Storylog

The Worshams were eccentric. They were wealthy-Old Money Virginians—so they could afford to be. They lived down at Yellow Sulphur Springs. Yellow Sulphur, as we fondly called it, had been a resort in the late 19^th century, a hot spot for rich folks to come out and get some fresh country air, drink the healing waters of the spring, or whatever rich people did on resorts a hundred years ago. But when I knew it, it was a bunch of run-down, paint-peeling Virginia historical landmarks with full-length covered porches, scattered on the slopes of a wooded hollow through which a creek, fed by the springs, gurgled its way. Some of the old wooden houses were closed up and due for renovation sooner or later (hopefully sooner, since I doubted they’d make it until later). Others were inhabited by odd characters, even stranger than the Worsham family—a Native American guy named Arnie, who also went by Ravenfeather or something like that; a man who made statues out of PVC pipe filled with concrete and collected all kinds of old junk; granola hippie women; and various other mysterious, unseen characters whose existence added to the Yellow Sulphur mystique.

Mr. Worsham was an architect, and my father, a contractor, was going to build them a house of Mr. Worhsam’s design on a piece of land up the hill from the existing buildings. The house was to have no electric lights or electric heat, or electric anything else, just like the old paint-peeling covered-porch former-resort house they lived in at the time. On the weekends, it wasn’t unusual for my father to drag us—me, Alicia, and our little brother Cullen—to whatever construction site he was working on. “There are kids there. Y’all’ll have a great time. Come on…” I was never too fond of the idea myself, especially in this case. The Worshams had four children—four boys, ages four, seven, eleven and thirteen. Steven, Braxton, Charles, and Richard. The family’s eccentricity was also manifested in the fact that none of their children went to school—they were all home schooled. Which essentially meant that they had nothing to do all day besides run around in the woods and wreak general havoc. I always pitied their mother. The first few times my father took us there, I had no interest in a bunch of weird, rowdy boys who played in the dirt all day. I was interested in civilized society. I was in the height of my “trying to fit in” stage at school, and hadn’t yet admitted to myself that it wasn’t my calling. I stayed in the car and read my new absolute favorite books, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But my siblings liked playing there, so my dad dragged us back weekend after weekend.

I warmed to the savages a bit when I learned they shared the Hedlesky family love of Tolkien. At the time, my siblings and I were all reading the Trilogy. Actually, I was initially more surprised by the fact that they read at all. I decided it was ok to hang out with them some, when they weren’t off running around like maniacs, caught in the grip of “pea soup mode.” In pea soup mode, which eventually became an important Hedlesky-Worsham tradition, every individual’s brain is slowly replaced completely with pea soup, all rational thought is abandoned, and people run around laughing like drunks, only with more energy and slightly better coordination. But I didn’t embrace pea soup in the early days, and at first all I would do was shyly engage in conversation about our shared literary love, Tolkien. Now, these kids were really into it. They knew about all the various bizarre creatures of Middle Earth. They had old original hardcover copies of the books, with black leathery covers and all the maps done in red ink. Charles loved showing off the “orc clubs” he’d carved—not to kill orcs, but clubs like the ones orcs would have used to kill innocent little creatures. Fire-haired, lanky Charles, with his satanic grin and decidedly orc-like shriek, always identified more with the “bad guys,” and wouldn’t hesitate to let you know it with his fists if you decided you were a “good guy.” Richard was less violent in his interest in the books, and in general. But he was the only one Charles would occasionally take orders from. When he told someone to do something in his self-assured tone, making it clear that all they were doing now was messing things up and wasting time, not even Charles could refuse. Richard enjoyed showing off how he could write Elven runes. We didn’t go so far as to role play the entire book, like the Worshams told us they did with some other home schooled friends of theirs. But we did spend endless hours up in the oldest boys’ attic bedroom among their animal skeletons and drying herbs. We’d sit on their filthy, sheetless cots, surrounded by heaps of dirt and collected junk that covered the floor at least six inches thick, discussing the nuances of the books and assigning each other the characters we thought most befit our personalities. I was always a hobbit or, if I were lucky, they let me be Eowyn, warrior princess of Rohan. Nothing too girly though.

