Old Fools Journal: Life Sketches

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.  ~Henry David Thoreau

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength. ~Jack Kerouac

Though I am not an artist in the sense of great or even significant I am an artist in the sense that we are all artist to some degree.  I look at the things other people do without judgement. I only want to see what they see and I want to see what the artist wants me to see.  They are different things. Through the art the artist is shouting something and I want to know what that something is. (For the artist that read this post don't think I pass over your work lightly, I study it. You know who you are.)  The things that my bride does when she is in the mood astound me as do things children do. The things I do make me think "primative". Often times in retrospect the things I do says "record keeping".  Good or bad it gives me great satisfaction to sketch scenes of my childhood.

This particular one is Mom's view from the front of our little house in the woods off Rodney Parham Road west of Little Rock, Ark. in about 1950.  That is if she happened to be looking. (She did not have to be looking she could always see me). This was back in the days of my youth when I thought I was Indian and I could be quite stealthy.That's me in the uppper left corner about to disappear into the bushes. It appeared from this vantage point to be thick brush but there were animal trails and by following the one I happen to be on in this sketch and pushing aside the limbs of the brush for about ten feet the trees opened up a bit and the going was easy.  It always amazed me that ten feet from that little road in front of our house I could strip nekkid and no one would know. Sometimes I did.

I spent a lot of time in those woods and I think I knew them better than anyone else around there.  I only remember once taking someone with me. Even at that I have big blank spots in the map in my head of the places I never saw. It was a big woods.

As far as I know there was never anyone else in those woods not even other kids but I always thought someone was watching me. That someone became the "man in the woods" and later just "the Indian". I never spoke of him and I never saw him either. If I had of seen him it would have scared the crap out of me.  There were creatures watching me but like the squirrel in the tree by the house only on rare occasions was I allowed to see them. I never saw any fairies or elves either but I was always on the lookout for them.  I took the crashing of "dead falls" I did not see as a sure sign. That did scare the crap out of me. Then I talked to them after a little swearing mostly thanking them for saving me...again.

Later when I had motorized wheels I lost interest in those woods but in my  bicycle years I rode all the old logging roads and I had a spot just down the road to the left in this picture where I could get my bike through the brush and onto a grown over logging road. Taking my heavy old Hawthorne with the big balloon tires and full fenders places that had probably never seen a bicycle. That was long before the ubiquitous mountain bike.

Just to the left of that open gate was where I ran over our good bucket with a 1937 Ford Sedan in my learning years. It was also where I first let my Mom see me smoking a cigarette. I'm not proud of either of those events.  To the left is to the main road and two miles to school. To the right is to Grandma's house.

I'm happy to have the memory of this place because it is not there now. It has been bulldozed into oblivion but it is still alive in the picture show in my head.


Life is not a race, everyone finishes. The last to finish is the winner. t.swaim