The Places of my Carbondale Childhood

Eight years ago, I moved back to the small town where I grew up. It wasn’t my intention, nor did I intend to stay, but a series of minor decisions led to a major life leap: back from Barcelona, Spain to Carbondale, Illinois.

After a few years of rootlessness, I did yet another unthinkable deed: I bought a house around the corner from where I grew up. When I was young, this neighborhood was the average neighborhood, nothing special, kind of second-class. We envied the kids who lived in Parish Acres, a much more upscale, and newer redoubt of middle- and upper-middle-class success. It’s funny that today when I drive through that neighborhood, it looks exactly like mine. Where did that pecking order come from? Its newness? And now the upscale neighborhoods are further out beyond Parish Acres, leaving it as the somewhat dingy wanna-be and my neighborhood to inexplicably become a sort of cool-ish, diverse, cottage-y neighborhood with – get this! – mid-century bungalows. Really? The Hengehold house, the Keim house, the Isbells, the Wilkinsons, the Schills and our house? They’re now mid-century treasures. They have a fashionable label! And honestly, it is a lovely neighborhood: mostly well-tended, modest homes, not too big and not too small, many built along the same patterns (the ranch, the split-level, the Cape Cod) with huge trees shading them in the summer. My father, an inveterate walker-to-work on campus his entire working life in Carbondale, remembers standing at the top of Glenview and looking down the entire street, past Freeman, only a few baby trees to obstruct his view. Today, except for winter when the branches are bare, there are no views down Glenview, just lush, leafy green.

The other day I was walking my dog around the block – my stomping grounds for the first 25 years of my life, then a 20-year hiatus, and now the last 8 years – and as I was peering into the space between two houses on a half-cul-de-sac, I distinctly remembered that place, an iconic one from my childhood: Bardo’s Jump. We roamed free in my childhood, and one of our frequent routes was to Murdale. In the early days, we went to the Walgreens and spent our weekly dime on a candy bar or a soda. The soda was more complicated because we had to reach into a cooler, remove the bottle, drink it, and get our 5-cent deposit back. Or Cristaudo’s to get pink-iced cookies or peaks – mountain-shaped delicacies with cake on the bottom and cream on top, all covered with chocolate. Years later, we’d go to Huck’s to get more junk food. But no matter where we were going, we had to walk by Bardo’s Jump. Bardo’s Jump was where two streets that should have connected didn’t, so to get from one part to another we had to walk through the yards of two back-to-back houses – one being the Bardos’. And because there was a five- or six-foot drop between the yards, a dirt-covered drop-off became the place where all the neighbor boys would take their banana-seat bicycles and jump off. Who remembers Bardo’s Jump today? It was just the name we neighborhood kids gave it, but this no-place is forever etched in my mind.

When I was growing up, our “block” was around a mile in radius, so a walk around the block, a common family activity in a summer evening, was indeed a walk. Inside this large block was The Field. It wasn’t just any field: when we told our parents we were going to The Field, they knew what we meant. The field was just long grass with a few brush piles and one large tree, but the truly magical place in The Field was The Mound. The Mound was: a mound of dirt. And yet to children, this mound of dirt was A Place. Yes, you could play King of the Mountain on the mound, but the best part was when someone – I have no idea who – carved winding holes through The Mound, so you could not only climb on top of it but also through it. The pecking order in The Mound was clear; we younger kids only got to play in and on it after the older kids tired of it. When The Field was built up, I remember being anxious: what scary strangers were taking over our terrain and stripping us of our Field? And today, as I walk my dog through the streets that used to be The Field, I often wonder under which house is The Mound today? I can’t quite reach that far back…

My parents were New Yorkers. While my mother never stopped yearning to return to the city, my father had spent his Brooklyn childhood dreaming of being a forest ranger, so he was pleased to be near nature. When we were kids, he would take us on Walks in the Woods. The Woods was the natural area on the south side of Chautauqua if you walk down Emerald Lane (and it’s still there!). A Walk in the Woods was a big event. He’d plan a route, and then tell us we were going on An Adventure. An Adventure would be tunneling through hedges and vines, perhaps balancing on a fallen log across a creek, or maybe going past the thickets where Mad Myrtle was hiding. Mad Myrtle… who remembers her? The legendary Girl Scout camp madwoman that terrified every kid. And to think that Mad Myrtle lived in the thickets near the pond! My heart pounding, I’d follow the safe lead of my father through the thickets until we got to the pond, in a clearing where no madwoman could dwell! As a parent, I’m guessing these walks were as much about giving my mother a break as our Adventures, but we always smet the prospect of traipsing through the woods at the end of the road with anticipation and excitement!

As we got older and more independent, we discovered Kelly’s Barn, right where our road runs out. We’d walk to the end, continue down a gravel path, and end at a little barn – if my memory is accurate it was little more than a lean-to housing a few horses – with a field nearby. We would pet the horses, walk around the fields, and mainly get away from the adults. Because we were getting to middle school age, I have a fuzzy memory that a few minorly illicit things occurred at Kelly’s Barn, but it was our getaway, our way to escape scrutiny. Today the lands are owned by Green Earth and horses are a distant memory, and although it’s still just around the corner I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been back. Maybe today…

When I was living in Spain and never intending to come back, I had forgotten all these places. With my daughter, we carved out new places: the pond in the Parc de la Betzuca, the snorkeling in our special secret little bay near L’Escala… these are the places of her Spain childhood. She even had her local madman: Mamel, who lived near the train station in Valldoreix, where we’d have to drive by quickly lest he come out! But since I’ve come back to Carbondale, I will see a place and flash back to those days and those places, which lurk under the everyday places today, forever in my memories, and maybe in someone else’s, too.