We kept the map from the lake at my house and the map from the creek at Josh’s house, and we would add to each when we stayed the night with each other. Josh was left-handed, and so he would often smudge the lines that he was drawing if he didn’t have a flat surface to write on. Because of this, and since my penmanship was better anyway, I did most of the markings on both maps.
For the first couple of weeks, it went really well. We would walk through the woods along the water and pause here and there to add to the map. Our pace was slow, and we took breaks on the weekends while we operated the snow cone stand, but despite all this, it seemed like the two maps would come together any day. In reality, I am quite sure that the map was incredibly inaccurate, but we did our best. Our procedure was as complex as we could manage — when the bank curved, the line curved. On the upper left corner of each map, we drew a compass rose, but we didn’t have a compass, nor did we know how to use one. We weren’t even sure which direction north was, but it was on the wall map in our classroom, so we put it on our maps. We were the world’s worst cartographers, but we were making progress.
The project seemed to be going so well that one afternoon I rerouted our usual path to the woods and took us to a nearby construction site in the neighborhood. From the cinderblocks, I guessed that they were going to place a house like mine on the plot, and the perimeter that was marked with pink-flagged wooden spikes seemed to say that it would be about the same size. I glanced around, and when I saw that no one but Josh and me was around, I jerked one of the spikes out of the ground; we ran back the way we had come and into the woods.
We were feeling optimistic and had decided that we must be getting close to finishing our project. In preparation, we thought to impale the earth with a stick each time we reached the end of the day’s expedition; if we came upon the stick from the other direction, we would know we had joined the maps. This new strategy also sped up the process because it meant that rather than attempting to use our map to find the point at which we had last stopped — which was nearly impossible, though we ignored this fact — we could simply run through the woods until we saw our stake and extend the map from there.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before the woods became too thick near the lake’s long arm, and we were unable to proceed further. We debated trying to circumvent the barricade, but this idea forced us to accept that without the constant guidance of the water, our navigation skills were obliterated. Having reached a dead end, our interest in the maps stagnated, and we reduced our explorations significantly while we focused on how to make the snow cone stand more successful. I used the time to make a better, albeit deceptive, sign.
Just a few weeks later, however, the entire dynamic at my house changed. The weekend my “FOR STAMPS” dollar made its way back to me, my house descended into chaos. Police officers came to our door and talked to my mother and me for hours. One policeman with a thick, black mustache and a striking burn scar on his left forearm and hand had asked for my collection of Polaroids the day the dollar came back. My mother told me to always listen to the police, and so I did what he asked, but I think he could tell I was reluctant. Although he could have easily said nothing at all, the officer told me that he just wanted to borrow them so he could look at them too, and this made me feel better in a way.
After they left, I found myself suffocated with new restrictions on what I could do and where I could go, though I didn’t understand why this was. My mother told me that the policeman might need to speak with me again, so I had to stay inside, but none of the police who ever came back over the next several weeks seemed to need or want to talk to me.
With the snow cone stand gone, Josh and I turned our attention back to the maps with revitalized interest, though our discussions were based on the telephone now. Every day we would call each other to talk about how we would move forward. We were still at the same impasse that caused us to largely abandon the mission almost a month before. Josh struck out on his own and attempted to expand his part of the map from his house, but he wasn’t making headway alone. The project seemed to be dead in the water.
Gradually, however, my leash grew longer. One weekend, to my surprise, my mom didn’t say no when I asked her if Josh could come over, and it wasn’t too long after that when we were allowed to play outside again — though now I had to check in frequently. My mom bought me what was the nicest watch I had ever owned, and set about two dozen alarms on it — one every thirty minutes from sunrise to dusk. She told me that if I wasn’t back between each alarm, then she would take the watch away. She said that I wouldn’t need it anymore since I’d be confined to the house from that point on. I couldn’t quite understand the need for such a policy, but I was only six years old, so of course I assented.
If Josh and I were just looking for recreation, this would have presented no challenge, but we had work to do. My mom’s new policy meant that we couldn’t stay in the woods for hours and continue to look for a new path; and every time we seemed to make some headway, my watch would beep, and we would have to run back to the house. We thought that we could just swim when we got to the cutoff in the woods, but that clearly wouldn’t work since the map would get wet. Even if we could keep it dry, the pacing would be ruined, and the accuracy of the map (though there was surely little to begin with) would be compromised. We tried going faster when we were coming from Josh’s house, hoping to see the pink-tasseled spike in the ground that would signify that the project was over, but we eventually ran into the same problem of the blockading forest. Then we had a brilliant idea.
We’d build a raft.
To keep debris off the road and off site, the construction company began throwing their scrap building material in The Ditch, since they no longer needed it for building. We originally conceived of a formidable ship complete with a mast and an anchor, but this quickly diminished into something more manageable. We set aside the wood and took several large and heavy pieces of Styrofoam that were backed with thick foam board. After several failed attempts to pilot these individual pieces of debris, we tied them together with rope and kite string in hopes that they wouldn’t tip over in the water quite so easily. This project had to be a secret one, because we both knew that my mom wouldn’t let us take a raft down the tributary, so we lugged the raft out of the ditch and hid it behind the biggest bushes we could find.
We launched our vessel a little down-water from Mrs. Maggie and waved a farewell to her as she motioned for us to come back her way. But there was no stopping us; we had less than half an hour before my watch beeped.
The raft worked very well, and while we both behaved and spoke as if the functionality of the raft was a given, I know I was a little surprised. We each had a fairly long tree branch to use as a paddle, but we found it was easier to simply push against the land under the water than it was to actually use them as intended.
When the water became too deep, we’d simply lie on our stomachs and use our hands to paddle the water, which still worked, albeit less well. The first time we had to resort to that method of propulsion, I can remember thinking that from far above it must have looked like a colossally fat man with tiny arms was out for a swim.