Just completed Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, reminding me of the summer in Marble, Colorado reading the Martian Chronicles. Reid, Todd, and I were visiting Reid’s Granny. Shorter than the 12 year old Reid, wrinkly, gray, she lived in a small house in the valley. Marble took its name from the quarries outside the now deserted town that provided the rich white stone with light blue veins, carried east to the capital for monuments.
After a day of hiking, we piled into the tent, spending the remaining daylight reading. When the sun set, we emerged under the the night sky, and scanned for shooting stars, satellites, and of course, flying saucers. The jagged mountain shadows morphed into monster of Mordor from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
At this age, we three immersed ourselves in books. Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and my favorite, Danny, the Champion of the World. From these books, I wandered into my Dad’s dark, musky den, where on the second shelf he had popular paperbacks, including Stephen King. I read ‘Salem’s Lot on an October evening when the wind blew our willow tree, scratching against my bedroom window like red-eyed vampire boy, Danny Glick, hovering in front of Ben Mear’s window. That scene scared me. So I tore through the rest of the books: Carrie, Cujo, Fire Starter, The Shining, and the favorite of us three boys, the 800 page, The Stand.
Next, I found Lawrence Sander’s The First Deadly Sin and The Second Deadly Sin. Mario Puzo’s Godfather trilogy. Then came Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt adventures, including Raise the Titanic. This led me into Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Dad didn’t like Fleming’s writing because he sounded English, which I never really understood. Then toppled the classics every teenage boy should read: Hemingway, Jack London, Hermann Melville, Mark Twain, H.G. Wells, and Jules Verne. These authors, though “classics” and often taught in university or more likely collecting dust on shelves, should be devoured before the age of 16 when adventure vibrates within bones and burns the gut, so that when he gazes out his bedroom window at the Rockies he craves life’s adventures.
That’s what we three boys did that summer. Reading Bradbury today brought back that memory of how delicious it is when something wicked this way comes.