“It’s an accident waiting to happen,” Mom said as she looked out an upstairs window and over the back wall to the neighbor’s junky backyard.
We’d moved a few miles up the Southern California coast, to a new home in Ventura. Mom told us to go on out and play while she unpacked.
“But don’t you two ever set foot in that wreck of a yard behind ours.”
We scaled the six-foot cinderblock wall out back and sat on top for a good view of the forbidden yard. A rusty truck was parked between oil drums and oversized wooden spools. Old tires were chunked about, and a dark-haired kid arranged them in a sort of obstacle course. When he saw us, he picked up a burned-out fluorescent tube and tossed it against the wall so that it exploded beneath our feet. Erik and I cheered. The kid grinned at us then climbed up the wall and into our childhood.
Dale was a Catholic kid, born late to a large family. His brothers and sisters were already grown, married, and living up north in Oregon. Erik and I walked to the public school—blonde California kids, casual in jeans and T-shirts—but Dale went all the way downtown, to the Catholic school. He wore a uniform—plaid necktie and brown oxfords, white button-down shirt always rumpled and half-tucked.
Even among the dress-alike Catholic kids, Dale was different. From our perspective, looking into his life from up there on the wall, Dale was a kid without parents, like in the Charlie Brown cartoons. We knew that someone cooked his meals and drove him to the Catholic school, but we rarely saw grownups in the yard behind ours. Once in a while Dale’s father would stick his head out the back door to call his son inside. He was older than our dad, with creased, brown skin. He always seemed to be thinking for a moment before he decided to smile at us; it was a weary smile.
We never once knocked on Dale's front door. We didn't phone him. When we wanted our friend to come out and play, Erik and I pulled ourselves up onto the wall and—sitting atop it—we counted off for our unison call.
"One-two-three: DAAAYY-YUULLL! DAAAYY-YUULLL!"
We called twice—then waited. In a few beats the back screen door would open, and a skinny kid with a bowl haircut would dash down the back stoop and across the yard to climb up onto the wall with us.
There we were between worlds. Sure, Mom could come out on the back porch and call us in at anytime, but on the wall we felt free from the fetters of chores. We never brought toys or books up with us. The wall was a rough land where there was no need for distraction. From there we could see not only Dale's yard, but each successive backyard terracing the hill behind us, right up to Foothill Road where streets and houses gave way to canyons and hills.
Crowning the closest foothill were the Two Trees. Dale told us that there used to be three trees at the top of the hill, standing single file. One year, the hot Santa Ana winds blew wildfires over the rolling hills, taking down grass and brush and, finally, racing across that last ridge above our neighborhood and scorching the three trees. The third one didn’t survive, but the remaining two became a landmark for sailors and pilots. In a way, the Two Trees were an orientation point for us, too. On foggy days, when the landscape disappeared into gray, we wondered if we’d just imagined the trees, the foothills, the rest of our neighborhood. Perhaps we were the only ones alive in the entire wet, colorless world. We’d tell each other the story again, to prove we remembered the Two Trees we couldn’t see—and that once they had been three.
Dale loved that story. He’d tell it again and again, looking up the hill as if he could see the shadow of the third tree still standing there. Then he’d kick his heels against the wall and laugh at how a tree can’t do anything to save another tree anyway. We stretched the legend to include three brave firefighting kids running a cinderblock tightrope up the hill with a long garden hose. When the fog burned off and the Two Trees appeared again up on top of the hill, we forgot the stories and went back to chucking dirt clods into the bed of the truck.
If Erik and I could ever muster the bold disobedience to cross Foothill Road, Dale promised that it would be a short hike up the bald hillside to the Two Trees. We'd bring sandwiches and a thermos of lemonade—enough to share with Dale—and the three of us would sit in the shade of the Two Trees, our backs against their trunks. We’d look out over Ventura to where the ocean framed the town opposite the foothills.
Dale called us from the wall just as we called for him. But there were days when Mom wouldn’t let us go out, not even to tell him that we couldn’t play. One foggy Saturday morning, he called for such a long time that I snuck a peak out the back window. Dale’s hair was damp, flattened against his forehead as he sat alone, kicking his heels against the rough cinderblock. He called once more. Then Dale let himself down from the wall and walked with slouched shoulders back up to his house through the fog.
