SOCAL PAST

The arroyo that meandered through eastern Riverside was a wild and wondrous place when I was a child. Winding parallel to the railroad tracks, the sandy creekbed lined with cottonwoods left the foothills and descended into the patchwork of houses and orange groves, and by the time it edged past back yards, it was really a wide flood-control ditch in the hard-packed earth. Our trails cut down the steep banks in gashes we made with hundreds of sliding footsteps.

My brothers and friends and I could keep ourselves occupied in the ditch all day. We walked around the dead-end barrier of our street, through the waist-high wild oats of the vacant lot and crossed the railroad tracks. Then we chose our descents into the arroyo: sissy-path or not. Some trails had a gentle slope and banks for steadying hands. I always went the nihilistic way, so steep I had to stutter-step down loose dirt in a long slide until I nearly flew over the puddled water and slammed into the other bank.

We tried to dam the scarce water with rocks and sticks; we collected broken glass that I tried to arrange like glittering shells around the mossy trickles collected in deeper pools. I pretended there were fish near the abandoned shopping cart, that its silvery grate was a coral reef. We excavated reddish clay from the banks and tried to make Indian pottery.

When thirst dropped gauzy, dark veils over our eyes, we scrambled back up the trails and emerged onto the sharp edge of the arroyo, blinking at the fields and foothills surrounding our neighborhood, fingering the wild tobacco bushes with blooms like pale macaroni tubes. Before we gave up and went home, we laid pennies on the hot tracks so the next train could make copper jewelry for us.

“What did the pennies look like after the train ran over them?” my oldest daughter asks while I drive her to school. I hear the tremors of admiration mixed with fear in her 6-year-old questions.

“They looked kind of like magic teardrops, I guess,” I say.

Now her voice, and the chiming in of my 4-year-old, sounds slightly disapproving. “Did Grandma know you were there? By the tracks? Did she know you put the pennies there? Did she know you went in the ditch?”

I laugh. “Yeah. She knew.”

“Where was Grandma?”

“At home. Having a life,” I tell them. I am constantly trying to explain the difference between acceptable parental supervision in the ‘60s and ‘70s and our hawk-watching worries of the ‘90s.

“Grandma gave us breakfast in the morning. Then she told us to go play. Outside.”

“By yourself? Without a grown-up?” they ask, breathlessly.

“Yup,” I say. “All day long.”

The concept of total freedom in the wild outdoors is completely foreign to my children, as it is to most of their friends. My children spend hours in our yard, but many kids today rarely venture onto grass or dirt at all; their playtime is in dens and bedrooms with computer games and videos.

I watch my kids scramble up and down the ladders and netting and slides at a Discovery Zone birthday party; every now and then they look anxiously toward the parental faces lined with mine on the observer benches. My daughters wave and smile at me. I can’t breathe. There isn’t any fresh air in this place, and the screaming, arguing and laughter of parents and children buffets me in waves. The children look like hamsters in a huge Habitrail, scampering through the same circuitous routes again and again, their stocking feet flying in the giant cubes connecting the play chambers.

I picture us in the ditch, sliding and tumbling down the loose dirt, scraping our knees, collecting caps of mud on our elbows. I stare at the tiny shoes scattered on the floor, collected in the grid-cubbies; I look at the line forming at the entrance to the chamber, at smiling faces pressed to narrow backs, waiting to crawl nose-to-heel through the same tunnel again.

My brothers and I used to crawl through tunnels of bamboo and arundo cane and wild grapevine in the Santa Ana river bottom, our knees dragging through sand and leaves that smelled of dank and fox and eucalyptus. My mother would gather us in the station wagon, our foster brothers and sisters, our friends, and drop us off at the trail leading to the wild undergrowth along the river. Then she’d leave.

“She left you alone?” my daughters ask, staring at the thickets of bamboo and the tangles of grapevine draping the branches near us as we walk.

“Yup,” I say, and my husband laughs and nods. He and his brothers and cousins played here, too, probably not far from us. “All day. I was the oldest, so I was in charge. I made everybody collect acorns and grind them up with rocks, like the Indians did.”

