Teenager Remembers Imaginary World of Early Childhood Innocence

December 29, 2007

By Jackolyn R. McCoy
Selawik, Alaska - In our isolated village of Selawik in Northwest Alaska, we had limited activities as young children, but my sister and I and our friends always found interesting things to play with in our community. One of our more intriguing adventures was playing in our backyard with just snow and willows.

One winter day my sister Cynthia and one of her friends were playing outside behind our house near our dad's shop. They simultaneously spotted rabbit tracks and followed them into the deep snow. That led to an open space in a clump of willows. I don't know who came up with the idea, but we had discovered a new winter clubhouse.

The club rules were simple; you just had to be a friend of my sister or me. Soon we had a posse: friends Megan, Kristy, Stephanie, Robyn, and Angela soon became regular clubhouse companions.

We built our clubhouse with our imagination. We shaped the snow to make beds, couches, and kitchen counters. The willows served as the walls that separated the rooms, including a master bedroom, a little bedroom that bundled similar to a closet, a huge living room, a kitchen, and a backyard. We had it all. We were living our dream.

My mother told us not to take food to our clubhouse, so we gathered our own food from nature, such as needles and cones from the trees. We pretended to cook, even sometimes acting as if our "food" was burning.

We didn't want anyone to know about our clubhouse, so we invented secret signs to communicate to each other outside the club. We made a lot of them. For example, the following sign, which meant "group talk," went like this: We would put both hands around our hips and shake our bottoms in a circular motion. After doing this, we would clasp our arms together. Only the people who went to our club knew this, or so we thought.

My dad had this huge empty fuel tank that separated our clubhouse from the shop. We used the empty tank as an imaginary vehicle. There was a huge ladder-type iron bar on the side of the tank for climbing to the top of it. We took long rides in our fuel-tank jet to new places, like Florida. Sometimes we just used it as a car to go to the grocery store, but family outings were my personal favorite. We'd pretend we were a family going out on picnics and sledding days, or we'd actually go sledding near Selawik's straight bridge on the airport side of the village. (We'd also go snow surfing on our purple, circular sleds that were hard to stand steady on.)

Eventually in our clubhouse, snow pots and pans didn't satisfy us, so we got this crazy idea that we could do anything. One of our friends talked us into breaking into this old, abandoned house, which was adjacent to my family's home in Selawik. On a beautiful, sunny winter afternoon, we all went to this house in clear daylight. My friend Angela struggled to pull down the board that covered the window. Finally the board came off, and she jumped into the house through the aged window.

Angela wandered into the house for only about five minutes when one of my father's friends drove by with a snow machine and told us to stop breaking into the old house. Luckily for us, my father's friend only drove by for a few seconds, giving Angela time to jump out of the house with pots and pans that we hid until the next day when we could carry them to our beloved clubhouse.

We took the things without regret so we could blissfully play in our imaginary kitchen. We felt no regret in taking these kitchen utensils because no one was using them anyway.

As a teenager, every time I pass that clump of willows in our backyard, I see myself as seven years old again, pretending to be all grown up. I miss our make-believe clubhouse.

I wish I were a kid again just to play without criticism or ridicule.

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