CROP CIRCLES

A short story from an ongoing project: "MOMENTS of GREAT or SMALL CONSEQUENCE - a collection of personal memories"

We had moved from Botswana to England just before my thirteenth birthday and bought a house in the English countryside, just outside Oxford.

Our address said that we lived in a village called Sunningwell, but the truth was that we lived between two villages and were surrounded by three fields and a motorway.  To visit on a beautiful summer’s day at dusk, one would argue that it was rather idyllic, as the sun set over the golden crops, undulating like the ocean as the westerly wind blew gently across it. One could also describe it as a peaceful country existence, but the truth was that, for a teenage boy it was purgatory.

To get to school in Oxford, I would have to walk a mile to the nearest bus stop and even then, getting a bus to actually stop and pick me up was hit or miss. The reason being, that my bus stop was the final stop before the bus turned onto the motorway, and this meant that more often than not, it was at maximum capacity before it reached me.  So despite getting to the bus stop early, I was usually waved at apologetically by at least three bus drivers, who passed me by, and ended up being late for school.

During the summer months, at least I could ride my bike to school. This would take about forty five minutes and involved riding up and down hills with my ridiculously heavy book bag in a basket on the front. On arrival at school, my school uniform was drenched in sweat and I would end up stinking for the rest of the day. The one upside was that I had never been fitter.

I lived with my mother, stepfather and younger brother and sister. The age difference between myself and my siblings was six years between me and my sister and eight years for my brother. As such, I was more of a babysitter than a brother.

As my mother and stepfather both worked, my summer holidays were spent babysitting my siblings during the day. This involved an unhealthy amount of  TV and little else. When nothing of interest was on TV, we would resort to a collection of movies on VHS. One video that we were forced to watch every day, according to my sister’s wishes was the 70s movie, “Grease”, starring  John Travolta and Olivia Newton John.  By the end of the summer, we knew it so well that we could watch it with the sound off and insert all of the dialogue ourselves, flawlessly.

A lot of my friends from school lived closer to, or within the Oxford city limits, or at least somewhere with a better public transport service. This meant that casual meet ups were much simpler for them, and didn’t involve having to sequester lifts from one’s parents into town.

For me there was no such thing as a casual meet up. Each rendezvous had to be planned and organized days in advance. Who would be looking after my younger siblings? How would I get into town? How would I get back? Would it be my parents picking me up or would I be overspending, by needing to get a taxi? The teenage me, hated everything about it.

I would sit at home watching  John Travolta for the 720^th time, imagining my friends in the city calling each other at a moment’s notice, arranging to meet up at the local park, hanging out with girls, maybe deciding last minute to see a movie and generally living their lives with a freedom that I did not possess. Even when my parents were at home, the idea of just popping down to the local village to see what was happening, was a moot point.

The village was so small that even the post office had long ago been euthanized. All that remained in the one street village, was a church, a pond and an art school. Somehow, no matter when I rode my bike past the art school, I would never see anyone going in or out of it.

The village was like an empty movie lot. Beautiful thatch roof bungalows lined the street, but with no people, ever.

In my desperation for anything to happen in my life, I would ride my bike through the village, thinking that one day, I would come across another human being, maybe even my age, maybe even a girl, and we would hit it off and have a summer romance. I would even take a ten pence coin to make a phone call from the public payphone, that stood between the church and the art school. But to add insult to injury, if I did try and call a classmate, I would invariably get their mother answering the phone, telling me that my friend couldn’t come to the phone as he had just popped out to see his friends at the park. ARGHHHH!

So my village visits would go something like this: I would ride my BMX into the village, sometimes stopping to look at a horse in the field, sometimes feeding him a handful of grass. I would then cruise into the village “hotspot”, which was a bench under an aptly named Weeping Willow, that stood next to an empty pond, between the church and empty art school. There, I would sit throwing pebbles into the vacant pond and wait for any mysterious stranger from out of town to walk by and spark up a conversation.

The only evidence that I was not a sole survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, would be a single car zooming through the village, using it as a shortcut when the motorway was gridlocked. There I sat under the weeping branches, stewing in a cauldron of teenage angst, allowing my thoughts to dwell on my life passing me by, and the fact that I had neither touched nor been touched by a girl, let alone locked lips with one. 

My teenage life sucked and I could see no way out. I would ride home, disappear into the garage and take out my disappointment on a canvas of some sort, by throwing paints and random found objects at it, convincing myself that I would be the next Jackson Pollock.

Then one Saturday in mid-August, I was a week away from turning sixteen. My parents were going out to a friends for dinner and I was therefore babysitting, again.

Subconsciously, I started singing in my head, Summer lovin’, happens so fast. Summer lovin’… as my brain prepared me for yet another inevitable date with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John.

As my parents pulled out of the driveway, leaving us freshly fed and digging into some vanilla ice cream, with Travolta flicking his collar up and combing his greased hair, the phone rang.

Hi Lubo! (my nickname, short for Lubomirski).  What are you doing tonight? There are a group of us going to meet a bunch of girls from the local school. I managed to get some beers and my older brother gave me a joint.”

My heart sank into my melted vanilla ice cream. Wait, who’s going? I asked.

