Hooky

I began playing hooky at age thirteen. Public school had never held any charm for me, and it certainly wasn't where any actual learning ever happened. Learning happened out in the world away from little desks in stuffy classrooms where teachers went through government mandated motions of educating youngsters while only managing to indoctrinate some of us.

I could never conform enough to be a good little student, so as soon as my family was living in a place where there was somewhere interesting to hangout on days I cut classes, I set about being loose and free at every opportunity. The first day I played hooky was easy. I just didn't get on the bus at the corner stop, instead sprinting across a small vacant lot into thicket lining the banks of the Vermillion River. No one noticed that I wasn't on the morning bus. Even if they had noticed, they'd have never found me scurrying along game trails paralleling the river.

As I neared the west bank of the river, I heard voices ahead. Slowing and moving as quietly as I could, I spotted the source of the voices as two men sitting on folding chairs fishing with cane poles using crawfish as bait. They spoke quietly and cheerfully with each other, their conversation punctuated by brief chuckling and an occassional gufaw. I stayed concealed and watched them until the nearest one said "Come on outa there. We ain't gonna hurt ya."

Emerging from tangle of bush and vine, I stood slightly behind them. The one who had spotted me asked why I wasn't in school. I answered honestly that I had better things to do than sit at a little desk in a stuffy classroom lisenting to teachers yakking on about things which were of no interest to me. This elicited a guffaw from both of them and I was invited to sit with them for a while by the speaker whose name was Virgil. He introduced me to his friend Clement. They wanted to know what all I was learning about roaming along the river banks alone, so I told them about creatures I saw, about how the smells of living things and water calmed me, and how doing it alone helped me overcome fears I didn't realize I had.

They latched onto that admission of fears and began telling me about the dangers I might face on my sojourns along the river. Real dangers like water mocassins and copperheads and timber rattlers, and less real dangers like haints and hoodoos. I giggled at that part of their talk which made them look sharply at me so that I thought they were about to scold me, but they just sighed and carried on with their stories of mysterious things happening in thicket.

I listened without interrupting again, silently poopooing their accounts of unexplainables, but enjoying the cadence and timbre of their speaking styles none the less. They were nice men, bidding me farewell when I grew restless and moved on down river to explore and play. Carrying the sack lunch Mom had prepared for me, I found a quiet place to sit and eat before getting to work forging the sick note I would pass off to my homeroom teacher the next day. Getting Mom's signature just right was the hardest part, but I somehow managed to pull it off every time. Decades later I asked Mom if she ever knew I had played hooky so much in those days and she told me she never did. Apprently, my homeroom teacher never checked with her about me being out sick on any of those many days I was roaming the river.

When school let out for summertime, I began breaking the rule about being at home after dark, sometimes walking down to the end of Grande Avenue where it hairpinned back to become a street named Antigua Drive, never turning to go up Antigua but heading straight on through thicket toward the west bank of a tight bend in the river. Getting through the thicket in the dark was tricky at first, but along the riverbank it was easy going unless I tripped on a cypress knee. I eventually learned that full moon nights were the best for safety's sake, not just for footing but for spotting and avoiding dangerous creatures dwelling there.

Virgil and Clement had been right out that simple fact of the land, and of the waterway, too. Spotting a water moccasin swimming in river that first night, I steeled myself to remain alert, even as I wondered where it was going and what it might see making its easy way upstream.

I knew of creatures like opossum and racoon living along the river course, and had been warned about alligators, too, sometimes with turtles sitting upon them like living logs.

They had said that they sometimes went fishing together at night in a pirogue they had carved from a single cypress log themselves when they were younger and stronger, and when there were still plenty of big cypress logs available for such use. Logs not yet felled to become railroad ties. That's when, they warned, they felt, and heard and saw stranger things.

Stranger things the likes of which I imagined that swimming pit viper might see somewhere upriver. Stranger things which might take interest in it, and decide to take a closer look at it.

A much, much closer look. Maybe even a closer look at its inside parts as well as its outside.

Then I began wondering about it maybe finding me out there, and wanting to look closer.

And possibly showing me better ways to learn, innate but too long dormant to know about.

That I might transcend to higher states of understanding and make wondrous things for use.

Wondrous things which would make it easier to roam the places of greatest interest to me.