Julie’s rebellion was a short-lived experiment in minimalist living. She moved back in the house in the fall when it got cold and windy. However, while the trial was at its high point, she lived a dream life that would have been the envy of any 16-year-old girl. She lived in a tree house in a redwood forest, with absolutely no adult supervision! Her boyfriend could come and go as he pleased. She could sample any drugs or debauchery that came along. She even bought her first car: a 1968 Volkswagen hatchback (in barely running condition), which would be her auto shop project when school started in a month or so. Long summer days of freedom led to hot August nights where she could do anything she wanted… and so she did. The trapdoor on the bottom of her tree house was only a few feet off the ground, but it led to a completely different world.
There was no ceiling, so Julie and her entourage could listen to the sounds of the night forest (when the highway traffic died down), and gaze at what few stars shone through the gaps in the canopy. The walls were sheets hung in exotic tie dye, batik, and paisley patterns. The interior was all pillows, lit with a variety of candles that gave Marty the impression of being in a nomadic shaman’s yurt somewhere in Tibet. There was a mattress on the floor, an end table, and a low coffee table around which she and her guests used to sit, Japanese-style.
When the wind blew, the candle arrangement became rather inconvenient, but in the stillness of summer it was awesome to be surrounded by flickering bright colors, with music playing all the time; just talking and passing her pipe around. She had a ceramic pipe in the shape of a bearded old man’s head. Fittingly, you burned the herbs in what would be the man’s brain cavity, and the carburetor was his mouth shaped like an O. Marty liked to look up into the redwood branches with everything else blocked out, and imagine he was high in the canopy. One time he got so stoned he forgot where he was, and fell right through the trap door! Good thing it was only a 4-foot drop! The pain of a twisted ankle was worth the laughter, and the memory of that one exhilarating split-second of primal terror when he thought he was going to plummet to his death.
Marty saved up his money from helping at the pet store, and bought a metal detector from Radio Shack because he wanted to search for buried treasure on their historic property. Actually, the crude contraption was more of a kit – he had to put it together from parts. It was the only kind of metal detector he could afford, but it worked well enough for things close to the surface. After he got it to work, he focused his search on the areas adjacent to the old railroad bed. Almost immediately, he found five buried railroad rails and about a dozen rusted stakes. Ascribing them with significant historical value, he fancied himself quite the archaeologist as he eagerly measured and mapped the locations where he found them. He got an old paintbrush and an ice pick from the shed, and cleaned them up meticulously.
Next, he searched the grounds nearest to the house in a grid pattern marked with string, and discovered what once must have been a trash heap full of old tin cans and bottle caps. An occasional old fork or tool would turn up as well, just to break the monotony of antique garbage. Those, too, got the restoration treatment, and a nice little collection was being catalogued in his notebook. His trowel also dislodged many broken bottles, with a few still intact. His prize was an antique blue Alka-Seltzer bottle. Must have been a helluva party, he mused to himself as he washed off the years of dirt. He mapped the locations on the grid where he found interesting objects, certain they would lead to buried treasure!
When that fantasy didn’t pan out, he searched away from the house in ever-widening circles and found many more steel spikes once used on the railroad. Numerous tin cans were scattered about just under the surface, because their property was once a campground next to the tracks. To Marty, it appeared as though people were just as bad about littering in the ‘good old days.’ Down by the picnic table and its ancient lead-piped faucet, his trowel hit something shiny. It was a silver dollar! His heart beat faster as he hastily cleaned it to find the date, forgetting all about proper salvage protocol. It was from 1892, badly worn, and (tragically) his trowel had scratched its obverse side, so it was probably worthless except for the silver. Still, the discovery of ancient silver was a double shot of espresso for a teenage boy’s avarice! Bustling like a squirrel that had lost its nuts, Marty pot-holed the rest of that campsite in a hurry. He found several more tin cans and something that looked like an old stove part, but no more coins. Sadly, his visions of rotting oak chests spilling silver dollars all over the dirt faded away with the twilight, and he resisted the urge to continue digging and sifting with a flashlight. Whatever might be underground had been there a very long time, and wasn’t likely to go anywhere by morning. Besides, he had all summer! Good Lord, did he love that feeling!
Rabbit had some records she stored in their house for a time, and Marty eagerly explored those, too. He couldn’t get enough music, and it was hard to find anything he didn’t enjoy. Commercial country & western made him nauseous, but he liked bluegrass very much. The majority of what could be called “pop” appealed to his sense of humor, at least. More importantly, some of the music he discovered was so deep and profound that it would stay with him for a lifetime. In Rabbit’s collection he discovered that the singer-songwriter genre included more than just Jim Croce, who was his first favorite artist. Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and Cat Stevens had some very poetic tunes that he enjoyed thinking about as well as listening to. However, it was a Don McLean album that really opened his soul to music. Of course he’d heard American Pie on the radio a few years before, but was too young to really appreciate it at the time. Now, with the precocious wisdom of a teenager, he felt as if he was the first to truly understand McLean’s lyrics, which had deep meaning on so many different levels.
