Battle at Nostalgia Falls

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to have a water feature. Or at least as far back as an afternoon spent playing at my grade school buddy Adam Carpenter’s house, which was adorned with a small pond and waterfall in the back left corner.

The very term “water feature” is wholly inadequate to describe the sense of place that tiny pond conjured. It was closer to a scale replica of Reichenbach Falls in my mind, though it would be years before my imagination plummeted over that particular precipice, and more still until I rode the funicular to the top of the real deal.

But it was a cyclopean goddamn waterfall, just shrunk down to a size at which kids such as myself could re-create our favorite G.I. Joe commercials. Adam and I set about creating a siege, with Destro’s chrome dome rising above a moss bunker, Storm Shadow clinging to a sheer rock face, and either Tomax or Xamot riding a zip line down to wreak havoc on whatever Joe team had foolishly decided to tread on Cobra soil. As I recall, some faceless Joe lost his life to the churning current that day, and we never did recover his body.

Not sure if it’s a feature of my generation, the first to grow up with 3.75-inch action figures as the industry standard – or perhaps just a feature of my eternally child-like sensibilities – but I tend to view the world as a series of set-ups for awesome adventures. When I see a bonsai tree, I imagine Frodo hiding in its branches, trying to evade the elves of Lorien. Driving across the Burnside Bridge, I covet the small bridge-lift towers as my own personal fort from which to berserk among the bars and music venues of downtown and the inner Eastside. Even the duct work in my basement has become Freddy Krueger’s boiler room. Abandon all hope, ye who enter there.

The past fortnight has brought two two key bounties to our house, further submerging my consciousness in the swirling twin eddies of nostalgia and fantasy. First, my father arrived with about eight boxes of old toys, trinkets, clothes and other ill-begotten loot of my youth. If you know my wife, you might be able to imagine the look of horror on her face as she surveyed the boxes of crap (in her eyes) that my Pops had deposited upon us. She instantly started making mental lists and instructing me in the art of resisting my pack-rat nature. “Make four piles,” she said, listing off: One to keep (this one should be very small, she said), one to donate, one to sell on eBay, and one to throw away. “One pile to keep forever, one pile to chuck, one pile to give to others, and the last to make a buck,” to put it in Tolkien terms.

And so, despite my desire to keep four piles with different names (one labeled “Keep in attic,” one labeled “Keep in basement,” another labeled “Keep in garage,” etc.), sort I did. Now, two plastic boxes remain, stuffed with jumbo Star Wars figures and Legos, CDs, books, a couple of stuffed animals, and framed pictures of yours truly rocking a bowl cut that would make Boxey from the original “Battlestar Galactica” emerald with envy. Speaking of, I even found a “Battlestar Galactica” Thermos from my old BSG lunchbox, which I hope to find in my next parental delivery (sorry, Mary Ann).

Second, I finally got my water feature. That’s a photo of it up top, with Lord Crowley the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel smacking his jowls with pleasure after taking a sneaky slurp. It replaces the previous star of our yard, a large pile of rocks that mainly served as a safety hazard to Josef, Lawson and the other children my foolish friends and family have let wander the landmine-strewn expanses of our back yard.

This miniature waterfall may not host a battle of the epic proportions that Adam Carpenter’s did all those years ago, but I would be remiss if I didn’t set up at least a few action-packed tableaux. More importantly, it’s a mountain for my miniature canine mountain goats to traverse and gambol upon, and the supplier of the next best sounds to actually living by a river or ocean.

Water is my god. It’s a representative of all that is life-giving and -taking on this planet. It’s deep and mysterious, moves faster than we’re comfortable with, and sometimes becomes stagnant and poisonous. It’s every kind of metaphor you could need for life. Plus, when I stare out at the ocean on the right kind of night, I can almost see the tentacles snaking along the horizon as dread Cthulhu rises from his sunken city at R’lyeh to reclaim his world from the Old Gods. Sorry if it’s too soon after reading that New Yorker article about the “really big one” to make jokes like this. As I said recently to some friends of mine, I live my life as if the apocalypse will happen at any moment.

So, is it wrong to take the power and primal earth magick of water and shrink it down into a water feature that can be controlled with a plastic valve? Perhaps, but Christians seem content with portraying the mysteries of the universe in a white plaster Jesus hanging on a particleboard cross, so I’m sure Cthulhu knows my heart is in the right place. Which will make it all the tastier when he feasts upon it.

The boxes my parents bring from their Corvallis house are the product of them cleaning it out. My grandmother went to the great kitchen in the sky last year, and with less reasons than ever before to make that drive, they look to transition more consistently to their Portland abode and beach house. I now have no grandparents left, and my parents are grandparents to my brother’s children. I’ll be 40 in a couple of years, and have long since passed the point at which a reverend would advise me to put away childish things during a by-the-numbers wedding ceremony.

I made myself a promise in high school that I would never change, which has mutated into a commitment to preserving those aspects of myself that were full of wonder and possibility and the promise of things lying just beyond the thin veil of our reality/perception. As I sort out the contents of the first half of my life – I never imagined I’d live to be 40, much less 80 – I feel not a shred of shame at the power that toys and water features still hold for me. On the contrary, I’d be sad to look at a cascade of water and not see a rift leading directly to a dimension of pure imagination.

Come with me, friends, and we will paddle a Fisher Price Adventure People kayak out to the place where the water feature meets the fence. Along the way, we may find a Bedouin’s tent containing the characters with which Tom Robbins populated a pack of Camel cigarettes, Will and Holly Marshall, and D.B. Cooper. If nothing else, we’ll plummet off the edge together, and never look back.