We Control the Vertical?

The sermon at mass this Sunday dealt with, among other issues, fear. Father asked the congregation if anyone ever experienced fear. Who hasn’t right? My first experience with fear that I can remember was back in the early 60s. I lived in Lakewood near the intersection of University (Nee Longwood) and St. Road 13 which was also the last traffic signal before you reached Palatka.

I’ll tell you what fear is. It’s being 11 and having to, because the family TV was on the fritz, walk back from Craig Smith’s house after watching ‘The Outer Limits’ back when controlling the vertical and horizontal was a thing. By the time I reached the last block I was sure I was running fast enough to put Roger Bannister, the first to run a four-minute mile, well behind me.

There was a more palpable example at that time though. Bear with me.

For a kid my age in those days, Lakewood and its surroundings was nothing short of a paradise. Lots of woods, Christopher Creek, and marshes to explore. Lots of tree houses, bridges, and underground forts to be built. Lots of turtles, newts, skinks, and snakes to wrangle. Lots of kids my age to make trouble with. Lots of construction sites with their attending scrap piles, brimming with everything we needed. Sometimes workers gave us a hand. One time a roll of roofing felt fell off a truck…black gold!

There were water balloon fights and quasi “capture the flag” skirmishes that, more than once, ended with us floating in the pool at The San Jose Apartments next to DuPont High School sipping on cokes, chewing on Slim Jims, but not before we hosed ourselves off and put on our swim trunks. The pool’s filter wasn’t a match for the muck we were usually covered in.

A few of us delivered the Jacksonville Journal in the afternoons there and had a few clients at the place. Couple thar with a good relationship with the maintenance man, a few well-placed papers and we got the royal treatment. The Cokes and Slim Jims were acquired in the same fashion at Paks minute market nearby. It worked well till a partial roof collapse at the “Stylishly Stout” store in the Lakewood Shopping Center one afternoon during a thunderstorm. The same roof we tossed our extra papers on. We were summarily dismissed – to our parents.

I’ll leave that there.

One day I found myself in the sprawling woods near DuPont High School heading home one evening from the scrum…all by myself. As I approached the clearing that backed up on Christopher Creek that, once I crossed on one of our bridges, would place me on Colgate Road within a few blocks from the house, I heard leaves rustling, grunting, then blood curdling squealing. Then I saw them, about a half dozen wild hogs from very little to very large. One saw me and charged. The rest joined in. I ran to a tree on the edge of the clearing right by the creek and scurried up as high as I could and perched on a large branch, hugging the trunk. My heart was pounding.

They milled around squealing and grunting some putting their hooves on the trunk as if to climb. Then I realized they weren’t going to get me, so I calmed down enough to look around and there, on the opposite side of the trunk not ten feet away was a bobcat clinging to another branch also peering at the hogs. The cat peered at me then down at the hogs then back at me. There I was, frying pan into the fire! Slowly it dawned on me. We were in the same boat. The hogs were the clear and present danger not me.

Whew!

Eventually the hogs wandered off. I looked over to see what the cat was up to, but it’d vanished as well. The cat wanted a part of me as much as I did the cat. I got home late and was grounded. No one believed my story.

Oh, to have a cell phone…

At the turn of the century, I’m pushing fifty years old, attending UNF, taking a Middle Eastern History class and the professor quotes an old Arabic saying: ‘Your friends are three…your friend, your friend’s friend, and the enemy of your enemy.’

The instant I heard that I was right back there in that tree. That bobcat was the enemy of my enemy!

Twenty-six years on from that finds me back in a proverbial tree. There are bobcats, hogs and a host of other beasts milling around the place and I’m thinking that all I need is a TV that can re-run episodes of ‘The Outer Limits’. At least you get control of the vertical and horizontal back at the end of the episode. In the real-world any kind of control is becoming a chimera.