I was always looking for that portal to another world.
Had I found it, a physical reality in a physical world, I probably would have been too chicken to go through. But I looked, anyway. I used to take long evening walks, beginning and ending in the all-too-familiar area around my house (though when I used alleys I got some intriguingly mysterious overgrown spaces even within that wasteland of ranch-style houses) and creating magical liminal spaces around the fringes, especially near the Concho River.
San Angelo, Texas, is not a promising-looking place for the imagination to roam, but one thing I learned in my career as an Air Force brat was that all places are boring and ugly, and all places are interesting and beautiful, depending on the personal investment and the distance. Everything is ugly when you're separated from it by a car. When you are close enough to be intimate, but for one social or physical barrier holding the spot just out of reach, many mundane things become beautiful and full of possibility. Vacant buildings, untended drainage easements brimming with wildflowers, culverts that were either flooded (during the October or May rains, if we got them that year) or dry as bones, gates to nowhere, haunted gardens - I found them and I made them into what I needed them to be. I almost touched a bird once. I trespassed more or less accidentally, and undetected, more often than I care to think about. I discovered the only newsstand in town where you could buy new fantasy and science fiction paperbacks. I learned that there's a large species of hummingbirds that sings - tweeter tweeter.
Does anybody let their middle- and high- school kids take these untended walks anymore? Do solitary children ride bikes out to explore? They have their phones, after all. They've had the warnings. With a little exercise of common sense, they should be fine, just like I was. For my own part, I don't remember many personal encounters, and those I remember have nothing of the threat about them even in hindsight. I stabbed myself on the palm by grabbing onto the wrong branch during one of my river explorations, and the lady I'd accidentally trespassed on cleaned the wound and was very nice to me.
But every parent I meet now is paranoid. We fear the people who want to hurt us and our children out of all proportion to their numbers, because the consequences of misplacing trust are so dire. But as a species we need to explore. We thrive on leaving our safe spaces to explore the spaces we cannot control, where danger is a possibility but far from a certainty, and returning, still safe, more or less, give or take a thorn in the palm. And if we never pick up the thorns, no one ever has a chance to be nice to us, do they? Kindness at home does not count; it is the job of home to be safe and kind to us. I never met kindness at school, of which the less said the better; school was soul-crushingly and inevitably dangerous because the predators of whom I was the natural prey gathered there in force, and I have no reason to think that this has changed. My walks were soul-expanding, marginally risky at most, and sprinkled with small, spontaneous kindness.
I was making my own portal and going through it every time I left the house.
How would a modern child accomplish this, in the paranoid cities of a world assumed to be unkind?
Is that a grown-up misperception on my part?
It is 2015. You are twelve. You need to find, or make, a portal to another world. You need to explore. You need liminal spaces, intimate mystery, a chance to encounter the kindness as well as the rudeness of strangers.
Where do you go? How do you get there? Who tries to stop you?
Answer me that. Write me the book. I want to know.
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