One Easter, Erik and I were hunting for eggs in our backyard when we looked up to see Dale watching us. It was a crystal spring morning, the blue sky so bright behind Dale’s head that it almost hurt my eyes to look up at him.
"Wadda you guys doin'?"
We joined Dale on the wall and discussed the best hiding places for eggs and what great spots we would find if we were the ones doing the hiding. Talk turned to chocolate bunnies and jellybeans, and we asked Dale about the morning's haul at his house.
"Oh, my mom and dad forgot to put out my Easter basket," he shrugged. "That's why I'm out here right now. I just have to wait awhile for them to set it up."
We didn't ask any more questions, but Erik climbed down and ran inside the house, returning to the wall in a few minutes with his striped jersey tucked into his Toughskins and bulging out slightly on one side. Back on the wall, he pulled a couple of hard-boiled eggs out of his jersey and pushed them toward Dale.
"Thanks," Dale said, turning over the colored eggs in his hand. "I left mine in the house." Erik and I looked at each other but didn't say anything. Dale crunched one of the eggs against the cinderblock and picked off bits of shell and membrane, dropping them over into his own backyard.
Mom called us in for some Easter goody just out of the oven, and Dale said it was about time for him to go back home and check on his Easter basket anyway. Erik let himself down from the wall, and so did Dale. They were opposites—Dale dark and hunched on one side of the wall, Erik towheaded and standing straight on the other. The two boys walked away from each other, me looking from one yard to the other, watching them both. I’d never sat alone on the wall before. Mom called for me again, her voice breaking apart the foggy-day feeling I had. It was a relief to obey her and climb on down.
Summer came again. Dale helped his father load the old tires into the bed of the truck and they got it running well enough to drive it out of the backyard and off someplace out of sight. Then one morning we went out to call Dale, and he didn't answer. His patchy back lawn was freshly mowed. It didn't even seem like Dale’s yard anymore. When we walked around to the front of his house, we saw an empty driveway and a "sold" placard tacked at an angle over the "for sale" sign. Mom was surprised that Dale hadn’t told us. The whole neighborhood knew they were leaving, she said. They’d gone back to Lakeside, Oregon, where Dale’s brothers and sisters and grandparents lived. There must be hills in Lakeside, I thought, and trees.
Neighbors rejoiced about property values rising and the departure of a backyard eyesore. Some other family moved in, and as the yard behind us grew increasingly tidy, the wall that separated it from ours felt higher and harder to climb. It just wasn’t the same with only two of us.
A few summers later, we took what Dad called "the scenic route," up the old coast highway, 101. Sandy beaches became the rocky Oregon coast as we traveled north. The bare California foothills sprouted Douglas fir and mountain hemlock, becoming the Cascade Range, thick with lumber. We crossed into Oregon, not even thinking about Dale until we saw a mile marker for Lakeside through the misty rain. Lakeside, Oregon! His family would probably be in the phone book. Maybe we would even see our old friend just walking down the street somewhere—it was a small town, wasn't it?
As we drove through Lakeside, wipers kicking against the edge of the windshield, Erik sat stiff beside me, watching out the window. Dad drove slowly—I'd like to think he was giving us a chance to remember Dale, but most likely he was just obeying the speed limit through town, driving safe on wet roads. I actually wished he would drive a little faster. What if Dale had turned out to be a bad kid—what if he smoked cigarettes? What if he were now the kind of kid who chopped down trees just for spite? I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him again at all.
But I didn’t have to decide, because we didn’t see Dale. On the way out of town, we drove past homes with piles of tires and junk in their front yards, not even a wire fence separating one yard from the next. Any one of these homes could have belonged to Dale’s family. Here they fit in.
Beyond the city limits, the rain stopped. We didn’t notice until the wipers squeaked on the dry window—then the sun came out, magnifying colors on the wet grass and trees, making it all so painfully green that I had to squint. I wanted to turn back into the mist then, to return to those foggy mornings when the whole world was just three kids telling stories on a cinderblock wall.
