Corps of Discovery

I don't know what became of her. Jodi, my companion in my first whirlwind adventure, was a short-haired blonde who claimed with all her might to be a boy.

She hit like a boy. No doubt about that. "No, you can't kiss me. I'm a boy, and boys only kiss girls," she would say.

With that issue out of the way, we did all the things that boys do. We had dirt-clod fights decked out in Army surplus helmets and jackets, toting ammo boxes and clip belts. We played Hot Wheels and GI Joes and climbed stuff lots of stuff trees, hills and TV antennas.

Jodi lived in a two-story yellow brick house, six houses up the street from my family's L-shaped ranch on the outer edge of a developing subdivision.

Beyond our immaculately sodded yards was "the wilderness," which in our minds was in the mid-1960s as expansive and unknown as the American West was to William Clark and Meriwether Lewis in August 1803.

The dirt-clod fights had taken us to the fringe, but never had anyone we knew ventured out of sight of the two dozen brick homes on the north side of our street.

"There's a creek over that way," Jodi told me. "What's past that, who knows?"

In my reconstruction of the adventure, one morning we were playing with my plastic cowboys and Indians in my parents' one-car garage. We then played a game or two of Cootie before getting into my brother's Scouting gear.

Without much discussion, we silently began gathering provisions a package of peanut butter crackers, some M&Ms, a broken transistor radio, a plastic hunting knife and my bow and arrow from Guntown Mountain. We crammed what we could into a daypack and filled the canteen with water from the garden hose.

We then stepped boldly into the woods and disappeared.

For the first hour or so, we could still see the roof of Jodi's two-story house. Even from the creek, which was right where she said it would be, we could see the Worleys' TV antenna, which was next to the house of Jodi's next-door neighbor, Buzzy, a wild kid who smoked and had a functioning machine gun his father had brought home from Korea.

I'm not sure who urged whom to venture past the creek. Maybe neither of us did. Perhaps each of us was just bolstered in knowing the other was there.

Hours passed. We ate the M&Ms first. Then the peanut butter crackers. By our estimates, we were 20 to 30 miles from home. The sun, which was still rising when we left home, was setting now. It was a cool day with a nice breeze. We were certain that we might never see our neighborhood again. No one would know where to begin looking for us. Why hadn't we left a note? Probably because neither of us knew how to read or write. I'm guessing we were at least 4 but no more than 5 years old.

As we turned toward what we thought was home, I refused to cry. I had to remain strong for Jodi because she was a girl, after all, even if she wouldn't admit it.

"I'll get you home; don't worry," I said.

More hours passed. Vultures circled "the wilderness." We were sure the police had been called. Maybe the National Guard. Our dads probably had to leave work early and were none too pleased. Maybe they thought we had drowned. Maybe they thought we had been kidnapped or stolen by gypsies.

When we emerged from the woods, we were in another neighborhood different but identical to our own. We had, like Columbus, discovered a new world.

Once I had gathered my wits, I recognized one of these foreign houses as belonging to Elizabeth, my mom's friend, who went to our church and lived on the other side of town, some two hours, by car, from our house. How on Earth had we ended up here?

"I know this house, Jodi. You're going to be OK."

We rushed to the sliding glass door and knocked. I told Elizabeth in rushed detail how I had saved Jodi from a perilous fate and had done the responsible thing by bringing her to safety. "I saved her," I said.

"Her?" Jodi said. "I'm a boy."

Elizabeth called my mom and curiously engaged her in a game of guess-who-I-have-in-my-kitchen over the phone.

"WHAT?" I could hear my mom scream. "I'LL TAN HIS HIDE!"

"No, Mom, let me do it," I could hear my brother offer in the background.

Within seconds, the Ford Fairlane was in the driveway, and we were rushed away from Elizabeth's warm cookies and cold milk. "When I get you home, mister-" Mom continued to rage. We dropped Jodi off at her house, and I met the belt in the garage where our adventure had begun.

As the belt cracked across the backs of my thighs, I tried my best to explain that I was a hero, a savior, a good-deed doer. "You'll learn not to do that ever again," my brother offered.

Within weeks, Jodi and her Air Force family had moved to Turkey with her still claiming to be a boy.

Looking back today, I know the beating wasn't nearly as severe as my memory wants it to be. I know that the true distance between our house and Elizabeth's was, at most, three blocks.

We had been gone for most of the day, true, but there were no calls to the police. There was no search party. If we'd have been able to find our way home before the street lights had come on, we, even as wee preschoolers, wouldn't have even been missed. That's the way things were when I was a kid.

Readers, and those looking for a speaker for a church or civic group, may contact Stephen M. Vest at steve@kentuckymonthly.com