When I met them, I think the Worsham boys’ general assumption was that girls were still gross. My striving to gain the affection of boys at school and the comradeship of little pink-and-makeup Backstreet Boys fans disgusted them. The influence of the Worsham boys and the suffering I experienced at the hands of my peers at school slowly converted me from a teenybopper wannabe to a leather-footed, tree-climbing forest child. My barely-latent true nature suddenly came to the fore when my “friend” made a biting comment on my appearance in history class one day: “Wynn, don’t you think that shirt is…well, a little tight? You know, no one’s looking—definitely not the guys.” This succeeded in finally snapping that little thread that attached me to teenage society. I turned a total 180 and abandoned the middle school world of fabricated friendships and melodramatic dating for the equally estranged-from-reality but far more enjoyable world of Yellow Sulphur. Those few acres of trees, fields, streams and berry patches became my whole universe. A day spent there could stretch out into a monumental adventure, a quest worthy of tales—or at least worthy of the sacrifices I made at school to be accepted by those crazy, woodsy, roughhousing boys. This is when I really started to need the Worsham boys’ friendship. But it had conditions. I was compelled to become a fanatical follower of all things Worsham. If they hated pop music, I would to. If they thought technology was useless, I agreed wholeheartedly. And if they thought cute clothes and makeup were retarded, then so did I. I went so far as to wear my own version of a school uniform—the same pair of black shoes, the same pair of grungy jeans, and one of seven nearly identical t-shirts—every day for three months. I strove to be tough, climb trees, take and give a good beating, run on thorns barefoot, and eat bugs like the best of the boys.

Down at Yellow Sulphur, we built things—forts, houses, tents, bridges, dams—out of wood, snow, mud, and rocks. We imagined we were self-sufficient, camping in the upper field and eating the berries we’d scrounged through the briars for earlier in the day. We made war against each other, with water, with wood, with our bare hands. We were velociraptors and Olympic hay bale jumpers. We were beavers, damming the creek back in the woods. We were the rulers of mud kingdoms, complete with miniature mud palaces with stick-thatched roofs and mini mud brick walls. We were deer and hunters; though Charles preferred to be the rabid hunting hound. We had epic battles, which we’d prepare for by spending hours choosing teams and carefully carving intricate wooden weapons. Both of the oldest boys thought themselves great whittlers; but Charles’s creations tended to take the form of large, crude clubs, while Richard’s weapons showed skill and a touch of aesthetic taste. Richard was a whittling expert. He carved me a dagger once, complete with a groove down the center. So the blood could flow out quicker when you stabbed someone, he told me. I still have this dagger, well-traveled and a bit dog-chewed, made for me by Richard Worsham.

Richard Worsham…my first love. Actually, it was Aragorn, King of Men; but in my 12-year-old mind, the two people were often one and the same. Both led me bravely into battle. Both made difficult decisions with the greatest ease and confidence—where to set up camp, where to position the fort and how to build it, how to make the fire properly, who would do what when we had water fights, who could claim which part of the huge old beech tree to climb in. Both were looked up to—quite literally, since Richard was already going on six feet tall, and I had already reached my present stature, a less than intimidating five feet. Richard admittedly had a touch more of the big-brother’s-always-right impatience than I imagined Aragorn having; but we all have our faults. We were the oldest two, and so we shared a bond of maturity—which meant that I was second in command, if I could keep Charles from beating me up when I tried to tell him what to do. We would occasionally let the younger kids go off and play hunters and hunted, or something like that, while we discussed books or made fun of Arnie the weird hippie guy. Once Richard and I left the other kids playing some game in the house, and scrambled back into the tumbled arches of thick brush woods alone to one of the secret clearings he knew about so he could show me how to set up his canvas tent. We dragged a few pots and pans with us to make it feel like a real camp. He proudly showed me every single detail about the tent’s construction. Though his little mold-spotted canvas tent was not my primary concern at the moment, I proudly smiled in response. Then we sat in the woods and talked for a long time, while I fiddled with the wooden dagger he’d made me. I always had it when I was over at the Worshams’. In fact, I always had it, period. I brought it to school in my backpack every day. I showed it to people at lunch just to let them know that I didn’t care if they hated me; I had a boy who made me wooden daggers, and he was way cooler than any of them.

It was a true obsession. The summer after sixth grade, I was planning to go to England with my mother, and then stay in Wales for another three weeks with a friend. The thought of having no communication with the Worshams, with Richard, for a full month was excruciating. I anguished for weeks over whether I should write him a letter admitting my love and give it to him just before I left; or perhaps I should give it to him a while before I left, so I could hear his response; or perhaps I shouldn’t give it to him at all, because then maybe he’d freak out and we wouldn’t be friends anymore. I ended up giving him nothing, and saying nothing, and I left for England. With the little wooden dagger, of course. It was almost gone forever when my mom got lost trying to drive a rental car from Reading to Wales, and we had to stay at an inn down in a quaint little village in the middle of nowhere. I left it under my pillow (I always slept with it under my pillow). I was heartbroken when I discovered, hours down the road the next day, that it was gone. Luckily, my mother stayed in the same inn on her way back to catch the plane in London, and when I returned to the States I was relieved when she handed over my dagger—slightly chewed by the innkeeper’s dog—with a knowing smile.

