The Witch of Maple Street

When I was in the fourth grade my older brother Allen decided to give up his serious work in detonating small explosives and take up the study of meteorology. This seemed like an odd career move to me. Perhaps he originally thought meteorology was the study of meteors and was too proud to admit he made a mistake. Or maybe he really was interested in predicting the weather. For all the years I’ve known him I’ve never been able to figure him out.

Soon Allen’s room filled up with weather equipment: weather vanes, barometers, thermometers and wind cups. Some of the stuff we picked up from around the house. Other items Allen sent away for. We even made a trek to the shabby Army Surplus store on Main Street. We didn’t find anything there, but it did give us an excuse to rummage through the piles of blankets, mess kits and canteens.

We smelled like moth balls for almost a week.

Once assembled, the equipment needed to be set up outside. Since Allen’s room overlooked the garage that seemed like the logical place. It wasn’t long until I was going EVA on the slanted garage roof festooned with equipment while desperately trying to balance myself. As project manager, Allen remained inside by the window overlooking the assembly.

It was then that I saw her: the witch of Maple Street. Actually, I didn’t see all of here, just her sun hat bobbing up and down among her sunflowers. Her name was Mrs. Phillips and she was our next-door neighbor. I only knew a few things about her. I knew she lived alone. I knew she pretty much stayed in her house. And I knew her husband was dead.

No adult seemed to know the exact cause of his death, but every kid in the neighborhood had it figured out. Mrs. Phillips had devoured him. That’s what happens to you if you are foolish enough to marry a witch.

It wasn’t long until Allen, frustrated with my natural ineptness, joined me on the roof. His focus was securing and proper placement of the equipment. There was weather to predict after all. To his growing annoyance my attention was not on the science of meteorology, but on the simple joy of being on the garage roof. How cool was that? I was on equal footing the backyard sycamore tree!

Then the magic shattered. A voice shot up from below: “You, boy.” I looked down. It was Mrs. Phillips standing in the middle of my backyard calling to me.

The witch of Maple Street was in the middle of my backyard calling to me!

I looked at Allen. He was on his knees pounding the weather vane into the shingles. He acted like he heard nothing.

“You, boy,” growled Mrs. Phillips. “Come down here.”

What could I do? An adult had commanded me to do something. I had to obey. It was like a rule or something. I climbed back in through the window and went out to the backyard where the witch was waiting for me.

“Come with me,” she said. We walked to her garden where she gave me a bucket and a pair of big yellow gloves. “I can’t bend down like I used to. I need you to pull those weeds. Do you see them?”

I looked. “Yeah,” I said tentatively.

“Pull out the weeds and put them in the bucket,” she said, and then she disappeared into her house.

There was nothing preventing me from just walking away. But I lived in a world where adults were always granted unquestionable authority. I had been commanded to “weed” so therefore I must weed. It was the grim logic of the day. To do otherwise risked grave unknowable consequences.

It took me a half hour to fill the bucket. When Mrs. Phillips returned she gave me a glass of lemonade. I drank while she inspected the bucket.

“How did you do this?”

“What?”

She pulled a dandelion weed out of the bucket. “How did you pull the dandelion out, root and all?”

I showed her. My method was not to use the gloves. My hands were small allowing me to get a sure grip on the base of the weed. One quick snap and up came the dandelion, root and all.

Mrs. Phillips looked at me then looked at the dandelion. She nodded her head then reached into her apron and pulled out two quarters. “Come back tomorrow.”

I officially had a job. Given my needs at the time, it was a relatively well paid position. True, I was working for a witch doing menial labor. And the job itself was hardly rewarding. But I figured as long as I didn’t marry her I would probably be okay.

And then I found out what happened to Mr. Phillips and how he rose from the grave.

Next:
The Resurrection of Mr. Phillips

My Favorite Books (non-fiction)

It’s Saturday morning and I’ve just finished the novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark. I found the book thoughtful, puzzling, contradictory and refreshing. I’m still mulling it over which means it is everything I want in a novel. The book was published in 1962, made into a play five years later and then into an award winning film. As recently as last week I had neither read the book, nor watched the play, nor rented the movie.

I am way behind the times.

I connect books in my mind. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie falls into a category dominated by Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Plath’s The Bell Jar, and Knowles’s Separate Peace. They are books where teenagers question the world around them. I suppose these novels appeal to me because some part of myself will always be a wide eyed thirteen year old.

