My Childhood Paradise

When I was five our family moved to a neighborhood in Rockville that would become a Paradise for me.  Our new home was on Leverton Road, the southernmost street in Hungerford, a suburban tract development of modest single-family houses.

800 Leverton Rd.

Two attributes made my childhood home special: One was that the sprawling neighborhood of a few hundred homes was built all at once and filled with families, like ours, with kids, so I instantly had playmates by the dozen. The second advantage was that within walking distance were my elementary school and a rec center with a ball field; a community pool and a fantastic park that were built a few years later; and, best of all, dense woods on three sides of us and winding, long trails throughout them.

We spent as much time outdoors as possible.  Nobody I knew stayed inside much unless they were sick or being punished.

We found plenty of things to do.  We were among the first people to move in, so there was still construction going on around us. When kitchen appliances were delivered to nearby homes, we would snatch the big discarded cardboard boxes the refrigerators or ovens or dishwashers had come in, drag them to the top of our yard (the right side was graded into a decent hill) and take turns climbing inside and rolling down the hill.

Or we would play pickup baseball games at Ellwood Smith, up near Richard Montgomery High School, or on the scruffy little diamond at the elementary school.  Or catch salamanders from Cabin John Creek, which ran perpendicular to Leverton on the east. Or play football on the flat beside the creek or street football.  Leverton was straight, short and pretty level, and by being at the end of the neighborhood we didn’t get much traffic.  Or ride bikes to various kids’ homes.  We all had bikes so we could get around pretty well. My four cousins, all girls, lived several blocks away, on Brice Rd., and sometimes I would bike there.

The pool was built a couple years after we moved in.  When I was around 12 it became my second home in summer.  My friends and I would spend all day there, from noon till six, playing underwater tag or going off the one-meter springboards or playing pull-up tag in the diving well, until adult swim.  During that time out we would play football in the flat field behind the pool or hang out at the snack bar.  At six it was home for dinner.  Many evenings we came back until the pool closed at eight.  I’m sure the lifeguards hated us.

Dogwood Park

A couple years later Dogwood Park was built across the creek and north of the fire trail.  It had lighted baseball fields, basketball and tennis courts, hilly fields and even a little ice-skating pond and snack bar.  I spent copious amounts of time there, mostly playing basketball or baseball with my friends, but sometimes watching baseball or softball games under the lights.  My mom even taught me to play tennis there.  In winter it was a Mecca for sledding, with a long run that ended at the creek.  The goal was to get as close to the brook as possible before digging the toes of your boots down into the snow to stop.  Once in a while somebody would end up wet.

But for me the most magical activity was exploring the woods.  They were big and full of adventure. I spent untold hours there, many with my dog Sam. To the west and south a fire trail had been cut that led up a hill as a continuation of Leverton.  You had to cross Cabin John Creek to get to the trail.  Somebody, probably a team of dads, had put a big tree trunk across and over the creek.  Walking across that trunk was like stepping through a magic doorway, kind of like crossing the Kent Narrows bridge takes you from one world—the Maryland mainland and crowded Kent Island—to the vastly different, quieter world of the Eastern Shore.

The fire trail had little paths feeding off it like capillaries off a vein. I learned them all. What I never learned was how they got there. Deer?

One path, or rather the right few, led to a dark, stagnant pond.  I remember there being the carcass of an old rusted car half-submerged in it. Some friends of mine had built a hidden cabin near the lake.  I remember when they showed it to me feeling hurt that I hadn’t been included in the planning, theft of materials from a nearby construction site or building of it.

On Saturdays we—me, my brother and his friends or me and my friends—would take a trail through the woods and emerge in downtown Rockville near the old courthouse and go to the little retail strip across from it, where there was a People’s Drug store and a movie theatre called the Villa. We would hit the drugstore first and load up on candy, then sneak it into the theatre.  During the week I would often take an offshoot of that trail to Hungerford Elementary School, rather than use the sidewalks along Leverton, Carter Road and West Edmonson Drive.

The woods gave me a place and time to shape my perspective on things, to sort out the mysteries of relationships, and just to be. 

Kids today don’t do unsupervised outside.  Outdoor activities are largely through organized sports, and many kids simply stay inside. 

Why?  There’s a lot more for kids to do indoors.  Video games, texting, and other forms of screen time.  Plus, parents feel it’s less safe for their kids to be left unsupervised.  Part of that is probably due to the never-ending news cycle.  Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s we didn’t hear of every abduction, abuse or assault.  But there are probably more attacks on children than in the past.  My theory is that the deinstitutionalization of patients with mental disorders starting in the 1970s played a role.  The Community Mental Health Act (CMHA), signed into law in 1963 but not fully implemented until the early 1970s, pushed thousands of patients out of large institutions into out-patient programs at newly funded local mental health centers to provide community-based care.  According to a 2013 AP article, since the CHMA was enacted, 90 percent of beds have been cut at state hospitals.  

The institutionalization of people against their will was in many ways a barbaric approach to dealing with patients with mental disorders, and CMHA was a noble attempt to fix that.  Unfortunately, our society hasn't put the resources into supporting meaningful, effective community-based care.  It's a tragedy, in my opinion.

In any case, today the woods are mostly gone, having succumbed to the development of Tower Oaks, Wootton Parkway and the New Mark Commons neighborhood.  And so, too, it seems, the childhood pleasure of being alone outside seems to be as dead as that carcass of a car in the pond deep inside the woods of my youth.

Copyright © 2015 by Dave Douglass.