\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Last Saturday we drove around sections of Old Town, hoping to spot the place where a young couple had planned to set up a trailer they had just bought from our son.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Driving around Taos, San Miguel, Mora and Chavez streets, we came across some interesting features: hills, trestles, bridges, places where we saw kids congregating. And they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve done it for years.<\/p>\n
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And on the east side, the flat east side? Well, in our youth we had the railroad tracks and more importantly, a culvert that ran under our unpaved block of Railroad Avenue, a few yards from our house.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It seemed the culvert could accommodate 11-year-olds but nobody any older. And surprisingly, few people played around or in it. The culvert began near the Maldonado house on Railroad and Columbia and ended at the Martinez house across the street. It served to keep water off streets like Grand, Third, Fourth and Fifth, and there was a reciprocal benefit for those of us in the Railroad barrio: the runoff that exited at the tracks helped spawn a big, healthy nest of mosquitoes. We even had names for those insects we kept on a leash.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s safe to admit now that we found pleasure in being victimized. Telling our parents, ” . . . and Don and his friends tried to beat us up” carried a certain ge ne se qua, a feeling that something important (almost) happened to us.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In truth, in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc40s and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc50s, we often instigated the antagonism. We could run faster than they, and we could run really fast when in danger of a pummeling.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0One summer, a boy named Kenny came to visit his cousin down the street. Kenny and I were the same age and size and soon began exploring the culvert: “You go in first.” “No, you do it.” We discovered we were the right size to take advantage of the currogations, for traction, and with surprisingly little effort, could crawl through it on all fours.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Once we tried to see who was faster, but the only person I knew who owned a watch was my dad, and that was out of the question.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0So Kenny and I agreed to start at different ends, crawl around each other and see who hit daylight first. Bad idea. We simply got wedged, and the more we struggled to get past each other, the worse it got. And it was dark in the middle of the culvert. We learned to crawl backwards (there was no turning around), and thus we never found out who was faster.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The tunnel became our place. Though easily accessible culverts like that are probably illegal today, we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have too many fears. Just a sprinkle of rain was enough to clean out the culvert.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Once, Kenny and I had been drinking a soda at a nearby grocery store. There we discovered a group of neighborhood toughs, one of whom said, “Weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t you the one who gave me a dirty look yesterday?” No matter my answer, it was going to be wrong. So we bolted, leaving our bottles on the counter.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0We outdistanced them by 100 miles \u00e2\u20ac\u201d adrenaline does strange things \u00e2\u20ac\u201d but the real pleasure was in making a quick turn and crawling into the west end of the culvert. We simply vanished. Our pursuers, when they arrived later, had no clue. We had won, but our giggles nearly gave us away.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0As fate would have it, a few days later, while Kenny and I were making castles out of the sand that accumulated near the tracks, one of the rivals must have surmised that we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d hidden out there. Well, the culvert has the advantage of providing darkness, making us hard to spot, and the pursuers were too big to crawl through it. But on the down side, there were only two ways out: no emergency exits.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0After a dramatic chase scene, Kenny and I hid in the middle, each of us entering from a different opening. A few minutes later, the bullies went to each opening, and one of them shouted, “Dame lumbre.” Kenny, not a product of northern New Mexico, asked why the bullies were going for lumber. “Well, Kenny, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dclumbre\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 is fire. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to smoke us out.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I smelled the smoke from a match, said my prayers and figured it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s better to have to fight it out than to become asphyxiated. Well, neither thing happened. Discourteously, the gang abandoned us, we later learned. After striking a match and smoking a cigarette, the rivals took off, lured by their “rucas.” So, while we sweated it out in a stuffy culvert, Don & Co. had taken off with girlfriends.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0We had a very late supper that day. We tried to elicit sympathy by explaining we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d been holed up in the tunnel for weeks. Naturally, whenever we children got into a bind of our own making, Mom had some very sympathetic words. If we complained about something someone else did to us, her response invariably was “Hicieron bien,” which translates to “They did the right thing (in chasing, hitting, robbing, bloodying, insulting or asphyxiating) you (meaning us).”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The other words of comfort were “It serves you right,” “you had it coming” and “you asked for it.”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Me, peace-loving me?
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Well, Kenny never came back, and besides, by the next summer, the culvert was too small for 12-year-olds. Kenny clearly was traumatized by the “lumbre” incident and wrote his parents to send him a bus ticket back home.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0As he left a few days later, his ostensible excuse was that “There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nothing to do in Vegas. Why, in California, I can watch \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcDragnet\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 three times a day.” Who could ever pass up that opportunity of receiving three daily doses of “Dum Da Dum Dum”?
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0As a result, Kenny missed out a great many scrapes and escapades we participated in, and often instigated, in Las Vegas.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0As for Kenny\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s departure, well, it serves him right. Playing the part of a troglodyte in a culvert was, after all, “da dum” thing to do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Last Saturday we drove around sections of Old Town, hoping to spot the place where a young couple had planned to set up a trailer they had just bought from our son. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Driving around Taos, San Miguel, Mora and Chavez streets, we came across some interesting features: hills, trestles, bridges, places where we saw kids […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}