The reason I decided to read Prime is that it was referred to in another book I am reading: How Fiction Works, by James Woods. Yes, I also read books about books.

That’s the thing about reading. It’s not static. My reading tastes change as I change. When I was an adolescent it was all spaceships and dinosaurs which evolved into Hammett's world of hard boiled detectives which transformed into historical novels which changed into non-fiction and a plethora of other subjects. Yes, a whole, complete plethora.

Everything, it turns out, is linked with everything else.

Below is an (always) incomplete list of some of my favorite non-fiction works.

Stillness at Appomattox by Bruce Catton
One of the most harrowing books I have read on the Civil War. It concerns itself with the war’s final year, basically when Grant took control of the Union Army and, from the South’s perspective, the Civil War stopped being fun. The scope, range and tragedy of the war is laid out brilliantly. If you read this and want more, Catton’s trilogy on the Civil War is also remarkable.

Reflections on a Ravage Century by Robert Conquest
By any measure, the twentieth century was a bloody mess. Conquest examines what he considers the root cause of the horror: blind adherence to ideology. The combined madness of Stalin, Hitler and Mao ended the lives of over one hundred million people. This mind blowing tsunami of death is examined by Conquest not only as a historic fact, but as a horrifying portent for the next century.

The Uses of the Past by Herbert J. Muller
The title is out of print and the book I have is a hardbound 1952 edition. I purchased it for a buck at a used bookstore. I love this book. It is a study of past societies along with an intelligent analysis of current history. This book is reminiscent of Toynbee’s Study of History.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Victory Frankl
I admit it: the title is politically incorrect. It should be re-titled Everybody’s Search for Meaning (which has a kind of Sesame Street ring to it.) But gender sensitivity aside, Frankl’s insight is that there is only one true human freedom, and that is the freedom to choose one’s attitude about a given situation. The first half of the books is the author’s first hand account of life in a Nazi death camp. The second half explains his psychotherapeutic method.

The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey
Yes, this is the same John Hersey that wrote A Bell for Adano and Hiroshima. This time he records the events at the Algiers Motel the night of Detroit’s race riot during the summer of 1968. Shots are reported to have come from the motel, police arrive, and three men are shot. What happened and how it occurred are Heresy’s concern. The book is written in a matter of fact style and is an example of what investigative journalism should look like.

The Making of a President 1968 by T.H. White
The classic, of course, is White’s Making of a President 1960. My favorite is the book White wrote on the 1968 campaign. This one includes many of the seminal events of the 60’s (assassinations, riots, George Wallace, Vietnam, the Chicago Democratic Convention) culminating with the election of Richard Nixon. White ended up writing a total of four books covering Presidential elections and, incredibly, three of them involved Nixon as a candidate. White also wrote a pretty good Watergate book, Breach of Faith.

Life on a Little Known Planet by Howard Evans
“Is the fly more a more intricate machine than he appears, or are we less clever than we suppose…?” Howard Evans will tell us in this wonderful book on insect life. Evans is both a distinguished biologist and an accomplished writer. If you have any interest in biology and insects, you will love this book.

How Should We Then Live?: The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture by Francis Schaeffer
Bible scholar Schaeffer looks at Western Civilization and presents a cogent analysis of the changes taking place in the late twentieth century. He opens up the treasure chest of western culture including philosophy, poetry, novels, and films, and declares them to also be the property of Bible believing Christians. Always interesting, Francis Schaefer is never pugnacious yet anxious and ready to debate his beliefs. The television series on which the book is based is definitely worth a look.

The Human Zoo by Desmond Morris
The book The Naked Ape made Morris famous, but I like his follow up work better. The Human Zoo is a sociological study of human behavior. Morris is audacious, thought provoking, frustrating and fascinating. My paperback edition of the book eventually fell apart in my hands from over reading.

Shelton College

In May of 2005 I stopped by Cape Canaveral and visited what was left of Shelton College. Reverend Dr. McIntyre’s four-year institution of higher learning had closed its doors thirteen years before in 1992. There wasn’t much that remained. The boys’ and girls’ dorms had been reconstituted into condos. The main college building was now a dilapidated sign company. And the jungle in front of Satellite Beach had been leveled. It was now a residential neighborhood filled with split-levels, basketball hoops and two car garages.

The only building to remain unchanged was the Under the Stars Hotel.

