One summer I went to a boys’ camp on a tiny island in Puget Sound, Tanglewood Island, owned by a prominent Tacoma pediatrician named Dr. Schultz. A kid could go to Dr. Schultz’s camp for 5 weeks or 8 weeks, depending on what his parents could afford. I went for 5. I was eleven years old.
Tanglewood Island was covered with conifers, two wild donkeys roamed around beneath them, there were cabins here and there where the campers lived, and we had some forty Willits Brothers canoes that we could paddle around in - as free as seabirds - once we mastered the basics of canoeing, which included learning how to capsize a canoe, swamp it, and right it again.
Dr. Schultz also had a World War II era landing craft - one of those barge-like boats that you see in war movies, the fronts of which fall open when it hits the shore, allowing hoards of brave Marines to run up the beach and pretty soon get killed.
One day, I think to celebrate the 4th of July, Dr. Schultz loaded seventy of us into his landing craft and off we went to the Nisqually Mudflats, an area of fine silty soil and extreme low tides, down at the end of Puget Sound.
A couple of cargo ships got wrecked there some twenty years earlier. Dr. Schultz’s idea was that he would steer his landing craft up as close to them as possible, then lower its front and we would run off like prepubescent Marines ourselves, not to death, but to a couple of hours of playing and climbing around.
Cool, right? What kid wouldn’t want that?
The answer is that every kid on the landing craft wanted it, even when Dr. Schultz announced that we had to strip naked, leaving all of our clothes on board.
Whoa! Seventy naked boys! And silt! And two wrecked ships to explore. How do you think that would go over with the keepers of our social norms today?
Ah, it was heaven! There was a chance that we might tumble off the radically tilted deck of one of those ships and drown in silt! Or get cut on a jagged piece of twisted and rusted ship railing. But nobody cared. We all knew that silt was curative, even if we did get cut or nearly drown.
How did we know it? Dr. Schultz told us.
The clothing we left behind was in a big and stinking pile by the time we returned to the landing craft, but we didn’t care about that, either. We’d sort it out when we got back to Tanglewood Island.
About a week after that stupendous day, my five weeks at Dr. Schultz’s camp were over and I went home to my regular life.
Except, except, except…. The part of Tacoma we lived in, Browns Point, had a locally famous rich guy who lived in a fabulous house near our school, and while I was gone, word came down to my best friend, Dave, that the rich guy was out of town. Out of town AND he had a swimming pool.
If I wrote the rich guy’s name here, those of you familiar with Tacoma would say, “Ah, that rich guy!” for his name appears on the stadium that houses Tacoma’s AAA baseball team even today.
I had only been home from camp for a few days when Dave and I convinced our parents to let us sleep out in his backyard, and then, when the moon was high and the witches were out, we puffed up our sleeping bags to look like we were still in them and ran through the darkened woods to the rich guy’s house.
Dave said something like, “See, he’s out of town.”
I said something like, “Yeah, no lights.”
We jumped his fence with the ease of Olympians and stole to the edge of the pool like skunks on the lookout for a drink. All we planned to do was dive in, swim around a while, then run back home in our soaking clothes like two happy Welch boys in a Dylan Thomas poem.
But I remembered the landing craft and the silt and the ships and said, “We gotta do it naked, Dave.”
Dave said, “How about we just wear our underpants? Then, if we get caught, at least our peckers won’t get seen all shriveled up.”
So down to our underpants we stripped, and into the pool we went. The water was cold but the stars twinkled down and we muffled our shouts of joy.
When we got out of the pool some fifteen minutes later we pulled off of our soggy underpants, tossed them over the fence ahead of us, dressed in our dry clothes, jumped the fence ourselves and went home.
Ah the petty crimes of eleven-year-olds. No one would ever know!
But not so fast! We forgot our underpants and had to sneak into our houses early the next morning to get clean pairs to put on.
“Ha ha!” we said. “What are they gonna think when they find them?”
Ha ha, indeed, for Dave, not so much for me, since my underpants conformed to one of Dr. Schultz’s rules and had “Richard Wiley” written in them, in indelible ink and in my mother’s beautiful cursive.
When the rich guy called a few days later, my father drove me up to his house in the silent tomb of his 1949 Packard. The silence belonged to my father. The tomb belonged to me.
I remember that the rich guy was kind, and that someone had even washed our underpants before he gave them back to me. And I don’t remember getting into any serious trouble after that.
A half a decade later, though, when the San Francisco Giants came to town to play their annual game against the Tacoma Giants, their AAA farm team, I climbed the fence at the farthest corner of the stadium parking lot. So in a way I jumped the rich man’s fence twice.
This time my excuse was that Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, Matty Alou and Willie McCovey, played for us, while the great Willie Mays played for them…
I ask you now, who would want to miss that?
Postscript…
This essay is in memory of my childhood friend, Dave Richards, who died in 1987, at the age forty-two. He was the fastest runner I ever knew, but he couldn’t outrun his demons.
What a great story to dedicate to your friend Dave. Just a note: I can see it's too long since you visited the UK, Richard! Because it's Welsh rather than Welch....but that brings me to the horrible verb, now almost never used except by the insensitive, as in 'he welched on the deal'. So many English people pronounced that as 'welshed' that of course Welsh people got upset. Now it's pretty much obsolete. Not used in the US, I imagine?
Was Gaylord Perry having a thing with Mamie Van Doren?