The Wilds of Montgomery County
With the next trip to San Fran postponed for three weeks, the travel diary juices are nonetheless flowing. And today I traveled in the Greater Metropolitan Area, and I find I have some small items to share:
First stop was the Salvation Army in Greater Bladensburg. I miserable town, but the only place to drop-off unwanted household items on a weekend with a car. I was met but a suspiciosly jolly porter, who lugged my cast-off clothing out of my car and let me write my own receipt. He asked me if I was planning to spend the day on the couch watching sports. ? I said no.
My next planned stop was Lake Needwood. Don't you know where that is? It is, of course, in Northeast Rockville. I decided to try to find it because I have a dim memory of being about 4 years old and drifting lazily on a warm sunny day in a rowboat with my mother, on a calm green lake surrounded by Eastern Woodlands, possibly fishing for tiger muskie. Ahead was a deserted island, covered in oaks and tulip trees and giant rhododendron, complete with sandy embankments and turtles. We landed on it and in my memory, we explored the island wilderness for hours, snapping ferns, upending turtles and digging in the sand. I recently interrogated my mother about where this wonderful wilderness was (thinking she would say North Carolina, or Cape Cod, or Maine (though I have never been to Maine)), and she totally surprised me by saying Northeast Rockville. She was a cub scout den mother at the time, circa 1976, and one of my brother's den outings was, it seems, boating.
The trip from Greater Bladensburg to Lake Needwood was less than easy. I avoided the Beltway because there was bad traffic. Instead, I journeyed from east to west through rural Silver Spring, through urban Silver Spring, past my old kindergarten in Takoma Park, past the body shop that fixed my car, past the ethnic restaurant strip in Wheaton, and finally (after many wrong turns) onto the road from Rockville Pike into Rock Creek Park and Lake Needwood. Suddenly I was in horse/golf/plastic flamingo country. It was dark and raining. The road was curvy. There were lots of osage orange trees (which have a habit of masquerading as mulberry trees in the summer, but in the spring are easily identified), thornapples and white pines.
I arrived at Lake Needwood to find a small pond, not a wilderness lake, with a very small island, an islet really, about 100 yards from shore. I read the extensive instructions about how to fish for tiger muskie. I observed the abandoned boathouse, and the sign advertising that they needed a volunteer deck-hand. Some geese with strep throat squawked nearby, and some die hard fisherman stood listlessly about, encased completely in rubber clothes.
It turns out that Lake Needwood really is much smaller than when I was four. It is a man-made lake behind an earthen dam that was build in the 1960s to trap sediment flowing into the main branch of Rock Creek. The Army Corps of Engineers expects the lake to completely silt up in the next several decades, and become either a marsh or swamp - apparently there is disagreement about which. This rapid in-fill is the result of erosion and run-off from nearby, hideous Rockville/Wheaton developments. When I was four, the lake probably was in the hinterland, just as I remember it.
On the way back home I passed the Boy Scouts of America headquarters where I remember spending endless hours in the parking lot, waiting for my mother to do whatever den mothers do in there. Buying patches, maybe? Or little cub scout emblems? I don't remember ever going inside that building. When I was four, it was always raining at the Boy Scouts of America. The fact that I never remember going inside is curious, because as it happens, my brother's cub scout den elected me their Den President, also when I was four (four was a big year for me, it seems). The little cub scouts didn't seem to know that: a) girls weren't allowed, and b) even if they were, I didn't happen to be a cub scout at that particular moment. Also, I was four, which must surely have disqualified me. I think my brother was kind of peeved that I was elected (vague, ill-formed childhood instinct). My mother ordered a new election, and my brother won.
I drove straight from the Boy Scouts of America to my parent's house to further interrogate my mother about these dim childhood memories. First up - where did I go to nursery school anyway? It was HIGH on a hill, with very dark scary woods going down a near vertical cliff, and during recess I tried very hard not to fall down the vertical cliff because I was afraid of getting poked by the tops of the trees, which I could see. Avoiding this required Full Concentration and was Extremely Exhausting.
I think my nursery school uniform was my red coat because my only nursery school memories involve taking off my red coat (with relief after successfully avoiding falling off the scary cliff), putting it somewhere, and then trying to find it again once the teacher said it was time to go home. I also remember learning to write my name. It was very easy, since my name only has three letters, so instead my greatest challenge was trying to get the three letters to stretch all the way across the top of my crayon drawings. Only later did someone tell me that this was NOT THE POINT.
This treacherous and tiring nursery school turns out to have been on New Hampshire Avenue - not exactly the wooded alpine slopes.
Lastly, I asked my mother about a huge forest of sweet gum trees and sycamores somewhere in Montgomery County that had wonderous, fantastical playthings in it like a gigantic rocket that kids could climp inside and magnificent suspended tunnel in the air made out of something very wobbly. I am not making this up. I explained all this to my mother with a straight face (over a gin and tonic), and she said a little bell was ringing faintly in the back of her head. She too, it turns out, remembers the Forest of Fantasy. We're still not sure where it was. Current best estimates are Sligo Creek somewhere.
Finding that will be next weekend's adventure.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:19 PM
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