Chapter 3:
Adventures on Queen Anne's Hill
BY THE TIME I WAS FOUR, my mom and pop had moved to Seattle, Washington, where they rented a remote bungalow on a dead-end road in the Queen Anne's Hill section (for Everything-You-Ever-Wanted-To-Know-But-Were-Afraid-To-Ask-About-Queen-Anne's-Hill...click Here). By now I had a cloth Indian playsuit with bright colored, chicken feather war bonnet, which had become my daily dress. (There is no escaping one's fate in this world, you know. Ask Achilles, if you doubt me...). And there was a new voice in the wickiup: my sister, Cecilia.
Our bungalow was one of two - side-by-side, and they shared a common driveway. Next door lived "Lillian" and her policeman husband, and their young daughter (her name long vanished now) a few months my senior, and my only playmate. There was nothing between our house and Puget Sound but a long, descending meadow of waving, brown, knee-high grass which ran all the way down to the distant shore. At night, from our windows you could see the searchlights on the water and far out to sea of the Pacific Fleet in night maneuvers and training they knew it not - for a War with the Japs which no one yet really foresaw...
Behind our house the other way was a large dairy farm, with nothing between us and the cows but a poorly strung barbed wire fence. In Seattle it rains nearly every morning, and I remember I would get the umbrella out of the hall closet, open it, and go out and stand in the rain looking at the cows. And then sort of silently and piranha-like, these bovines would come gliding up out of the mist - one here - one over there - two moving up the fence row further down... slowly emerging out of the gloom and assembling, chewing, steaming, and getting ever closer and closer and bunching up in front of the small boy with the umbrella on the other side of the wire. At which point, my mother would emerge and grab me and bumbershoot alike and march us unceremoniously back indoors - all the while expressing her worries "...that some day the cows will break through that fence and tramp you to death, etc. etc." Parents have the darndest worries.
And once, lightning did indeed strike during a rainstorm one night - and it hit our cesspool out back (not septic tank - in those days it was just that: a lightly boarded over and lightly sodded over real cesspool) - and when the lightning hit it - well, enough of that.
Lillian's daughter's idea of fun was to "play doctor" in the long tunnels in the grass we wore in the meadows round about (her seniority of just a few months, as well as her gender, made her the unquestioned leader and me the schlep in most of our pursuits) - but my Mom's vigilant patrol at all hours and all windows preserved neighborhood decorum pretty well. But it was this same daughter who conceived one of our most brilliant escapades: the day we ran away from our homes (at the age of four) and wound up in another snake story, to boot! For we had not got too far up the unpaved road before we came onto a huge spreading tree - I can see it now - standing out sort of alone there in the bright sunlight in sun struck sand spread all about it - and lying there in the sun was a snake! A great, big, long snake! And we both saw it! (My first experience of the need for independent verification in all outlandish claims made in this world...). For though the runaway plans for high living in High Barbaree suddenly vanished, that we had indeed beheld a big snake did not - though parents summoned later to come look and see for themselves were never able to find hide nor hair (better: scale nor fang?) of the wily creature, that was our story and we stuck to it...
Mom and Pop sometimes went to the movies and left us in the keeping of "Lillian" and her pistol-packing Hubby. Once, on returning home, Mom came into the bedroom which my sister and I now shared - to find a window wide open which she knew had been closed when they left for the movie. So she closed it again, and went out of the room - and told my father in the next room. He thereupon got up and went into the bedroom to check for himself - and found the window open again! He went over to it and leaned out over the sill. There crouched down on the ground directly below the window was the figure of a man - who took alarm at once and bounded off into the woods...
This was an age when kidnappings were all the rage: news about Charles Lindberg, Jr.'s Kidnapping even then filling national newspapers, and Hoover was having it declared a federal and capital offense... As reconstructed later by all participants, this was always called "...the time Cecilia was almost kidnapped". It was thought that the (putative) kidnapper had entered the room and was actually still in it when my mother entered (standing in the shadows or behind the door or some such...). When she left the room, he opened the window once again and exited - where he was seen then shortly thereafter by my father.
Thus, Seattle.
