On Making A Man – Teamwork (Pt. 2)

All I had known was going it alone.  Once I had a friend, a partner I could lean on, the world seemed to open up its doors to me.

I have to say, elementary school was not an easy time for Your Narrator.  Issues at home (and I am in no way reducing anybody else’s home problems) made for a very unstable environment.  And even though I had “close aquaintances” for most of my schooling, and even talk to some of them still, to this day, I really only had one close friend to speak of.

I cannot recall exactly how our paths crossed, but by 5th grade, you could tell that we were friends, and by 6th grade, we were inseparable.  A pair of science nerds, to be sure; everything that could be related to our love of science was spoken about.  He might remember more of the details, but I recall that we were big into NASA at the time.  It was a great time to learn all about rockets, the physics and chemistry that controlled them, the biological constraints on life if man were to survive in space.  It was just before the Space Shuttle program took off in 1981, so this was all over the news, as far as we could tell.

The Educational Powers That Be played a dirty trick on us and we were separated in Junior High School. We both qualified for the gifted “SP” program.  I made it into the “2-year” version and he made the “3-year” option.  It was a bump in the friendship, yes, but we managed to make it work.  There is another story about this – I will leave it for a later time.

The working proof of this was the annual Science Fair.  Everybody in those days had to do something to participate.  When you were really young, your parents did most of the work, but you knew just enough to explain what might actually be going on.  In case you’re wondering, the old bicarb volcano was basically outlawed (!) as it didn’t really show much of anything about Earth Science.  I remember one of my older projects, which was simple but effective in showing the conversion of (potential) energy to motion (kinetic energy).  But those kiddie projects had to be put aside because, after all, this was Junior High School!

He and I knew we needed a killer project and so came up with an idea that was way before it’s time (in 1980, that is).  We had heard that Canarsie had once been swamps with industrial waste dumping, plus there were landfills all along the highway which formed the southern-most border of the community.  We’d just finished basic chemistry – how much can you learn in 7th Grade, right? – and came up with the idea of testing the waters around our community for residual contaminants. We were going Green just about the time Kermit the Frog started singing about his own issues with being Green.   Now, we were far from being grouped with environmental engineers, and the amount of Qualitative Analysis we’d had amounted to maybe 30 hours of beginners’ study each.  Determination, however, was in overabundance.  We hit the books and found quite a few simple tests that we, as school kids, could do.  Could we test for PCBs?  No.  But we could test the pH of the water and say whether it was in the normal range.  Couldn’t test for mercury, but lead was much easier.  You get the picture.  What you don’t see is that the testing was the easy part.  Getting the actual water samples was the true challenge.

Nobody got left behind, nobody played hero.  Most of all, nobody got hurt because we always watched out for each other.

For those not from our neighborhood, Canarsie is surrounded by water on three sides.  The western side had Paerdegat Basin.  The southern edge was Jamaica Bay.  And on the East, we had Fresh Creek.  Each of these had their own issues, and looking back, it’s a miracle that we weren’t classified as a local version of Love Canal.  Paerdegat Basin was (and still is) a poisoned waterway, with overflow sewage being dumped there every time it rains in Brooklyn.  Fresh Creek was fed (we were told) by a trickle of water from a subterranian river and it had lots of floating garbage in it.  Jamaica Bay had two landfills (including one where they pumped the solid waste from our sewer plants and the other one where the Mafia illegally dumped thousands of gallons of toxic materials) and this isn’t counting the shenanigans in the 1800’s that lead to “Dead Horse Beach” and the other dumps.  The last time I checked, there were still oil recovery booms around both of the two big landfills, trying to catch whatever might leach out of the ground.

Now, if we were normal kids, we would have just gone to the local pier, lowered our bucket with a rope and called it a day.  Nope – that didn’t get us what we wanted to see.  Time to get creative.

For each of the waterways, we managed to make it down to the water’s edge, and this allowed us to collect our multiple samples.    To reach the waters’ edge was a project in and of itself.  This meant either sneaking through holes in fences and beating a path through weeds (and ticks!) or walking several miles along the public beach, ducking under the highway overpass and then walking the shoreline.  In either case, we were not supposed to be there (and I am sure that if our parents knew all of the details, we’d’ve been killed or even worse).  What made this all the more challenging is that this was in early spring, so the sun set relatively early and it got cold at the same time.  Picture that you’ve walked this far and got your samples, and now you either have to walk back along the water in the dark or somehow find a path through the weeds and pray that the fence had a hole big enough to crawl through.  At the time, it was scary stuff.

The only thing that made it possible was that my friend was there with me.  We were a team, from conception of the idea all the way through to completion.  Nobody got left behind, nobody played hero.  Most of all, nobody got hurt because we always watched out for each other.  We carried shared water and snacks, science supplies and notebooks.  The science meant more because we were doing it as a team.  Contrary to what was written about me on my report card, I did manage to find a friend that I could “play nice” with.

With samples in bags, we trudged back to the center of Canarsie, where he lived, to store our samples until the next time we could test them.  We got real results, made a handful of posters explaining where we got the water from, what we tested for (and how) and our results.  Most of all, we kept everything super secret and didn’t tell anyone else about what we were doing.  I don’t even think we told the teachers and, looking back, this might have had them worried.

Day came and we set up shop in the cafeteria.  Posters went up.  Samples of water were present so you could get the authentic swamp smell.  Test tubes to show what we were expecting to see.  It should surprise absolutely nobody that we won the Fair.  I can’t recall if we won for the entire school or just 7th Grade, but we did it handily.  And I still have my Gold Medal to prove it.  I share it with you, above.

We now had to up our game, of course, because the Borough Science Fair was coming, and we wanted to do well there, too!  So we modified the posters, learned one more test, wrote up handout sheets to give to the judges.  We worked our buns off.  The Borough Fair happened over the course of a weekend, in the basement cafeteria of Midwood High School.  Yes, that is one of the big reasons I went there and not Canarsie’s local High School.

We thought we did well for what we had done.  In the end, we didn’t even make an Honorable Mention – we were outclassed by the kids who went to more specialized schools.  This would not, however, be the last time he or I would make it to the Borough Fair.

The story turns dark from here.  We fell apart in late 1980 primarily because I made a loser decision and let him down in a big way.  We didn’t speak for about 12 years.  And after that, we took another 20 year break.  I finally got up the balls to apologize for my idiot actions and we ended up doing dinner in Flushing and spoke as if little had changed in the years we were apart.  And we still talk two or three times a year ever since.

I’ve chosen to not name him as I don’t need to embarrass him (or otherwise) in public.  We’re still in each others’ circle of business contacts.  If he wants me to, I can go back and fill his name in later.  Or not – I respect his decision because he’s always been there, even when I wasn’t.

To you, Comrade, I raise a toast.  My first true friend – the person who showed me what teamwork was all about.