A bunch of us. My friend replied.  That brunette that we saw at the fair last month will be there and she’s bringing some friends. We are all meeting at the city center in thirty minutes. You in?

Shit, I can’t make it, I’m babysitting and my parents just left.”

OK, see you Monday. I gotta run.  Before he hung up, I could hear my friends in the background laughing and teasing each other about the prospect of any female interaction. I could feel my chest imploding with jealousy. I wanted to tear the phone from the wall and smash it against the floor.

My ears started ringing as I stared at the floor, phone hanging from one hand, whilst in the other room my brother and sister sang along to the Pink Ladies, as they wailed about lost love.

You guys stay here, I barked at them.  I’m going into the garden for a while. 

I went up to my room and grabbed a box of matches from my shelf and ran down the stairs and out of the front door.  Sucking back tears, I stormed across the road into the field opposite my house.

The sky seemed to echo my state of mind as swatches of red, purple and orange, swept across the dusk sky.

The crops were tall at this time of year and whenever we entered the field, we kept to the tracks of the tractor, so as not to disturb the harvest. But tonight I didn’t care. All I could think about were the stories that would be shared when I saw my friends again. The tales of young promiscuity, phone numbers swapped, innocent and not so innocent flirting. Drunken mistakes and stoned laughing fits.

I stomped straight through the crops, to a spot in the middle of the field where there were two hay-bales randomly propped up against each other.

I wanted to scream, but I knew that this would only startle my sister, who would come running out onto the road, so I punched and kicked the crops surrounding me, like a drunkard fighting imaginary foes.

This wasn’t working. There was no desired effect of lasting damage or rebellion. Panting and out of breath I looked back to where I entered the field. My path was perfectly flattened with each crop lying parallel to its neighbor.

Crop circle. I thought. I would make a crop circle in the middle of this field, therefore satisfying my need for rebellion and damage, with a sprinkling of creativity thrown in for good measure.  And so, feet angled outwards like Charlie Chaplin, I started rotating around the center, spiraling slowly outwards.

The crops put up surprisingly little resistance and lay down obediently once under foot. Around and around I went, increasing the size of my crop circle, until it had grown to about eighty feet in diameter.

I paused to look at my creation and walked to the center point. The sky had shifted from red, to inky black and the field was bathed in bright moonlight as the full lunar face rose above the trees on the distant hill.

Another crop circle with rings, done a few months later

The stars that night were bright and there was not a cloud in sight to mask the beauty of the heavens. My breathing slowed and the adrenaline that had been pumping so aggressively during my creative rebellion had now dissipated, and I surrendered, slumping cross legged to the ground.

With a head of wheat between my fingers, my thoughts leapt unwillingly back to my friends and where they would be right now, and I started to sob. Why couldn’t we move house? Why couldn’t I be older? Why couldn’t I be cooler?

I suddenly remembered the matchbox in my pocket that I had retrieved from my room. Inside was an old joint that I had brought from a friend a few months ago, with the idea of sharing it with a girl in this very field. But to hell with it, I was just going to get stoned by myself and numb this pain in my gut.    

I removed the joint from the box. It looked more like a chewed up toothpick than anything I had seen in the movies, but it would suffice. There were two matches left beside it. I took one out and struck it against the side of the box. Nothing. I struck it again, still nothing. I struck it a third time and the head of the match crumbled.

I took the last match out and with much more care, gently ran it along the side of the matchbox. The magnesium sparked to life and I raised it towards my mouth where my medicine hung, or rather drooped, ready for deployment.

Suddenly, the westerly wind that made the field dance so beautifully, blew across me, snuffing out the match, before I could marry fire to joint.

No, no, no! Are you kidding me?!

Again my eyes welled up, but this time I shook with anger rather than sorrow. I was alone under this ocean of stars, spot lit by the moon, with nothing but my envious thoughts to chew away at my flesh. I took a deep breath, got to my knees and looked up.

One day, I will be living far away from these fields, this town and these people. My voice trembled, getting louder.  One day I will be living somewhere like Paris, Hong Kong or New York, doing a job that I love, where I get to be creative and travel and meet thousands of different people every year. One day I will have kissed a girl and even made love to someone, and I will be married to a beautiful woman who doesn’t know me like this, but as a confident man who has his shit together, and she will be from a different country with a different story to mine.

I closed my eyes and lowered my head.  Please… Fuck, please.

I then stood up, took three deep breaths, wiped my cheeks and slowly spun around, looking at the stars in all directions.

Please, I muttered one last time under my breath, before returning to my home’s glowing windows and the dulcet tones of 1950’s teenage lust.

Unbeknownst to that 15-year-old boy, that was not only a vow to myself , but also to the master puppeteer upstairs.

And so here I sit, thirty years later in my New York house, with my Cuban Italian wife and my two sons, all of whom I give thanks for every single day. And tomorrow, I leave again to travel to my next job as a fashion and portrait photographer, with a new team of people to meet and new creative problems to happily solve.

………………………………………………………………………………………….

P.S.  A few days later, the farmer came knocking on our door to ask if we had seen anything suspicious in his field.  Whilst my family reacted with shock and disbelief, I stayed silent and emotionless, eyes glued on John Travolta’s chin.

The field was also used for my first photography ideas

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