There were goats on our place behind the cabin. I don’t know where they came from, but I think they may have actually come with the property. We would take walks out back to see “the bluff” behind our place, which seemed to be an area favored by the goats, and near it there was what appeared to me at that age, to be a veritable mountain of sawdust. Some kind of lumber milling operations had been done there evidently, and there was this sawdust pile one could climb and, near the top, find puffballs – a fungus related to mushrooms that contained tons of loose spores which, when you stepped on them, were blown out in a fairly impressive cloud. That was entertainment.

But I think one of the whole points of living in this place was to be able to grow our own food. My mom planted a garden out front, where she grew tomatoes, string beans, corn and summer squash, and I don’t know what else. But I do know this – these plants were huge, and hugely productive. Why? Organic gardening and “Injun Jim.” We just called him Jim, but I heard folks call him Injun Jim. He lived with his family (whom I don’t recall meeting) well up the hill from us across the county road, and he introduced us to an old Native American practice for growing crops. Dig a suitably deep hole and drop a seed into it, with a fish. One fish per seed. One seed per hole. My folks had tilled compost into the ground and after planting the seeds, covered each row with a layer of straw. Tons of beans, huge tomatoes, enormous ears of corn, great big squashes. It was something to see. But this was how I learned of trout in the creek. Jim had stretched something (lines, a net, I’m not sure) across the creek and caught a huge burlap back full of trout. He and his family could not use them all, so he taught us the planting trick with the surplus. This kind of fishing was illegal even then, I recall hearing, but no one seemed to mind.

Unfortunately we never got to see our first harvest fully mature.

My dad was working as an exterminator and then a vacuum cleaner salesman, but he had degrees in Math, Physics, English and French. After serving in WWII )installing and repairing radars, etc. in the Battle of Britain and then in North Africa), he had stayed in the active Reserves until 1952. After separation from the Army Air Corps he had striven to make a half-decent living, but nothing had come up that really fit his skill set. Then our friend (his best friend from college) Phil visited, and told him of a job at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville Alabama. It paid well and was right up his alley. So we pulled up stakes and went to Huntsville in a converted school bus. The garden had not matured, but mom canned tons of green tomatoes, green beans and squash, and stocked our mobile pantry. The enormous ears of corn were not ready to harvest by the time we left.

We spend the winter in the school bus on Green Mountain while the house we had arranged to rent was fixed up or refurbished or something. We kids all caught chicken pox and passed it around to each other in the cramped quarters, but it seemed no big deal in those days. There was a coal pile on this property as well, and we burned the coal in the pot-bellied stove in the converted bus to keep warm. The house was made ready and we moved in, and made friends with the girls down the lane. I began going to Sunday School, and got a mask, a cape and a play sword, so that I could be Zorro for Halloween.

This was a ten-acre property with a huge fallow field beside the house, and a cave on the back of the property. We took walks and played outside all summer while Dad made good bucks at the Arsenal. I think my older brother “fell in love” with Aura down the lane. By now, I also had a little brother, 2 1/2 years younger than I.

While we lived there, we had a Willys Jeep station wagon (which I don’t recall whether it came with us from Ohio or not), which my mom would use to drive to town. On the way to town one day, we passed an elderly black woman, making the trek to town on foot in the broiling heat. My mom stopped and picked her up. At first hesitant to get in the car at all, the woman flat refused to sit up front, insisting she could only be in the rear seat. I moved to the package tray, and she got my seat. She insisted on paying for the ride, and did so with some of the homemade ginger snaps she had been carrying with her in a brown paper bag. Each of us had at leas one cookie. When we reached the outskirts of town, the woman insisted we stop so that she could get out and walk the rest of the way, so that neither she nor we would suffer the ire of the locals because she had had the nerve to accept a ride from a white person, and actually ride in their vehicle with them. I don’t think I was even five yet, but the clear injustice of this stung me even then.

We were on Green Mountain for only 18 months. The contract Dad’s employer at Redstone Arsenal was relying on was terminated by the Defense Department, and he had to find new work.