In September 1971 Cape Canaveral was a depressed city. The American opinion of the NASA Space Program had moved from high exuberance to the low doldrums in a mere twenty-four months after the lunar landing. A kind “been there, done that, bought the t-shirt” mindset developed. I suppose most Americans felt the way I did. We landed on the moon, hit a few golf balls around and discovered it was boring.

I had been brought up on the space paintings and drawings of Chesley Bonestell. His lunar vision had colonized my mind; the moon was supposed to be mountainous, filled with high peaks and vast, flattened seas of hardened lava. The Hollywood lunar set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was pure Bonstell. In reality, the landscape was just an unending rolling plain of gray dust. The lime lakes down Vanderhoof Road in Majestik Township were more intriguing.

The moon turned out to be no big deal.

Interest in the space program waned, tourism fell and by the summer of 1971 businesses were fleeing Cape Canaveral. It was as if the whole city was part of a gigantic closeout sale. That’s how the Reverend Dr. McIntyre got his hands on the property. Desperate people in desperate times do desperate things. The Reverend walked away with a complex of buildings for a pittance.

The center of the complex was the Under the Stars Hotel. During its heyday in the late 1960’s it was the place to go. Partiers from as far as Atlanta would travel to the Cape just to be part of the scene. In September of 1971 it was the cafeteria for Shelton College. In those first months it was not uncommon to have a group of partygoers pull up to the hotel in hopes of fun, frolic and fornication only to find themselves in the college snack bar.

I didn't studying much during my semester at Shelton. I remember buying text books and sitting in class and doing all the stuff that you do in college, but the memory that stands out the most is of Satellite Beach.

I loved that beach.

Satellite Beach stretched for miles in both directions. It seemed endless. At the time I was there it was completely depopulated. On some days you would find a couple of surfers, but more often than not the waves were few and tepid. Every so often a stray dog would wander by, sniff at the Atlantic surf and then go on its way. Most of the time it was just me. After class, I would sit on the sand underneath a palm tree and read.

Is there anything better than that?

One October afternoon I grabbed my latest paperback book and headed for the beach. You should know that there was a paved road to the shore, but that it meandered around and around.

But there was another way.

A trail that led through the jungle seemed to be a quicker and more direct route. I had seen that path every day and had been tempted to take it. And though I had never seen anyone actually on it, others must have taken that route. I mean, it looked well traveled. It was a path, after all.

After a second’s worth of hesitation, I started walking nonchalantly into the jungle. Immediately I notice the leafy growth on both sides of the trail. Everything seemed so incredibly green. Life was everywhere. It surfaced from the jungle in twerps, tweets and chirps. In front of me a swarm of Florida love bugs flew in random, stupid circles.

At that moment I fancied my self as a kind of ad hoc naturalist, a sort of everyman Darwin. I was an exploer seeking an understanding of nature and at one with the natural world.

Halfway into this complicated maze of growth I heard a rustle off to the left. A few feet in front of me a ten-foot rattlesnake crossed my path. It turned its head, sized me up and then sped into the jungle on the other side of the trail.

It would have been interesting to observe the snake more closely. Its speckled pattern, for instance, seemed incredibly complex. Also it didn’t seem to slither, but somehow used its scales to scoot through the foliage. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to take notes. At that moment I was screaming and running for my life.

At some point while in this mindless panic I left the path and flailed through the brush towards the road. I tripped and fell head first into a nest of bristles. I lost my book. Unfazed, I pulled myself up and continued my flight. I did not stop until I was back in my dorm room with the door locked behind me.

I discovered something about myself on that afternoon.
I hate nature.

I completed just one semester at Shelton College. I returned to Akron, Ohio, in January ’72 and did not revisit Cape Canaveral until 2005. By then Satellite Beach was more crowded, more commercial, and barely matched the scenes from my memory.

One memory was from December 1971. In the early morning hours I went to the beach to view the launch of a weather satellite. The newspaper described it as a minor launching. I sat on the sand and stared across the ocean to where, supposedly, at 5:30 AM the launch would take place.

5:30 AM came and went.

Another dud, I thought. Typical of the ghost town that Cape Canaveral was quickly becoming.

And then, in the distance, there was a spark followed by a growing roar. A brilliant column of fire appeared. Light flooded the horizon changing the sky into a false dawn. The fiery column rose higher and higher becoming a brilliant sun, then a white comet, and finally a shooting star.

There is only one word I can use to describe this.
Unforgettable.

Next:
My Favorite Books (Non-Fiction)