Honestly, though, I suppose I was a bit disappointed when the dagger made its way back to me. I was getting tired of this love business—the pointlessness, the fatigue of constantly being in emotional high gear. When I was in seventh grade, I was surprised to find that people at school didn’t hate me. Apparently there were a few losers like me who weren’t scared away by my bitter sarcasm or my refusal to wear anything besides baggy clothes in subdued colors and earth tones. The company of kids in school lessened my need for the Worsham boys. The wooden dagger I had by then relegated to a blue shoebox I kept in some corner of my room, along with other tangible memories.

The Worshams spent more and more time at their house in Richmond and were only around for a few weeks at a time, now and then. My dad would tell us when they were in town and on one such occasion we went camping down at Yellow Sulphur. Charles and Richard had recently made “gypsy wagons,” elaborate six-foot-long wooden affairs complete with wooden wheels, curtains, narrow cots and shelves. I had to admit they were cooler than anything my friends at school would have made. We dragged their wagons to a field down by the creek and set up camp. The campout started calmly enough, with the five of us—Richard, me, Charles, Alicia and Cullen—sitting around the fire in the warm night air of early fall, listening to Richard brag about hanging out and kissing girls at some party his public school friend had. I reminded myself to suppress ripples of jealousy. And to show I was as cool as his public school friend, I suggested we play spin the bottle. Maybe later, the boss replied, laughing and rolling his eyes.

As the night wore on and the pea soup vs. brain ratio inevitably increased, we ran a natural progression through the various teenage party activities. We eventually had Charles pissing on the corrugated metal roof of his gypsy cart and Richard waving his boxers out the curtained door of his. We moved on to “suck and blow,” which, if you’ve ever played it, you’d know is much less risqué than it sounds. Eventually we got around to the first, the most ridiculous, and—I admit—the only game of spin the bottle I have ever participated in. Only four of us played—we told my brother to bug off and go to sleep. We actually used a pocket knife instead of a bottle, since one thing you can count on is where there are Worshams, there are pocket knives. Richard, the oldest of the group, insisted that my sister—the youngest—was too young for him to kiss; so every time the spin of the pocket knife paired Alicia and Richard, they’d skip their turns. That left Alicia kissing only Charles, and Richard kissing only me, over and over. I still had the option to kiss Charles if fate instructed so. But my first spin pointed to Richard.

My first kiss would be Richard Worsham. The irony really hit me then, and I don’t know if it was the irony or some remnant of deep affection or merely the fact that someone was actually going to kiss me that made my heart pound. This was Richard Worsham, whom I had practically worshiped only months before and whose little wooden dagger I had carried around with me everywhere. This was also, I could see then, an arrogant thirteen-year-old boy who thought it was cool to be friends with asshole public school guys and go to parties to kiss girls. And sitting in a tent with two nervous, giggly younger kids and one older kid barking at them to shut up certainly wasn’t the romantic scene I had imagined. I was simultaneously nervous, amused at the absurd irony of the situation, and trying feebly to recapture my former image of the godlike Richard Worsham.

Then it was done. He’d kissed me. But the knife kept spinning, and I kissed him again, and then I kissed Charles, and my sister and Charles “kissed,” which closely resembled two vehicles colliding at high velocity. And things got realer and realer, until I pretty much knew I was just sitting in a tent playing spin the bottle with my sister and two boys who, when it came down to it, were more like my brothers than anything else. I only thought they were heroes when I was convinced everyone at Blacksburg Middle School was hell bent on bringing about my eternal suffering. I only thought making mud kingdoms and climbing trees was true adventure when school was so boring I wanted to kill myself. I should have seen it earlier; I should have been able to tell things weren’t what I imagined when Richard had started wearing shoes all the time and stopped playing in the mud with the rest of us.

I wish I’d never realized this. It is impossible to recapture the enjoyment per square inch of ground that I experienced at Yellow Sulphur. I’ll never be able to care about someone so heedlessly and honestly, not without laughing at myself, anyway, and immediately bringing myself “back to reality.” There are no wooded thickets to hide in now, no creek water to drink and splash in to drown out what bothers me. With my new “skills” of literary analysis, even reading becomes a task rooted in reality and not an escape. My little wooden dagger is just a crude, chewed-on piece of two-by-four. Yellow Sulphur was my resort too, my place to escape, and as time passes the memories of my adventures there chip and disintegrate, become gray and lose detail in flakes like the old covered-porch houses.

Credit: Wynne Hedlesky