MC Chapter 2

June 2000

Ferncombe was a town cut off from the rest of the world. Thirty miles from the nearest city, surrounded by vast farmland and dotted with dense woods. The population of roughly 400 relied heavily on agriculture. Very few outsiders ventured through town, and the local economy was lucky if someone stopped for gas or food on their way through. The children, what few lived there, were sent to school twenty-five miles away, in the small suburb of Woodcrest. During the summer they had only nature to entertain themselves outside of TV and toys. I suppose most children who didn’t grow up that way would have hated it, but not Andy and me. We grew up in the city, with few trees and little grass to run around in. We fully embraced the shift from life in the fast-paced concrete jungle to a slower life full of wilderness to explore.

We had just finished unpacking our bedrooms in our new house. It was actually an old farmhouse, built in 1862, but it was spacious and cozy, nothing like the cramped apartment we’d grown up in. We wandered aimlessly around the long halls and barren rooms, entertaining ourselves by making random noises and playing silly games while our parents slowly unpacked the rest of the house. Eventually, dad got tired of our persistent hovering and told us to go outside and get to know the area, just be back before dinner. We excitedly obliged.

In the city, our overprotective parents wouldn’t let us go off on our own. But in Ferncombe, it was normal for kids our age, twelve and ten, respectively, to wander the fields and woods for hours without ever having to check in with their parents. Our house, which was situated on a one-lane dirt road about a mile out of town, was surrounded by cornfields. The stalks came up to my chest, not yet tall enough to make the field an ideal place to play hide-and-seek or tag.

We set our sights on the patch of trees about half a mile from the house. We had seen kids pop in and out of other patches of trees that stood separately from the field boundary treelines when we arrived in town. Perhaps that patch, the biggest we’d seen so far, would become our summer stomping ground.

We attempted to run from the back porch to the patch, but neither of us had developed country legs. Andy fell a few times, tripping on the uneven, tilled earth. He took out about a dozen stalks on his way down and worried that the farmer who owned the field would find out what he had done and punish him for it. He worried about it for a week, to the point of triggering a couple of panic attacks.

That patch of woods was unusually thick. There was a single opening clear of brush or thorns that we could see, and what looked like a deer trail that led deep into the darkness. In hindsight, we should have just turned around and found another tree patch to play in. Andy said he didn’t like the way this one felt. I punched him in the arm, called him a sissy, and began walking down the thin but well-defined path. The canopy let very little light shine through, causing us to stumble almost as much as we did in the cornfield.

Despite its size, that tree patch had only a couple of clearings that we could find that day, and none of them showed any sign of human disturbance.

“Let’s just go, please,” Andy begged as we walked around the second clearing. “There’s nothing to do here. It’s pretty obvious that nobody hangs out here.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked.

“Well, yeah. How are we going to make friends?”

“The same way we did in Sinclair,” I replied matter-of-factly. “We go up to them, we say ‘hi!’ and we talk about Pokémon.”

“What if country kids don’t like Pokémon?”

“What kind of weirdo doesn’t like Pokémon?” I cried. “Anyway, this can be our hideout. If nobody else comes here, that means we can make forts and set up tracks for our trucks and nobody will mess with them. Maybe we can have dad build us a tree house!”

“Yeah, maybe,” Andy said, sounding dejected.

I huffed and stomped one foot. “Okay, okay, we’ll go out and explore other tree patches so we can meet other kids. But we’re going to come back to this one. I like it here.”

“Okay. Can we bring lights next time?”

“Yeah. Dad has that big metal flashlight and one of those lanterns from when we went camping. That should help, right?”

“Flashlights make things creepy.”

“You’re already creeped out.”

Andy looked at the surrounding trees. Above us, the canopy opened just enough to let in a small 5-foot patch of light. He stood in the dead center of it, as if it were some magical ring that could protect him from the monsters and spirits that haunted his overactive imagination. He looked back at me and shrugged. “Well, yeah. Look around, Amy. I bet if you look long enough, you’ll notice something looking back.”

“Like a raccoon?”

“Or something else.”

In the city, Andy had a reputation for being a bit of a coward. He hated the dark, squirmed whenever he saw a bug or rodent, and never took risks in anything he did. With his awkward, lanky size and soft personality, he was an easy target for bullies. It was easy to forget that he was the big brother, especially when I had to talk him down or defend him.

I rolled my eyes. “Let’s go, you big baby,” I huffed.

—

Over the coming week, we split our time between the big tree patch and the smaller ones. As it turns out, country kids, or at least the ones in Ferncombe, didn’t like or know about Pokémon. They were also very tribal and did not take well to outsiders. We found it difficult to make friends or even maintain a civil acquaintanceship with almost anyone our age. Despite our offers of toys, candy, baseball card trades, or labor in building various structures, we always found ourselves being ignored, or worse, chased out of the smaller tree patches.

The only person who gave us the time of day was Reggie. Reggie was also an outsider, although he had moved to Ferncombe five years before we did, so the others had warmed up to him to some extent. He was easy to get along with for the most part. We shared a mutual interest in monster trucks and marble games, and although he didn’t know much about Pokémon, his family loved the Mario games and owned them all.

Our parents completely mellowed out shortly after moving to Ferncombe, giving us total freedom to do what we wanted as long as we were home for dinner. Eventually, we focused all our time on the big tree patch. We found four more clearings, the biggest and brightest of which was in the very center of the patch and became our central hub for summer shenanigans.

Dad wouldn’t build a tree house for us. He reasoned that since it wasn’t our land, someone could tear it down at any time and waste hours of hard work and money. He did compromise, however. Mom found some furniture at a thrift shop, which he fixed up and painted for our forts. Dad helped string up some ropes between trees and hang tarps for makeshift tents and gifted us a couple of new lanterns, a heavy Maglite, and enough batteries to last us three summers. We moved a tub of old die-cast cars and monster trucks to the clearing and used the buckets and shovels we had previously taken to the beach to build a demolition derby course.

By the end of June, we had the best fort setup of any kid in Ferncombe. Andy was pretty sore that he hadn’t managed to make a single friend in town, but he managed to have fun in our own space. We utilized the smaller clearings for various activities and games, added more secondhand furniture, and brought a battery-powered radio for background noise. We spent a few nights as a family camping in the biggest clearing with a small saucer grill for a fire pit and a couple of fire extinguishers, just in case.

Andy and I thought we would grow up in that tree patch. He said if nobody bought the land by the time he had a family, he wanted to buy it himself, build a house, and raise his family there. It was good to see him relax for the first time in God knows how long. He hadn’t experienced a panic attack in weeks and finally started coming out of his shell. Life for him was starting to look normal.

We should have left that tree patch alone.