I grew up without neighbors behind me. Because of that, I thought I grew up spoiled. I could suntan in my swimsuit without the eyes of neighbors staring at me. Sometimes if I was home alone, I would tan with only the bottoms on. I could read book after book on the swing in our backyard and not be distracted by backyard neighbors sitting on their porch or yipping dogs barking at me through the fence.
Instead, across from our relatively small patch of sometimes kept but always green grass, was a field. The field as it was lovingly known in our household. The estate was owned by a little old lady that was rumored to be in her 120’s by the neighborhood kids. Mrs. Fehrebach lived alone, in a log cabin with a carriage house, a stable, and two barns. It was the first two-story log cabin in the state of Indiana and the acreage behind it was on historical register. It had not been touched except by the farmers who she bought it all from. Part of the land that my own house sat on used to be the servant’s quarters, and the rest of the neighborhood was just fields corn and occasionally soybean. Supposedly, the deed to the land and the remaining buildings on it, was signed by James Monroe and Andrew Jackson.
When I lived there, the land was mostly comprised of Indiangrass and a little bit of Kentucky Bluegrass. Directly behind our shed, just feet from the fence line, was the tallest tree in the neighborhood that had been struck by lightning not twice, but three times. Eventually so much of the tree had died that my Dad and I cut it down for Mrs. Fehrebach and used some of the live wood for bonfires. At the other end of our fence line was a weeping willow older than Mrs. Fehrebach herself. Across the acre, was a thick border of trees leading into the woods. They were sky high Maple trees and Indiana grown Sycamore trees. Hawks, Blue jays, cardinals, and one time doves that had escaped from a nearby wedding, all nested in their branches.
Mrs. Fehrebach could never tend to her land. The grass would grow completely wild and so did the nature that lived in it. On any given day, if you stood outside long enough, a small red fox would part the grass looking for food. For years underneath our shed we had a ground hog problem, one time a fox problem, and another year to our disdain, a snake problem. We never really minded the groundhogs, but our yellow Lab, Forrest, had a heyday any time they showed their furry little bodies to squeeze in and out of the fence for food.
In the mornings, I would eat breakfast in our glass encased back porch to watch the morning creatures conduct their business as usual. There were always deer, every single morning. The most my dad and I ever counted in the field at once was 18. A few bucks would knock their antlers and occasionally sharpen them on the fence posts of Hannah The Field and The Creek 3 our back yard. We had a crab apple tree until I was 12 and it rotted, just so that the deer would step up to our back fence. They loved those crab apples so much, they didn’t even mind when Forrest would bark at them. We had a path of steppingstones from our back yard to our front yard. The deer knew this and sometimes they jumped both of the fences from the field to the front yard. They were a beautiful, single file line of prancing dancers. The reason why, I will never know. They were just leaving the last patch of untouched nature in the suburb to enter civilization.
My dad would sometimes cut the grass for Mrs. Fehrebach and never accepted payment from her. It was his way of thanking her for owning our natural haven that the rest of the city, that the rest of the world, didn’t get. Because of this, she would let our family, and our family alone, on to the land whenever we pleased. I was climbing a ladder over our fence, over a threshold, into a whole new world that didn’t exist beyond the property lines. The air was cleaner, it was thinner, and the world was quieter. We really weren’t that far from a major city road, but the sound didn’t reach the field. It looked like I had all the room in the world to run free. But I always had to wear hiking boots and work jeans because you never really knew what was lurking in the grass beneath you.
Just past the tree line, and into the sycamores, was an offshoot of Cool Creek Park. It was a small creek, never more than 10-12 feet wide, but once you made your way a little farther down it was a whole new ecosystem I didn’t get to see in the fields. Hannah The Field and The Creek 4 There were crawdads, and frogs, and sometimes water snakes. And we were free to explore it as much as we wanted. We would try to catch the crawdads, the real big ones, as they darted out from under the rocks. We would wade in the currents that were sometimes a little too high when it had been raining all week. And if we were digging around the dirt, you could find an old arrowhead or fossil of a fish or leaf.
But just as the water attracted us, it would attract other creatures too. The deer never were far from the creek, and the coyotes always found it, too. Occasionally a cat or small dog would go missing, and the neighborhood always checked the creek first. Sometimes they would be drinking the creek water like the wild animal inside of them, but sometimes they would only find full-stomached coyotes. One summer, a mountain lion had escaped from the Indianapolis zoo. My dad and I had just come back from a late-night swim meet, and my mom told us how she saw two warm, glowing yellow eyes peeking at her through the fence, just past our shed. She saw the soft and sleek body and heard the tail whipping against the towering grass. She called the dog inside and locked the back door. I couldn’t help but believe her. I once saw a peacock in the field and when he got a little too close to our fence, he saw himself in the reflection of our glass porch. He spread his feathers and started calling to his mate. He didn’t know that it was really just 8 year old me, eating pretzels, reading My Side of the Mountain. I found out later he was visiting the nursing home on the other side of the creek and had Hannah The Field and The Creek 5 just escaped. But the field, the land, was just as magical as it was wild. I never really knew what we would see back there.
When Mrs. Fehrebach died and I was in my late teens, the land was up for sale. My family couldn’t afford a million dollars’ worth of land and the costs of upkeep, but damn did we dream. An ex Colts quarterback bought the land on a whim, for a steal of 600 grand, in attempts to make him and his 4 children “farm people.” They hated the wild grass so they cut it short, so short that it couldn’t grow back. They bought a Bernese Mountain dog in attempts to ward off the coyotes, but all he did was scare away the deer. Without failure, every night a few unlucky chickens would mysteriously disappear from their chicken coop.
I still tried to read outside. I tried to embrace the few moments I had left with the field. But I was far too distracted by the mishaps of the quarterback trying to be a “city farmer.” In the middle of my newest read, the newest John Green love story taking place in my own city, I heard the cry of a chicken. He was hung upside, strung between two trees, and the quarterback had his youngest son, just shy of seven, slit the chicken’s throat and drain it. “Mommy!” he yelled as he sprinted back up the field and into the carriage house. I eventually migrated my reading spot into the back porch. They had bought four wheelers, and their preteen son would drive them up to our fence when he knew that I was outside.
I used to be angry that my sacred haven, the only land of peace I knew in that city, had been desecrated. They didn’t value what it was worth, the land was worth ten times what they had paid for it. They spat in the face of nature and warded off all the creatures that used to call the land home. I try not to think of where they were driven away to. I cannot bear to think of my animals, on the side of the road, or tangled in somebody’s wire fence. That quarterback did to that land what our neighborhood once did to it too I suppose.
I never quite felt the same after that. I felt I knew those deer, and the foxes, and the hawks, and even the snakes. But now, the land is just land. It was taken by humans, but I couldn’t really blame them for it. Instead of preserving the beauty of the natural world, they saw potential for four-wheeler tracks, and a doghouse, and room for a tree house. I suppose they made it easier for me to move away for college. It wasn’t my land anymore, it was theirs. A few years later, after my parents couldn’t take the noise anymore, they made it easier for them to move away, too.
I dream of the field regularly. I hear it’s call to me, as if she’s begging me to come and save her. I wish I could restore her to all of her beauty. The land, in a way, haunts me, as do the creatures I once knew, too.
