Cameron Park

My brother Micah and I must have gotten the wrong idea from so many books and movies about brothers fighting and assumed that it was a sort of requirement for any boys with the same parents to hurt each other. To fill our quota of brotherly harm, we scheduled a two-hour timeslot to punch and kick each other every Saturday morning. Micah had height, strength, and smarts on me, but I was much more willing to bite, scratch, and fake an injury for a cheap shot than he was, so we were more or less evenly matched. My Mom figured it was fine so long as we weren’t fighting on the stairs, but my Dad wasn’t quite so comfortable with his children having such a neatly scheduled battle, so he went on a campaign to find some other activity to replace our fights. None of them worked until he told me that he saw real-life Bionicles looking down from the cliffs above the riverside trail of Cameron Park, so I went along on a Saturday-morning bike ride with him just to see. I’m not sure if it was cleverness on his part or gullibility on mine, but when he pointed at the outlines walking by the rim of the cliff, I really believed that they were the bio-mechanical warriors I essentially worshiped back in those days. After that, I’d never pass up a trip to Cameron Park, hoping to catch a glimpse of a Nui-Rama buzzing above us, or Toa Lewa flying between the trees.

Cameron Park is the largest park in Waco, Texas, and just about the most Waco park in the world. The rocks are littered with trash, there’s an enormous and incredibly unstable limestone cliff that regularly collapses on the walking trail, the brush is mostly poison ivy, and something like 30% of the people in there at any given time are drunk. It’s a sprawling place with no clear edges: the trails weave through backyards and construction sites, so you’re never quite sure if you’re trespassing or not. A couple miles of wandering can bring you from a dry wood of dehydrated trees to a dense forest to a patch thick with bamboo. 

At least that’s how I remember it. The truth is, last time I saw it, I was at least a foot and a half shorter and a whole lot more imaginative than I am now. Maybe the way that the paths seemed to be constantly shifting, never the same way twice, was less a product of some magical quality than my terrible memory and short attention span forgetting roads as I walked them. Still, even if it wasn’t magical on its own, there was something about it that made me lose my bearing on the world. I always thought that my Dad was a little stupid for keeping track of which way it was back to the parking lot, and never surprised when we got lost. Direction didn’t seem to mean much in a place like this.

In a fit of nostalgia during my first year at college, I Googled Cameron Park and was surprised to learn that there was actually a rich body of folk tales surrounding the park. I was even more surprised to learn how boring they all were. There was something about unseen hands gripping lovers walking up a certain hill at night, a generic baby-sacrificing witch-ghost who haunted some graffiti covered stone archway out in the woods, and two Native American lovers who apparently jumped off the limestone cliff where the Bionicles used to congregate. But, as little as I connected with the stories surrounding those places, I could trace my memories back to the same emotions; the unease of walking through that ivy-and-spray-paint covered archway or the faintly terrifying wonder of staring up at the limestone cliffs and contemplating how far a plunge it would be. I guess folk tales are kind of like most cartoons: they don’t really work without some kind of nostalgia at work. Still, looking back at pictures of those old places, it felt like I’d built my own folktales around them through all those walks and bike rides. Folktales of senses instead of stories, of bent branches making portals into worlds of leaves and shadows and brightly colored plastic robots watching me from over the cliff, just a little too far away for me to know for sure who they were.