Growing up in isolated Coopers Ravine

It has been said by someone smarter than me that "The boy is the father of the man."So as I relate the story of my childhood it may go a long way to explaining how I became the man you call Dad, and by the laws of natural inheritance how you, to some lesser degree, became the man you are.I spent the first 12 years of my life in what had once been a thriving gold rush camp known as Coopers Ravine, so named after its first resident I guess.In the early 1860s it boasted a bar, blacksmith shop and stage relay station. Up the road H.C. Holmes operated a lime rock quarry. Nearby guided tours of the beautiful Alabaster Cave were offered. The Alabaster Hotel provided lodging for the visitors. Below town at a fork in the road old lady Jones ran a boarding house.The road forked left to the town of Wildwood, and on to Horseshoe Bar. To the right it crossed Gwynns Bridge, later known as the Rattlesnake Bridge, through Rattlesnake Bar, Long Valley and on to Auburn.By the time your grandparents and I hit town, nearly 90 years had passed. The festivities were over. The Alabaster Cave had been dynamited for its valuable lime rock. Almost all the buildings had gone back to the earth. Even Cooper's ghost had moved on to find better diggings somewhere else.All that remained was one small three-room shack that survived because it had a tin roof. It wasn't much. No electricity or indoor plumbing. Virtually unchanged since the day it was built. Although someone had tacked cheesecloth to the rough hewn walls and glued wallpaperonto the cheesecloth, kind of homey. ...Not a palace, but I had the most perfect childhood a kid could have living there. I don't think we moved there so your grandpa could find a quiet place to write the great American novel; we were just broke. You grandpa was never healthy and we lived off his military disabilitypension, which was plenty if you didn't need anything. I guess we were poor, but I didn't know it.Sometime in the early 1950s the Rattlesnake Bridge was taken down by an idiot trying to drive a 20-ton truck across a 5-ton bridge. That pinched off our connection to anything else.The nearest neighbor was 6 or 7 miles away. For all intents and purposes, I grew up in a 19th century bubble. I had none of the addictions that plague us today. No television, radios, Facebook, no nothing. That old house was connected to nothing except your grandparents and me.... Looking back I was spoiled rotten, free to play and roam as much as I pleased. It's a shame that in order to grow up we have to give up the magic on childhood. A child uses magic to explain what he doesn't understand. An adult has to buy a damn book and ruin it. As an example, one of the panes of glass in our kitchen had an almost perfectly round hold the size of a baseball. How it got there, I don't know, maybe a flaw in the glass. I got it into my 5-year-old noggin that a witch must have thrown a rock through the window, because only a witch could have made a round hole like that.In the waning light at days' end, I imagined I could see her standing next to the water oak across the creek, giving me the evil eye. In the morning she disguised herself as an old stump, but I was on to her. I figured the old battle axe was not to be trusted. And then there were the snoop-wiggles and mugwumps that your grandpa told me lived in the draw east of our house.Looking back I think he was more afraid I'd fall into a mine shaft vent hole than he was of mugwumps. He knew his son well. I never went up that draw. Never going to. With all that magic wandering around, if I had to go to the bathroom at night I just stood on my bed and peed out the window. No way in hell I was going outside after dark.Your grandpa was the inspiration for most of the games I played during the day. He read to me every night, and not "Tony Wants a Pony" or "Elmer the Elephant" junk either. He read what interested him. By the time I was 8 or 9 I was very familiar with Robert LouisStevenson's pirates, Zane Grey's border men and even O'Henry's grifters and bank robbers.By night I sat on my bed cross-legged with a folded pillow supporting my elbows, my chin resting in cupped hands, lost in a spell of story. By day I played out those adventures.My favorite was "The Last of the Mohicans." I played Chingachgook, the noble savage, for an entire summer. Your grandma made me an Indian outfit out of two faded pink washcloths sewed to a woman's belt. In the morning all I had to do was buckle on the belt, align the washcloths front and back … more or less, and I was dressed for the day.Chingachgook, dreaded enemy of bad Indians and all Frenchmen. A cunning whisper, I slipped through the silent forest unseen, unheard.Remembering back, it wasn't that the forest was so silent, but there was a purity of sound. The woodpecker hammering away at a pine tree at the top of the hill, the faint spastic skittering of a lizard as it doges and darts its uncertain way up a tree branch, the angry screechof a chicken hawk besieged by black birds high overhead — all delicate brushstrokes of sound on a blank canvas of silence. I was one lucky kid.I decided to end my career as a noble savage when I jumped the creek and landed butt first in some stinging nettles. I decided to be a cowboy for awhile. Cowboys had advantages … pants for one. John Downs, aka Time Traveler, and Robin Enos, aka Portuguese Pirate, are Newcastle residents.