Inside of every culture is a magical land known only to a few. In a land not so very far away and a time not so very long ago, five young boys set out on a journey to The Kingdom of Children. From the shores of their world this Kingdom was a shimmering, ephemeral land barely visible from their vantage. Most heroic journeys begin from humble origins and so it was with this one. I was one of those young men.
I got my first view of the Kingdom from my friend whom we will call Doc because it was his dream to become a doctor. Doc had read a Science News article about some early isolation experiments. Our country was interested in the effects of isolation on humans traveling in space. We had joined together in a vision large enough to be just barely thinkable, just out of our reach. A vision that was large enough that we could reach for it together, large enough that only a united nation could achieve it. Our dream as a people was to walk on the moon.
The records set by these experimenters, though he was only twelve, did not impress doc. He felt that he could do better. I was touched by the awareness that it might be possible for me to hold great aspiration. A kind of euphoria settled over me. Doc wanted to set a new record during our upcoming summer vacation. I wanted to sign on. Doc eventually accepted me as a partner in this endeavor, due to heavy politicking on my part, and need. Doc thought that he might be able to use a small trailer that his father owned. With the trailer parked in the front yard behind the fence, he would go in with supplies, come out with a record.
Isolation is measured in terms of persondays/cubic foot of space occupied. More people in the same space meant less time was needed to best a record. In the beginning it was starting to look like Doc was going to be in there for most of the summer in order to set a record, but he was determined. With my becoming part of this effort we might be able to cut the time spent in isolation in half and still set a record. It seemed almost doable to me. We went to Doc's dad to ask about the trailer. Doc's dad had a great imagination and a lot of pride in his son. He sat down at a drawing board and drew up plans for a mockup of a spacecraft that stood nearly forty feet tall. It rested on four telephone poles set in the ground and then had three successive floors about eight feet across beginning eight or so feet off of the ground, with a final small tower. Just like a spacecraft might look in the future. It was incredible, it was huge, and we needed more people.
Up to this point in time I had been having a rough time in school, I was a hard kid to like. I was very smart and loved science and math. I was also very angry and afraid, hopelessly insecure. One day in an act of compassion, a neighbor kid stopped an older boy from starting a fight with me, it ended by him fighting the boy himself. He won. He was one of the only people who had ever stopped me from being victimized. He probably does not remember the event, though it is was one of the places that I turned to when I began the journey of getting up off of my knees. It is amazing how a seemingly inconsequential act can have the power to help save the life of a man many years latter. Human lives are so mysterious.
Cap, yea let's call him Cap, and I became friends. We had a common interest in science and comic books. Cap was big and athletic, I was not. It did not matter he appreciated my intelligence. In the years following our journey our friendship was gradually worn down by his inclusion and my exclusion from the developing social order in high school. Cap had game. We asked him if he wanted to join. He said yes. Game on.
Doc's dad pointed out that this was going to require a lot of work, and if we wanted to pull it off before summer vacation was over we had to get after it. The materials were going to have to be donated, and to us there seemed like a lot of them. We were going to have to talk our parents and possibly people in the neighborhood into helping us build it, because we were only eleven or twelve. It seemed barely possible. We decided to take the risk. First we talked to our parents, they agreed to contribute labor at some unspecified time in the future. Then we got a list of the needed materials from Doc's dad. It was an unbelievable amount of stuff. Telephone poles, plywood, lumber, nails, glue, paint, electrical, plumbing (we had a toilet), telephone, food (lots of food), and more. Numbing. Impossible.
I talked before I was a year old, and walked right after that. I was known for being smart and articulate. It was the currency of my survival, I was a scourge for my teachers. I realized, very early on, that what adults did not say was more important than what they did say. In my family system undiscussabilty was taken to epic proportions, the bind was exquisite. The only leverage I could find was my power to speak the unspeakable. I discovered that if I listened, I could hear what people did not want me to know, by how they left out what they would not say. My power was in letting them know that I was willing to say it. At the time I did not realize that this was also a source of weakness for me. There were two brothers who were twins in our neighborhood, and that is the name I will give to them. Mostly because they seldom acted alone. Somehow they found out that we were planning to try to set a record. At this point we were afraid of the possible humiliation of failure. If we let everyone know what we were doing and then did not accomplish it we would be ridiculed and we knew it. The Twins threatened to reveal our plans if we did not let them in. They knew they had us in a bind, we also needed more support. We let them in reluctantly. We hoped that they would somehow blow it, then we could kick them out, somehow we knew we were stuck with them. Invisibly the dynamics of our culture was working itself out through our dream.
I became the spokesperson for our group. Cap's dad owned a local building materials store, I began there. Cap and I went to his dad and gave our pitch. It was an easy sell. Cap's dad loved him, he donated a great deal of the materials. We were on a roll, the fragrance of momentum permeated the air like cherry trees in the spring, a smell that to this day takes me back. We went to lumber mills, grocers, paint stores, and more. I always came away with most of what we asked for, often more. When I spoke they heard our hope and wanted to believe. My grandmother worked for the local paper. She did general secretarial duties, proofed copy and adds, and more. I remember her always bringing her work home. When she retired they hired three people to take her place and paid them all more. That was the metaphor of my grandmother's life.
We got an article in the paper, which attracted the attention of the papers in the mid sized town near ours. The local media loved us. When we went to the local telephone company they not only refused to give us anything, they wanted a large deposit for the phone. We were crestfallen, it was our first defeat. One of the local broadcast media interviewed us and during the interview I mentioned the response of the local phone company. Immediately after the broadcast of the interview the manager of the local phone company called and donated everything we had asked for. He had one condition, that I would be sure to mention it in succeeding interviews. Like I said there is power in being willing to say what others won't. Power and peril.
