Memory Lane

It was our highway, our stream, our island.

By Tina Kelley

I don't remember how often we'd go there, probably just on weekends, maybe once a week. But in the geography of growing up, Kelley's Island loomed as large on the map as my backyard, my bedroom, my classrooms. We would walk there, on the wide, sandy roadbed of the highway before it was completed between the city and the Jersey suburbs.

We'd head up our street and left, down the hill to the dead end, past the Hennegans' gold house. Dad referred to Mr. Hennegan as a damned idiot — the man bought a brand new house next to the roadway, then protested the highway's completion. What did he expect, Dad wanted to know. Andy Hennegan lived there, too. The other kids used to make fun of him, I don't remember why. One of the neighbor kids said Andy tried to kill himself by putting his head down the toilet.

I sided with Mr. Hennegan. I didn't want to lose our private park that smelled of fresh air, pipe smoke and hot dirt. We never saw anyone else on these walks. It was our place.

We would slip through a big hole in the chain link fence and walk up a real big hill covered with cumulus clover. Whenever I dreamt I could fly, I would be running off this hill, just taking off, frictionless as a cloud shadow.

There were flowers growing at the bottom. Ma and I would pick them sometimes, mostly black-eyed susans. That memory is important to her, a real mother-daughter picture.

I wonder what our house smelled like all those years. Fresh paint, and toast, and the fireplace. But what was the true deep smell, up from the basement, that made one family's sugar cookies distinct from another's?

The roadbed, sandy in places and crusty in others, had stalled at this stage of construction for years. No one knew when it would be completed.

We'd cross over the grassy middle strip to the southbound lanes, past a big clump of trees. When the median opened up again, we'd hit Kelley's Island itself. A stream, probably 8 feet across — though the 8 feet remembered by a kid could be shorter in real life — rushed under the chain link fence. The stream passed around an island, then under the roadway in a long concrete tunnel. I think the boys next door actually walked through it, but that required more bravery than I had back then.

Pa and I would put rocks across the stream, making a bridge to the island, then turn the bridge into a dam. It would usually be gone by next time, probably because other people visited, too. I don't think I ever saw any fish or frogs there, maybe a box turtle once.

I remember when I was tiny, kneeling on the sofa, looking west out the window, over the woods toward the highway on the night before Easter and seeing what looked like a fast white cloud moving in an arc toward the sun. I figured it was the Easter Bunny's tail. I liked having seen it.

One day Pa and I went on a walk to the stream after he'd picked me up from playing with Peter Bohacek. I must've been in first grade because that's when I was in love with Peter, who was blonde and took me in the coat closet and said he could kiss me 1,000 times. Pa and I went for a long walk on the northbound lanes. He told me he'd teach me how to fish there, on the far end of the stream. This was early on, as I remember the stream was standing alone, cutting across where the road would go. He told me we could fish with bamboo poles and use safety pins for hooks. I wonder what we would've caught. We never got around to it.

The clear and open roadbed reminded me of a prairie, though I'd never seen one, and the hills beyond it rolled. We never walked as far as I wanted to, never far enough past as-far-as-we-could-see, and I still wonder where the mansion is that we could see from our southbound turnaround point.

Sheba, our hyperactive black dog, could run free here, as fast as she wanted. She chewed through the newel post at the bottom of the cellar stairs. She ate a box of the flashbulbs for our Instamatic camera. She would shiver whenever Ma got ready to leave the house, and grabbed the mail directly from the mailman's hand as it put it in the slot. Ma liked watching the dog get all the beans out of her system. It reminded her of the song "Born Free," she said. Sheba should've been that way all the time, running in a huge, safe place. She lunged against the leash and chewed human rooms. Here, she could kick up dust.

None of this landscape was real. It was all manmade. The hill of clover was a berm, a word I wouldn't learn until I had to sit through a planning board meeting decades later. All this acreage, if engineers hadn't interfered, would've been a woodsy swampland, much lower than the road. Come to think of it, this section of the highway was built on a wetland and might not have been allowed today.

Soon after the road opened up to cars, we moved. My folks sold the red Cape Cod to a computer lady who walked through the house muttering in a high voice, turning on the spigots of the tubs, not saying anything. Mom wanted a family to live there, with kids. Constant noise must surround the house now, and the smell of diesel. It must be harder to feel alone there in the garden now.

I wonder what happened to the stream, and what sort of salt and oil and sand seeps into it from the highway. I wonder when someone last visited the island. I wonder if there have been any accidents nearby.

That roadbed was a home, a brief land filled with talk. Now new sounds happen there, the endless double-knock of tires over cracks in the pavement, the sound of skids like the last moments of bad sex, the surf sound of light traffic growing with the dusk into the whine of commuters.

If we go back past there, revisiting at 55 miles an hour, we see nothing. We hear only the forging heartbeat of tires.