      
Next to Ward's, in the late 1940's, was a small grocery
store, now long gone, a sort of pre-industrial 7-11. Another
five-minute walk would take us to the small village of Newton
Lower Falls, situated where the Charles River crossed under
Washington Street in a series of pools and falls, both natural
and man-made. Here there was a larger drugstore (Rexall), another
grocery store, a barber, a cobbler, two lumber yards, a dry
cleaner, and a hardware store. Kidston's Hardware repaired our
bicycles. Leo, the barber, gave discounts for youngsters. There
was, for a while, a Dairy Freeze. Some of the Warren School kids
rode their bikes to Wellesley Hills Square (1 1/2 miles away) to
shop, but most frequented "Lower Falls." After all, what more
could a kid want?
      
Sadly, maturity diminishes the appeal of the geography of
childhood. The progression from bicycle to automobile, and then
to bus, train, and airplane, shrinks the mental map of childhood
space until it seems almost like another page from an atlas. Part
of the reason "you can't go home again" is surely because the
adult has lost the palpable spatial sense of the child. It is no
longer liberating - or possible - to race up a forested slope and
along a grassy aqueduct path, anticipating with relish the
impending braking run down the ski slope. One seeks recreation in
vast, boat-infested bodies of water, not in the few square yards
of a snail- and frog-harboring pond. But even though it is
diminished, the geography of childhood - for those who can trace
its maps in their minds - still performs an important function
for the adults we have become: it shows us what our world was
like when we began our journey, and thus suggests what we may
have forgotten about what is in our baggage
      
end
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