I was never good at completions. It was very painful and dangerous to face my father's disappointment, judgement, and rage. It was better to not lose than to win. I had won ribbons in science fairs with the help of my father. This was never enough, it only brought on an even greater expectation and risk of failure. I learned to avoid achievement. That summer my mother was involved with her new husband, my new stepfather. My stepfather had grudgingly agreed to an unspecified commitment to support me in this aspiration, mostly to placate his new wife. As I would learn my stepfather was only committed to the mutual pathology of my mother and him. Drinking held a higher place in his world then I ever would. What was to become our yearly camping trip and vacation was scheduled for the time that most of the work was to occur. I could not do both, I could not not do both, the ever present bind. I asked my stepfather to change the scheduled time so that I could do both. The schedule stayed the same, this became the first of many times that my stepfather let me now where I actually fit in his world. I went, by the time I returned I had almost been kicked out of the group. My parents and I went to everyone and convinced them that I had already contributed enough to deserve another chance. I was given another shot, a recurrent theme in my life, somewhere grace lives.
One of the reasons that I was let back in arose from the nature of the personality conflicts present, which by now had taken on serious proportions. Cap and Doc were older, the Twins were several years younger. I was in the middle, another recurrent theme in my life. The group had come to desperately need a tie breaker in the power struggles developing between Cap and Doc, and the Twins. It had begun to look like they might not really make it, even though they had nearly completed the ship. The fights were beginning to get ugly with threats of violence. Cap did not take shit off of anyone. He was not a bully he just would not let people dominate him. The Twins like me had learned to use negative attention seeking behaviors to survive.
I am not really sure why or how but my return gave us just enough stability to do it. Nothing I did really, just the introduction of another person into the dynamic I think. Probably it was not so much me but the kind of person I was in all such dynamics, hard to say. The day came, we went in, our parents and a few well wishers on hand. From the start it had all been there to see. The currency each of us had because of the needs of the group. The dynamics of our family system's and society, being played out on this stage. Once inside the power struggles took a new turn.
Cap, Doc and my own biggest fear, was that we would not be able to make it the distance. It was our vulnerability. The Twins were not committed in the same way we were. To this day I am not really sure what their commitment was, it really does not matter. When the power struggles began to get ugly they began to play their trump card with increasing regularity. They threatened to leave many times. Finally their trump card lost its power and became a reason to try to dominate them, if only to get them to quit acting out and making everyone miserable.
Our little ship of state was composed of three floors approximately eight feet in diameter and eight feet high. The first floor was about the same height off of the ground, reached by a ladder through a hatch. The first floor had a small refrigerator, a table, storage, a sink and a toilet. The second floor had some shelves and bunk beds built into the sides of the ship. We had a small television to watch, some games, a bunch of comics and a few magazines. The top floor tapered into a point like a nose cone and was topped by a conning tower with a rotating safety light. Doc was an amateur radio enthusiast and had a short-wave up in the nose cone, this is also were our telephone link to the world was. As time went on that telephone became our lifeline, our link to the sanity of the world, our escape from the escalating insanity inside our ship.
At the time we were under the impression that a prize was available if we set a record. Who was offering the prize does not really matter, what mattered was that we felt the opportunity to lose more than respect if we failed. Cap, Doc, and I began to talk about what we would do with the personal, social, and financial benefit from this achievement. Mostly we did this to bolster our flagging determination. By now the fights had turned physical with Cap being the target of most of the torment of the Twins. Cap would take the abuse for quit sometime, then he would react. When he did not get the response he needed from the Twins he would physically force them to stop. They were no match for him. They took some punishment for their choice of tactics. Cap could hit hard and sent them flying more than once. They began destroying things inside the ship as revenge. The bunk beds were first. By the end of the first week we were sleeping on the floor and Cap and the Twins were threatening to leave.
Doc and I were scared. The Twins had a Jekyll and Hyde thing going and had made my life miserable for a year or so now. Alone they weren't much, they were seldom alone, and together they were a pain in the ass. They were no friends of mine but I wanted to not fail so bad that I became the go between. Doc just tried to stay out of the way and keep Cap from leaving early. Finally with only a couple of days to go Cap got a severe nose bleed from the stress. He had a problem with them, and if it did not stop he would have to leave to get medical attention. We all made a last pull together.
During this time our parents developed a growing impression that we were having a hard time. We did our best to hide it, eventually it could not be hidden any longer. Outside our tossing little ship of state concern began to grow. Our parents began to wonder if we had not bitten off more than we could chew. Some how we made a deal with each other that we would declare a truce until we got out, if everyone would agree to not leave. Cap's nose quit bleeding, the Twins settled down, an uneasy peace descended on us. The count down to leaving began.
The word had gotten out about our expedition. We were interviewed while we were inside several different times and the local news media ran stories on our progress. We received calls from our governor and an unnamed federal agency. We began to feel the effect that recognition can have for human beings in the social order. As the day approached we were told that there would be cameras and most of the kids from the surrounding neighborhoods. We felt famous briefly. On that morning we reentered the world to a cheering throng of kids, media and parents. We were proud, dazed, exhausted, and haunted by what we had gone through. You can see it in the faces of the young men in the photographs.
My sojourn to the Kingdom of Children marked me forever. I saw my future, I saw why the adult world was the way it was. I was horrified. It was all there to see, our individual dysfunction's, our family systems, our cultural dynamics. I will never forget. We broke the record, within months the Gemini astronauts blew our record out of the water. In fact it happened so soon after, that we never got mentioned. Our journey to The Kingdom of Children ended by gradually fading into the past. Most heroic journeys also have humble endings.