Finally, the Safari had enough food in hand and was ready to head out in search of adventure, some of it in living off the land.

Depending on the time of year and what our kid culture memories told us about locations and availabilities, we might have a number of opportunities.

Across the street and three houses down in the Couch family’s backyard, there were three possibilities. Several times a year their Japanese plum tree produced thousands of plums that when ripe looked so delicious. One of the earliest and most disappointing lessons of a Southern boyhood was to learn that beneath the luscious skin of a ripe Japanese plum was a behemoth of a seed. The luscious “fruit” was really there to entice the unwitting gatherer into moving and then discarding the seed some further distance from the tree. It was bait all right, but without even the switch.

Another source of inaccessible and inedible “protein,” if you want to call it that was the abandoned water fountain in that family’s side yard. I never saw it really operate as a water fountain, but it always had enough water to support a thriving population of tadpoles. Later, we would put these observations of frogs in various states of development to use and a better understanding nature, evolution, development. For now, they were temporary objects of our fun to be watched, poked with a stick, and sometimes gathered into cups to be taken home and fed bread in the hopes they were would grow into frogs. That never happened, they grew into dead tadpoles instead.

Finally, that yard also included a large stand of bamboo. Now that, was a natural resource.
Long before Game Boy, we could spend the better part of an afternoon figuring out what we could do with various parts of that bamboo stand.

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