The Flat Rock

You must understand, these farmers never had a chance.  With bedrock 18 inches down, or less, how much sustenance could the soil deliver into crops?  They gave it everything they had, but after The Crash, the county took the land for back taxes.  And it became a paradise for kids.

The tableland east and south of two Great Lakes--Erie and Ontario--was formed of bedrock limestone.   Winter frost that cracked the fragile rock as much as six feet down had each spring pushed limestone shards through the soft hard-pan to chip the plows and dull the harrows.  Farm families and hired hands followed horse-drawn sledges and piled them high with rocks.  They dragged these "stone-bolts" to the property lines, and off-loaded them to create stone fences that generations later still delineate the fields.

Beside the fences, where the horses made wheeling turns as they plowed their rows, scrub willow and chokecherry shrubs took hold, then grand white oaks that still stand sentinel beside the perpendicular rock lines.  Apple, pear, black cherry trees prospered there.

Terraces of limestone stepped down toward the lakes.  Some were marked by rough, gray walls higher than a boy could throw a stone.  Others were sharp outcrops only a few feet high, in a wavering line from hedgerow to hedgerow.  A few of these held openings that led to water-carved caverns, tantalizing mysteries known only to the woodchucks, rabbits, skunks and garter snakes that made them home.

A cavern we had heard was accessible through the basement of a house next door was said to hide runaway slaves in the Underground Railway.  In a lake in a cavern near Harris Hill, my brother's buddy Alvin Bates discovered a blind shrimp that was named for him.

Near the Flat Rock was a narrow opening that led down to a larger passage.  My brother Choddie and his chum Hans Nonne had explored it for some distance, until there was not enough light to continue.  Paul Smith, survivor of several merchant-ship sinkings on the Murmansk run, came home from World War Ii solemn and fearing children might be trapped in it,  filled in the cavern opening with rocks and sod. 

The glaciers that had scoured the limestone shelves during the last Ice Age had been supplanted by  lichens and grasses.  These encroached upon the exposed rock for some 10,000 years but still left bare scores of  table-sized plates of gray limestone.  Warmed by the summer's sunshine, these made perfect tableaus for childhood picnics.  The largest of these our family adopted as the Flat Rock.  When I revisited here in 1992, the lichens were beginning to cover our names and initials that we had carved in childhood.

The Flat Rock

The Flat Rock was at the high end of one of the gently sloping fields, offering views of rows of homes a half-mile to the east and west, and to Nonne's Woods to the south.  To the north, just beyond the shallow ridge where Paul Smith had filled in the cave entrance, lay another hedgerow of the towering oaks, buttressed by wild apple trees and scrub.  Beyond it was the largest of the farm fields in our neighborhood.  This had in post-war years been reclaimed by the plow, for golden, ripening wheat.  And beyond that lay the final limestone ridge and Sheridan Drive, an arterial that linked the rural communities that lay to the east beyond Transit Road to industrial Buffalo and the Niagara's Grand Island.

Just beyond Sheridan Drive but out of sight from the ridge top lay a small airport.  It's Piper Cub and Aeronca high-winged planes whispered overhead as they glided to a landing.  They inspired me in my early teen years to design an aluminum-framed, primary glider that I had hoped could be towed behind the Allen brothers' 1937 Packard for takeoffs.  It never got off the notebook papers on which I sketched my hopes.

The 1937 Packard Touring Sedan

The Allen boys lived next door to us, on Tennyson Terrace.  That Packard was Gene Allen's first car after the old Dodge in which he had driven his family east from Nevada to find work in Buffalo's World War II defense plants.  The Dodge had running boards, and a spare tire bolted on the back of the car.  It had an oval-shaped rear window that had no glass.  Rumbling east along the highway at maybe 50 miles an hour, Gene was surprised to glance in  his rear-view mirror and see in the back seat--no boys!  They were standing on the rear bumper, hanging onto that spare tire, waving at other motorists.

The Dodge was succeeded by  the Packard, which in the late1940s was followed by a Buick convertible.  The Packard had little trade-in value--cars that somehow had been kept running during the war were rapidly being turned in for the streamlined products roaring off Detroit's auto factory production lines.  Gene tossed its keys to the boys.

The brothers were too young for drivers' licenses, so they drove the heavy touring car in the hedge-rowed fields behind our houses.  Within days its almost treadless tires had carved a roadway in the dry, summer grass.   At first they were content to sedately motor parallel to the hedge rows.  Soon bored with this, they added side roads twisting between the choke-cherry and thorn-apple shrubs.  By the time they had invited me to take a turn at the wheel, one of these side trips included a jump over a limestone ridge behind my house.  At speed--the speedometer, actually, was broke, but we estimated in our zeal some 35 miles an hour--the heavy, black machine would have all four wheels off the dirt.  It would crash to earth, jarring our spines, and eventually breaking most of the spring suspension.   The original low-rider!

Before long, the brakes failed as well, a brass line undoubtedly ripped loose by one of the shrubs.  To stop the car, we filled a rusting, 55-gallon drum with rocks.  We would slam in the clutch, swiftly rock the long floor-shift pillar through the gears until we were almost stopped, and gently bump into the barrel.  This was a trick we learned from the Allens' neighbor on the other side, a trash collector named Norm Smith. 

Norm Smith, the First Recycler

Norm had begun collecting the community's trash soon after the war ended.  We set it out at the street in galvanized, ribbed cans.  At first Norm simply dumped it and burned it on his lot, or in the field behind it.  Soon he was hauling it away to someplace else, approved by the health authorities, on a contract for the township.  In those booming postwar years, Norm's business also boomed.  Soon he had a fleet of trucks doing pickup for him, but he never lost the common touch.  Norm kept his hand in on a few rural routes, taking as his helper another geezer.  You could set your clocks for 4 each afternoon, because that was when Norm would glide his old stake-bodied truck into the parking lot of a tavern up at Transit Road and Wehrle Drive.  It was no secret that the pair had been to other taverns during the day, by the way they slammed into the lot.  After complaints from the tavern keeper that the truck was knocking away his building, Norm lined the side of it with rock-filled barrels.  These were loud, but easier on the siding.

Even though Norm no longer burned the community's trash on his lot, he became what was probably the nation's first recycler.  Stack of old tires, mounds of scrap metal and a mountain of wooden pallets towered as high as the surrounding apple and cherry trees.






Still to come:

The Allen boys, Denny and Dave, were natural leaders in  the Tennyson Terrace community.  

The war of the huts.

2x4 steps to the platform in the oaks

Bernie Smith's amazing taking of the pheasant.

The woodchucks.

The tiny, incredibly sweet strawberries.

You can't outrun white-faced hornets.

Pushing Hans Nonne's jitney.