The Trestle

The Trestle
Normally we avoided Boardman Lake and the river water cause for decades factories had been dumping toxic waste into it. It wasn’t safe for swimming, people didn’t even water ski on it.
Supposedly the lake was being cleaned up but there was no way of knowing plus the sewage plant was still there dumping its fecal juice into the river, and that you could see. At the jetty near our beach the river leaked brown water out into the blue bay. The current carried it along the shore in front of our house where the waves washed ashore green.
The trestle was well hidden from the public eye by the trees and bushes that surround it down to the river’s edge. We could do whatever we felt like and we did without bothering about being seen. We’d strip down and jump naked off of it. We knew the water was gross but the fun of being naked outweighed any worry about contamination.
Franklin Six
At night the Franklin Six slept there, under the trestle, on the sandy side. The Franklin Six were a gang of Indians whose territory was the stretch of Franklin Street all the way from Jack’s party store and the bay at the north end to Dean’s party store and Boardman Lake to the South. They were drunks and availability of alcohol defined the perimeters of their world. They moved en masse and although one or two would die off every several years there were always six.

We fucked with the teenagers but not with the Indians. They were unpredictable and any one of them could switch from harmless to murderous in an eye-blink. For them madness came in a bottle.
They’d had a car once but had driven it full speed off the Clinch Park boat ramp. I heard they were dead silent as they went into the water with just the roar of the engine as soundtrack to what appeared to be a group suicide attempt. The engine sputtered to a stop before the car was completely submerged. I’m sure it was a spontaneous idea but it didn’t surprise me. It was hard for me to imagine that any part of their life made them want to live it.
I knew of another carload of Indians who had tried to end it all by driving off the cliff at Peterson Park. It was a long drop down to lake Michigan, a couple hundred yards at least. They made it about halfway. The car’s carcass was still there, rusted.
Teen horniness is not a crime
Teenagers had sex on our side of the trestle after dark. We didn’t see them doing this, but we’d find their discarded underwear and condoms. The same stuff pretty much that they left behind in the wrecks. I didn’t understand why they didn’t remove the evidence. I got that they were in a hurry, they were always at risk of being caught by the cops, but why not come back the next day and cover their tracks.
In a way I admired the teenagers for their pursuit of lawless activities in the face of communal condemnation, but I also thought we were better than them. They were in the spotlight with attention beaming down from parents and police, everyone really. We moved about unseen or if we were, we were never called on it. We did whatever we wanted.
Teenagers were deviant only in what passed for rebellion was really just horniness. They roamed in packs during the summer and drove around the Front/State streets loop downtown and screamed out of their windows.
They laughed like hyenas and I was embarrassed for them. It wouldn’t be long before they were their fat parents. Us little kids ran under the radar, we could do just about anything and get away with it. I never once got arrested before the age of fourteen.