i'm tarzan

my experiments with towels-as-capes notwithstanding, the superhero that i aspired to be as a kid was not the as-yet-only-a-cartoon spider-man (whose costume was missing most of its webs, to save money) nor adam west's milk-chugging bat buffoon (remember, this was pre-dark knight)... no, my hero was an olympic swimmer and competitive yodeler from pennsylvania.

you got it: tarzan. specifically, johnny weismueller's tarzan.

every kid in my neighborhood watched those old movies, of course, along with the three stooges, the marx brothers, godzilla, and lost in space. there were only 3 channels back then - imagine! - plus the occasional fuzzy canadian transponder drift, so homogeneity was more-or-less inevitable. but there was something about weismueller's big, dumb brute that spoke to me.

for one thing, all he wore was a butt-flap, and no one gave him guff about grass stains. kids in my neighborhood wore shoes exactly 8 months of the year; the other months our feet became as tough as tar paper. if you walked on a piece of glass, it powdered, and any drops of blood could be remedied by a quick run under the sprinkler.

did i mention the trees? we were lucky enough to live in an area of town where there were still tracts of land that had yet to see a bulldozer. we lived in those woods, swung from the trees, caught snakes and praying mantises, built forts, and snoozed in the shade of old oaks while their leaves sighed like the tide. if a tree had branches, we climbed it, claimed it, and didn't regret it a bit if it turned out to be poison sumac (that happened a few times; we were slow learners).

in tarzan's jungle, right and wrong were absolutes, unlike the war in vietnam with its endless shades of grey (if it wasn't an actual war, why were we there? why couldn't we leave? how the heck did we lose?) and what happened during the dnc convention in chicago. on tarzan's escarpment, good guys were bloodied, but bad guys got eaten, and we didn't feel a bit sorry for them. tarzan was boss of africa, and any lions, cannibals, nazis or crocodiles that had a problem with that could put up their dukes and take their best shot. when it was over, his triumphant yodel proclaimed that all was right with the world.

i miss that. it's been a long time since i felt that all was right with the world. (plus he got to skinny-dip with maureen o'sullivan, something that impresses me more now than it did then.)

i'm old, now - old enough that a butt-flap won't quite do the job, and there's unlikely to be a vine in all of africa that can support me. but as i hang out next to our woods, smelling the riotous green rot, don't think that i'm not tempted to chuck it all and climb.

if only the jungle had wifi.