Fishing for white perch, walking through shoreline grasses in search of elusive soft crabs, or simply playing a game of tag with friends at the Pines beach described so many summer days in the Pines, but there was so much more! Community softball games on Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day between dads and their teenage sons – complete with hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill and a bake sale benefitting the community swim team – were staples of every Pines summer. AM transistor radios – where we heard that Elvis had died while we were playing tackle football at the playground (“the field” as it was known) and 45’s served as our soundtrack. The neighborhood was surrounded on both sides of Severn Way by what felt like endless wooded property owned by “Mr. Rucker” and “Commander Berry.” Fearless exploring, tree climbing, fort building, BB gun wars (we didn’t shoot our eyes out, but we came close a few times) and searching for box turtles were daily activities. Walking though marshy areas near the waterline often meant coming home with only one shoe; the other lost to the muck. While walking around the neighborhood was easy enough, unless you were barefoot on the hot asphalt, our chosen modes of transportation were more commonly bikes and skateboards – in the skateboard era that enjoyed the evolution from metal roller skate wheels to better-performing urethane wheels. Sims Pure Juice were the ultimate. Some version of Schwinn Stingrays from nearby Pete’s Cycle was common to see stacked at the beach or playground, but the stars of the show were bikes we built ourselves, refurbishing old frames, polishing the chrome and often sawing front forks off multiple old frames and jamming them together to create “choppers.”
The community beach and a pool shared by multiple neighborhoods both offered summer swim teams, the beach team competing against other neighborhoods along the Severn River. If you weren’t lucky enough to own a boat, someone you knew did. We jumped, dove off or swung from nearly everything we could find – boat houses, pilings, piers and even the concrete pilings under the Severn River Bridge.
Anything for an adventure.
My Mom, who passed away last year, used to tell folks she “always knew where we were.” No. No you didn’t, Mom. Mostly because from sun-up to the time the streetlights came on, we didn’t even know where we’d end up. I’m closing in on 60 years old, but still drive through the neighborhood when I am in town, often stopping to shoot a few baskets. As a kid, I bounced my nearly bald Voit basketball to that court so many times, counting down and pretending to score the game-winning shot every time before leaving it. I still do that before leaving.
A magnificent summer camp it was.
(Writer Erik Arneson, whose latest book, The Life of Paula Murphy – The Fastest Woman on Wheels, was published in October, lived in Pines on the Severn with his family from 1969 to 1979, returning to live in the community as an adult with his
wife, Sandy, and kids from 1994 to 1999.)
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