“Did you eat that?” they ask, frowning, stopping by the side of that same trail, now a bike path, to pick up bottle caps and seed pods.

“Nope. We had snacks. Crackerjacks and stuff.”

“How old were you? You were a teenager, right?”

“I was 11.”

All the mothers said the same things back then: “Go play! Outside! Now!” My mother told us to be careful, told us what to do if we saw a rattlesnake or a bully or lightning; and to drink water if we felt too hot or dizzy.

My husband tells how he and his cousins used to catch crawfish at the catch-basin we’re approaching now, how they used to fish with sticks and string.

“Where was Grampa?” the girls ask, of course.

“Working,” he replies. We watch the men heading to the large encampment of homeless people in the cane and brush; we are nearing the end of the arroyo that drains a block from our house. Our daughters race ahead of us on the path now, but the older one always turns and waits when she thinks we might be out of sight.

She doesn’t like to be where we can’t see her. She brings home the safety books and lectures from school, about fire and crosswalks, but also about staying away from railroad tracks and playing with parental supervision. She always looks for my face, for reassurance.

Even in the cacophony of Chuck E. Cheese, clambering up onto yet another token-eating ride, bobbing out of the sea of grimy plastic balls, my kids catch my eyes and smile. And to be honest, they like these places. While my husband and I and our friends grimace and say, “Shoot, can you imagine our parents actually paying money for us to go play?” the kids are all having a great time flinging themselves around and riding a rocket that goes two feet up and sinking into the cheerfully colored balls. They cry when they have to leave, just like we did when it got dark outside and we heard voices hollering for us to come in.

This is what my children are used to, what they have known since they were born. Safety. My Swiss-born mother grew up biking in the Alps. She did the Heidi thing. She sent us off into the foothills, pointing to the boulder-covered Box Springs Mountains we could see from our front yard and saying, “Be careful.”

In the shade of the huge granite boulders, we sifted through rocks to mine the shiny mica. Fool’s gold. Pink quartz and black pebbles. We caught small Western lizards with pulsing blue throats and long brown alligator lizards that fastened their jaws to the webbing between our fingers. We picked purple filaree and wild mustard for bouquets for our mother.

When we got home, we’d show her the lizards and flowers, we’d complain we couldn’t breathe from the smog collected in our chests. She gave us drinks, and the milk felt like it fell through cotton in our lungs. Then she and the other mothers would shrug at our whining, and I’d lie in the dark hallway on the wood floor, where I imagined it felt cooler.

“Why didn’t you carry water bottles?” our kids ask. We laugh hard.

My husband and I forget to give them water bottles, but the girls like to drink from the hose in the yard anyway. We sit on the porch and try not to watch them. They rollerskate up and down the sidewalk in front of the old wood-frame houses on our dead-end street. One of us or our neighbors is always there.

My husband and I would never let them explore the arroyo at the end of our street by themselves. The older boys on the block have made a crude shelter, a clubhouse, in the wild tobacco and pepper trees there, the same pungent shade that I remember. But people worry about possible fires, about the homeless men that trudge up the arroyo every night to look for cans and bottles along our street. I feel sharp pangs of loss when I think about their circumscribed play, but the thought of something happening to them sends much stronger jabs of fear through the lower part of my stomach.

My daughters like it when we take them to the river bottom and the foothills. They point at hawks and lupine and the great-great-grandchildren of our alligator lizards. They crouch low ahead of us to enter the bamboo tunnels. I know they can’t go alone. They can’t even sit in the car alone while I run into the store. In the ‘90s, that’s child neglect. Imagine me, dropping them off on this trail leading to the river bottom and saying, “Go play. Be careful. This is what to do if you see a snake or a stranger or a serial killer.”

So I walk with them, which I love to do because I still like wandering the paths and examining stinkbugs and poking the gourds Indians used to use for soap. My girls can wander the paths ahead of me, finding the valuable things children need to find.