Credits from top left to right: Jordan Whitt, Steffi Wacker, Old Chum, Brett Sayles

My Real Memoir

If adventure has a name, it’s Indiana La Mirada Jones Teemley. I know that sounds a tad over-the-top, but I had an insatiable hunger for stimulation; my mental motto at age 7 was, “The bigger the risk, the bigger the fun.” Hence, my favorite stories were adventures: The Three Musketeers, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, The Call of the Wild, and best of all, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In my mind I was Tom and Huck rolled into one!

Outside!

Our tract homes were boring popcorn-stuccoed boxes, suitable only for eating, sleeping and watching Zorro or Leave It to Beaver. So, Rory, Jeff and I virtually lived outside. And “outside” mostly meant The Field, which a big cheery sign labelled the soon-to-be home of “La Mirada Creek Park.” Work was due to start any day! But when we moved away a decade later, half a dozen matching signs had come and gone, each sun-bleached and riddled with BB and pellet gun holes. (The park was built shortly after we left, so obviously we were the problem.)

Every other year or so, The Field would catch fire, and the streets surrounding it would fill up with singed field mice, disoriented gopher snakes, and indignant geese. Grown-ups complained non-stop about the dangers of The Field. But their kids rejoiced. We liked it primitive and dangerous — danger was our middle name!

Critters!

On The Field’s highest hill was our treehouse. Rory and Jeff and I regularly upgraded it. But other kids, mistakenly thinking it was their treehouse, kept altering it. So we switched to hunting for exotic critters like coyotes, quail, and cotton-tail rabbits. Alas, they resisted capture, but we regularly brought home pollywogs and crawdads from nearby La Mirada Creek. We would set the pollywogs free once they turned into toads, and find hubcap-sized versions of them a year later. But the crawdads quickly became gourmet meals for our feline family members.

I especially loved capturing trapdoor spiders! This was accomplished in five steps:

1. Look for a telltale half-circle “door” hinged with spider’s silk
2. “Knock” lightly to see if it was occupied; if it was, its occupant would throw the door open, and then finding no lunch, slip disgruntledly back inside
3. Occupancy confirmed, dig down around its hairy hobbit hole with a spade
4. Lift the captured section out, and put it in a jar
5. Share it at school! During recesses, the class would capture bugs, then put them on the spider’s door and wait for it to attack! My teachers, um, loved it.

The Shingle Wars!

But the biggest buzz of all was “The Shingle Wars.” Kids from all over the neighborhood would climb up onto the rooftops of The Field’s two remaining, precariously-leaning shacks (left over from when seasonal flower-pickers lived there). We’d rip up chunks of asphalt-shingle roofing and “sail” them at the kids on the other rooftop! For weeks, we came home covered with cuts and bruises, beaming like gleeful little Vikings! But then a quickly-formed parents’ committee made the city tear down the shacks. No more shouting, “Today the shack, tomorrow Valhalla!”

Ah well, on to bigger and better ways to terrify our parents!