Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor

Author:Garrison Keillor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

15

Ravine

From the ballpark I walked across the gravel parking lot and into the ravine where I spent so many afternoons back in 1950, when we first moved to town. A creek bed that wound along the south side of town, cornfields and pasture on one side, backyards on the other, and in the spring a creek ran through it for a couple weeks, and then it was dry all summer. We boys used the creek bed for a trail, and about a quarter-mile east of the ballpark, it went under the highway through a culvert you could crawl through, and into a narrower and rockier ravine that led to the lake. The ravine was not so deep, maybe fifteen feet, no more than twenty-five, but the moment you descended into it, you were safe from adult supervision and correction. Nobody went down there except boys. Grown-ups lived for years within a stone’s throw of it who knew nothing about the gorgeous goings-on that boys were privy to. We conducted our wars here, Indian wars and World War II and skirmishes between crooks and G-men, and our favorite, the Civil War, the Confederate cavalry chasing after the boys in blue, the shouts of a lone sentry, figures darting behind trees and dashing from the brush, charging the artillery behind the breastworks, and rifle fire, and a brave boy writhing in the grass and lying crumpled and still, and the quiet on the battlefield, smoke drifting east, the valiant dead, the ground torn by hoof and shell. A short and glorious life. I hadn’t gone in the ravine for two whole years. I set down the briefcase with the dictionary and took off the snap-brim hat and walked down the slope through the sumac to where the main camp was, at a bend, on a bed of rocks around a sycamore tree, and the camp wasn’t there anymore, there was just the rocks and tree.

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