It was Tuesday, and we were just kids. Kath and I were bored, as usual, after school. They never taught anything real there. It was a hot Connecticut day, we had a good couple of hours to kill, and the sky was close enough to touch. Everything that we usually did just seemed like a waste. Even the playground. Petty monarchs with their useless kingdoms, fighting each other to be rubbed in the dust so someone else could call themselves by the coveted name: King of the Highest Hill. "What's a king?" I asked myself. "Dust." Replied Kath, and that's what friends are for. I didn't even know I'd spoken.
So we wandered down to the bay. Strictly speaking, we weren't supposed to, but we didn't know where we were going until we got there. The bay smelled of industry and fish, and a few gulls circled overhead, gossiping and complaining as usual. It was supposed to be dangerous down here because a lot of bums slept out in the rushes. Every once in a while someone just up and died in their splintery bed, but it was just past three, and every bum in town was making their way to Christ Church for a hot meal that would be served in about two hours. Since foot power took that long, we were safer here than at church, and we knew it.
We decided to build a slide because I liked them. Merry-go-rounds made me dizzy, and even swings got me sick, but I liked to slide. I could climb and re-climb those latticed metal steps for hours, just for the freedom that falling through space gave me, knowing I'd never be high enough to go too fast, supported by rails so I couldn't fall. We worked with what we had. We did not start small.
I'd been nagging and complaining all the way to the shore. "Nasty kids, stupid games, who wants their old playground anyway?" I'd been kicking sand and throwing rocks at trees, dragging my feet until Kath got tired of it and looked me in the eye. "What do you want?" My whisper was a pout. "I wanna slide." "I know."
So Kath reached up and grabbed a cloud and twisted it to rope and the rope became a rail. I never thought about it, I just reached up and pulled down and twisted and pulled some more until we were working on opposite sides. Absorbed in our task. We didn't say a word until we were done; we usually worked that way. But when I looked up I was scared. We had a slide. It was silver and white, blue and dirty gray. We didn't have stairs, we had a spiral, and it went higher than I could have believed. We stood at the top and sighted down a rail that looked like forever. "You wanted to slide. Don't chicken out now." Kath went first, so what else could I do?
I was scared at the top, but this was no ordinary slide. It was higher than I'd ever been, but going down didn't seem like falling. It was a slow ride, but I was sliding faster than I should have dared. The trick, I found, was not to think. It was to be part of the experience. I almost thought at the top and I almost didn't go. Being part of the experience was the most wonderful thing I'd ever done in my life. We climbed the spiral side by side, grinning like fools, looking into each other's eyes for confirmation, talking volumes without words. Yes! It really feels like that! Yes! I feel it too! We climbed together but we fell alone.
How high was our slide? I don't know because it was made of cloud and the top was in the clouds and there was no perspective to measure with. I do know this: There is a world that you cannot see when you look up from your home on the ground. All you can see is the bottom of clouds, and the real world is above that. The real world is a classroom. It doesn't need walls to divide it. Every raindrop is a biology class; every lesson is whimsical and relevant. Every child is both teacher and student, every teacher remembers that they are still a child. There are no countries in the clouds, no barbed wire fences dividing crooked lines with strange names on colored paper. This was home, this was at the top of our spiral ramp.
And we smiled at each other. We smiled, while our eyes conversed, and Kath slid down first. Then it was my turn. A flickering descent. Endless sunlight and motionless speed. Flashes of silver and streaks of gray. Nothing to measure with and nothing to fear, no boundaries and no boredom, just freedom like I'd never experienced it before. And, for the first time in my life, peace. This, and more, was my descent.
It ended at the marsh. It seems as if there is a puddle at the bottom of every sliding board. Even this one was no exception. My sneakers were wet. We became conscious that it was muddy here, and the first chill of evening squirmed through our clothes. It was time to go. We took a lesson from Lot and didn't look back. We just walked together as far as we could, then split apart, headed for our separate homes.
My mother started yelling before I had the front door closed. I sighed, turned around, and left. I took off my sneakers and banged them together over the grass. Then I dragged a lawn chair over to the driveway and started cleaning the treads with a screwdriver. My brother was upstairs doing homework. I was out here avoiding it, which I managed to do until my father got home.
"How's my big boy?" he asked, stepping out of the old blue Dodge.
"Mom's been on the phone with her sister again."
"Oh."
School was no better. And the next day was worse than usual, since I hadn't done a bit of homework. I dreamed my way through math class until Miss Rankin snapped: "Henry, you have your head in the clouds!" That only made things worse. Any young boy is capable of fantasy. I'm no exception, but up until now I'd been able to separate it from reality. Yesterday afternoon did not happen. The trouble was, I couldn't convince myself that it hadn't.
Kath's day had been just as bad. I could see that right away. We didn't even say a word; we just headed straight for the bay. And the closer we got the slower we walked. Until there was no avoiding it. We had to look up.
And when we did the earth was the same old earth we'd always known. Even the sky was unchanged.
