Wild savages

By the summer of '45 Richard had a gang, seven or eight other little boys from the base dressed mainly in bib overalls who left home early every morning to play in the sand and sage of the high desert surrounding Herlong. They scampered, like the jack rabbits they chased, through the brush on long quests for the ever illusive horn toads. It is almost impossible to see one of the cunning creatures, and being eight years old, not want to catch it. They are silver gray little toads with horns on their backs that give them the look of a miniature stegasuarus that are not much bigger than a quarter. On the rare occasion that one was captured, the gang marched into town in a victory parade, hopping up and down, the catcher of the prize leading the way, horn toad held high in his gritty little hand.

Then there was the grand march to Turtle Mountain. Turtle mountain was closest foot hill to Herlong of the grand range of the Virginia Mountains that formed the southern wall that had once held the ancient lake. On clear summer mornings it felt like you could reach out and touch it. To climb turtle mountain was an adventure not to be missed and one morning the wild gang of little savages decided it was time. They went home and packed lunches of bologna and cheese, or peanut butter and jelly all on white bread and reconvened to make the trek. The only problem was the closer you walked to Turtle Mountain the more it seemed to stay the same distance away. After a long time they sat down and ate their lunches and then turned around and dragged themselves back to town. But the desire to climb Turtle Mountain never quite left Richard. There remained a keen unarticulated desire to reach and explore that dreamland.

Finally there was the crescendo of wildness that Richard remembers from that summer of endless desert rat culture the gang had developed during that void of adult supervision. It was a dance that started with whoops and hollers in the sage outside of town and devolved into something mysterious, something only an anthropologist could explain. The boys continuing to dance and leap began, for some unknown or forgotten reason, who knew who started it or why, to stick stalks of grass as thin as thread down into the tips of their penises. This dance burned like a hot flame and then died out, leaving Richard worried that he had not pulled out as much grass from his penis as he had put in.