America took a lot of imagination.  The idea that you could make a better home on a wilderness shore two thousand miles off across at tempest tossed ocean absent privilege and long established customs must have been bizarre.   Or for that matter the idea that you could manage your own affairs without a King telling you what to do or an established religion telling you what to believe. 

Then once America got started it took a heck of a lot to imagine that you could get a wagon loaded with grandma’s harpsicord over the Rocky Mountains, drive a herd of cattle a thousand miles to a railhead or raft a mile long train of logs down a mighty river in order to be sawn into a million new houses.  A lot to imagine electric light, a machine that could fly, food in cans or ships that sail against the wind.

Indeed long before Walt Disney America was Imagineering.  It’s who we are – or were. 

It was also the fashion in which we raised our children.

In nineteen fifty-four I was eight years old.  We lived in Fort Hamilton Brooklyn in a nice building and summers we’d spend a week, two weeks a month maybe every summer upstate at my aunt Alice’s Hotel on Route 9 in Cold Spring, New York.  Fourteen rooms above a bar and a huge dining hall full of hoarded antiques acquired at local auctions.

I could write a book about the place and maybe someday will, because she was also a prissy New York City School teacher living without benefit of clergy in the hotel with her ex-bootlegger boyfriend us kids called Uncle Harry.  There were high stakes poker games upstairs in one of the rooms, any number former public enemies, horse-fixers, bookies and retired second story men and safe-crackers (but never a hooker) drifting in and out, and sometimes a slew of Secret Service agents because Mamie Eisenhower would often stay at a spa down the road (to dry out?) and my aunt’s very strange hotel is where they’d very strangely decide to put up.

Outside the main building was a barn and three cottages set aside for stick-in-the-mud working stiffs.  Also a small lake with a tiny beach equipped with wooden rowboats and lots of inflated inner tubes. Needless to say we stayed in the cottages and spent all day every day in the lake.  I learned to swim at the Sunset Park pool in Brooklyn but it was at Aunt Alice’s I did most of my serious swimming when I was that young.  Nights we’d have a campfire on the beach and sometimes swim under a giant floodlight Uncle Harry could be talked into switching on.  Oftentimes there’d be cousins from my father’s side of the family staying over, too, and once in a while friends from Brooklyn.

And it was one of these friends of my parents named Ed Radigan who brought his family up to spend a week at Aunt Alice’s and discovered the Castle and the Pool.

How he found this place I have no idea.  It was about five miles down Route 9 (I’m guessing) off on the west side of the road several hundred yards into Mirkwood Forest’s thick woods.  All I know is that one hot summer afternoon Ed’s sedan led the way in and my father’s wooden sided station wagon loaded with us kids inside in swimming gear followed along.  Bang, bang, bang down a winding rocky mostly dirt road to a six foot high stone wall enclosing something which resembled a gladiator pit in ancient Rome. 

We piled out of the station wagon and hushed in the silence.  Crickets, a bird calling far off, but beyond that a green stillness as if no human being had been at that spot in a long, long time.  Eerily looming above us was what looked like a castle.  Huge structure, stone, several stories high, roof fallen with vacant holes where windows had once looked out.  Spooky doesn’t begin to describe the place.  Not somewhere you wanted to be on Walpurgis or indeed any other night.

“I hope nothing’s watching us from up there”, Mr. Radigan lifted his chin at the thing.

And we kids shivered.

But we thought we were to go swimming somewhere new.  Where’s the water?

“Okay.” Radigan clapped his hands together breaking the spell, “let’s start water skiing” and he produced one of the inflated inner tubes from the hotel lake with a long rope tied to it.

Huh?

“Now take off your sneakers and climb up on top,” he pointed at the lichen splotched wall, and after exchanging puzzled looks, we did.

Shocked, we saw that it was actually a huge above-the-ground pool full of black water mostly covered in lily pads and splotched with algae.  On the edge nearest the abandoned castle was an enormous stone lion half covered in ivy from whose open mouth water was dripping like saliva.

Cree-py.

“Here Richard,” Mr. Radigan handed me the inner tube, “put this on and walk around on top of the wall over to the other side.”

I did and I did stepping over tree roots that had grown up the wall, poison ivy and stickers.

From the far side with the rope stretching across from me to them, Radigan, my Dad and the other kids looked a long way off.  I understood what he wanted to do and decided I wasn’t going along.  There was a big snake slithering over the lily pads after a frog, the water looked like ink and it stunk.  No thank you.

But “Uh, I don’t think…” was all I managed to get out before he jerked on the rope and pulled me off the wall.

Splash, my head popped back up on the slimy surface and he started pulling the rope hand over hand – fast.  I was flying, a speedboat crashing through all the floating glop, scaring the hell out of the snake and whatever else lived in that water.

Laughing like a maniac I crashed into the wall next to my Dad and the other kids started fighting to be next in the tube.

My Dad and Mr. Radigan took turns with the rope, keeping the insanity up for maybe two hours before we were exhausted, our sides aching from laughing so much, streaked with strands of algae, other much more mysterious stuff and smelling just like that disgusting water.

Then Radigan cocked his head at the sound of something like a horse crashing through the underbrush nearby, and yelled “They’ve heard us! Run for your lives,” and everybody piled back into the two vehicles laughing.

Back at the hotel we all ran off the dock into the clean lake water, rinsed ourselves thoroughly and were ready for dinner.  Boy, were we ready.

“Why did we have to run for our lives?” I asked Mr. Radigan around the campfire that night.

“Because,” he leaned over dramatically, “those things that live in that building back there usually only move around on moonless nights.  But you can wake them up if you make enough noise like we did and if they caught us – well I don’t even want to talk about what might have happened.”

 My mouth dropped open.  This was the year of the scary movie Them and I half wanted to believe in giant ants and also in space aliens, in Bella Lugosi’s Dracula, and from the expressions on the other kids faces listening in the firelight – they did too.

“Whoooo!”

Twenty years later, with my own children in our car, I looked for the place but never found it.  There were several new housing developments down that way so maybe that’s what it got bulldozed into.  Or possibly it was a version of the magical Brigadoon and only appears once every hundred years. 

And of course, looking back, I realize the sound in the woods was probably a deer and it was just time to go.  But I also realized what those two madcap men, one a fireman and the other a postman, did was to go out of their way to give us kids an adventure.  An imaginary, laughing, spooky adventure we’d remember for a long time.  They didn’t spend any money, for we didn’t have that much money then.  They didn’t amuse us with electronics; there weren’t any portable electronics then.  They didn’t leave us with the ladies or take us to some “playdate” in a sunny park playground. They weren’t obsessed with safety or afraid to tell us big bald entertaining lies.  Instead they had us up to our necks splashing around in dirty, stagnant, stinky water with snakes and whatever else, having the time of our lives. 

And I often consider that we’ll get our America and more importantly Americans back when we remember that fathers like those two were not only crazy enough to first dream this nation up and then build it, but the only ones, who ever really earned that title.

Like we should for our children.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD See it Here.  He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com