And between them there was a bridge. A silver sliding board, glowing blue from the inside, dirty with swirls of gray and white crawling and drifting curiously around it. Our sliding board was real and we were not silent! We screamed for joy and scrambled to climb; we stood at the top and looked around in pure ecstasy
From the bottom these clouds were as gray as the world we lived in; they were boring and dirty. But the top of a cloud is pure white. The sunlight was brilliant, almost blinding. We smiled. Kath's eyes were bright with reflected sunlight. And we slid. Together. Side by side, it was a revelation, and a unity you'll never know in this marshy and imperfect world. And we realized then what this sliding board was, and what we had to do. We could not go back. So we built a bridge.
We couldn't just climb up and slide right down any more. We couldn't. So we reached out and twisted some more cloud. There was plenty of material, and without thinking our hands knew how to work it. We twisted and stretched, pulled and tied into place. When we were done, we had two sides and a walkway in between. You had to climb our ramp to get up and you could still slide down the other side. But now we had some place to stand and admire our own kingdom. And there was even room to walk around. We could spend some time here.
And we did. Every day for the rest of that week we suffered through life on the ground, but we were born again after school. We didn't saunter to the bay, we ran until our heartbeats raced like our footsteps. And the other kids started to miss us.
Toni was their spokesman. He came over to my house early Saturday morning. My mom cam into my room as I was dressing. "Some kid's here for you and his clothes are dirty!" I resented that. Toni was kind of a big deal at the playground. I mean, he wasn't Eddie Hally or anything like that, but I was used to being picked last for football sides. I was pleased with what I got.
"You and Kath got a secret club or something?"
"No. There's nothing secret."
"Then where do you go after school? You haven't been around all week"
"Down to the bay."
"Why?"
"I'll have to show you."
So we rode our bikes over to Kath's house and picked up some food-Mrs. M. insisted on that-and headed to the bay. We didn't answer any questions so Toni stopped asking. And when we got there nobody said a word.
We just stared at each other. Then Toni pointed to our magnificent spiral and said in a small voice: "How?"
"Clouds."
"Clouds?" he repeated, stupidly.
"Clouds," insisted Kath, "let's go up." We had to pull him to the ramp, but then we didn't bother. None of us were climbing in a hurry. The view, the change of attitude as we climbed, was startling. Things up there didn't just look different; they felt different, too. Somehow our playground distinctions fell away as we went further up the ramp. They were replaced by wonder, and respect, for something bigger than any of us. We leaned on a rail and looked out across a landscape of cloud. Blue lakes, and hills that were pure white, dancing patterns of sun in the valleys; everything swirled and changed, everything also stayed the same.
Then we leaned on the rail and told our story. Kath and I had never talked a lot up here, so I was surprised there was so much to be said. We started at the playground and wove our story, alternating, interrupting, hesitating because there were so many places without words to describe them. And we stared. All of us. Because and hadn't really built the bridge, it was as if Toni had helped. The story brought all of our hands together, and before it was done Toni was absently pulling, twisting, adding to this and correcting that. I looked down and realized that I was, too.
I'd built a little jutting handhold. So I added to it and set the brown bag down on a round little bit of cloud. Lunch was ground stuff, stuff from down there. So I forgot about it, and we walked our bridge. We explored it again from end to end, but we stayed up, and didn't bother sliding. Nobody wanted to go down.
We wanted to stay and wonder. We wanted to talk, to listen, to pull and shape, to experiment and change. We dreamed about a castle and we knew we could make it, we talked about going over the rail and walking on clouds, but none of us did. We already were, and this bridge seemed safer somehow, than the rest of the sky. Besides, there was plenty of room to move around.
We decided to open up the rail and build a little room that came off the side. We wanted something to work on, and it seemed like a good idea, so Toni held this while I twisted that; Kath knotted, and I pulled. We didn't hurry. We stretched time like a cloud, we stretched cloud like it was meant for that, and after a while we had a wall that looked like it was made of thin silk.
We looked at it. Toni nodded, Kath smiled, and I think I did something with my hands. Anyway, we all knew that we wanted to continue. It must have taken a couple of hours to build the other two walls, because after a while lunch seemed like a great idea, even if it was from down there.
We had a long platform joining our spiral ramp and sliding board. The platform was almost as long as a football field. About a third of the way from the ramp we now had a room which opened out from the walkway. It was nice. It was someplace to go. It was someplace to eat lunch.
I'd never had a lunch like that. The floor was translucent, but it felt as safe as my mother's kitchen. Safer, if you consider her probable reaction to three kids laying on the floor eating peanut butter sandwiches. The walls gave us a sense of our own private place, but they didn't block much light. It was like looking through a thin fog. It was nice.
Eventually we got over being afraid and we ran out on the clouds. We had cloud races and cloud chases. We rolled up the paper bag and played cloudball.
By Monday morning everybody knew. A lot of kids thought Toni was crazy. A lot didn't. But everyone knew that Wulf and Kath had managed to do something special. And every last one of them were assembled on the edge of the playground in two minutes flat, barely time for the last echoes of the 2:55 bell to die away. I walked slowly out, to see children standing in a line. Lots of them. A line that would have been the crowning glory of any teacher's career. A drill sergeant would have been proud of that line. And every single face seemed to be turned towards me and every pair of eyes seemed to say: "This had better be good. This had better be very, very good." But Kath was there. With a present. A lightning-quick flash, a smile that opened a bridge between us for just an instant. The smile said: "We do." And we did.
This time, I was sure.