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A Day in the Jungle Scott had been dead for nearly a year when I found out about it. It had been twenty-two years since I had last seen my best friend from childhood, and one night it dawned on me to search around the Internet for any trace of him in my old hometown in Kansas. What I came across made my heart sink – an obituary for a 29-year old, dead after a fight in a Scottsdale, Arizona bar that left him with hemorrhaging of the brain. The perpetrator was being prosecuted for manslaughter, but that didn’t matter much to me – my first best friend was gone. My thoughts wandered aimlessly, as if I was suspended in a non-rhythmic trance. What was Scott like in the end? Was he still so small? Scott was a year younger than me, and about half my size, but very athletic and always on the go. I was tall, clumsy, and more into thinking than acting. It was always Scott who led the adventures, and the biggest adventure we went on was into the dreaded Hobo Jungle. In my fading memories of Kansas, it is always summer. The scorching sun was interrupted only by frequent thunderstorms, which nourished the crops and kept the prairies just above the level of being vast deserts. Our own little subdivision, in the sleepy town of Newton, was like an oasis in the midst of shimmering wheat fields. Its quaint ranch-style homes were clad in only the brightest hues of paint. Each house had at least one tree in front, but the oldest tree in the neighborhood was probably five years old. My only knowledge of woodlands was from my family’s yearly trips to Colorado. Hobo Jungle threaded along Slate Creek, along the edge of our subdivision and off across the flat land as far as my young eyes could see. It wasn’t a jungle; it wasn’t even a forest, really. The creek itself was dry most of the year, but cottonwoods and wild walnut trees grew up along its banks, in a depression in the prairie that had probably been carved over hundreds of years. It wasn’t a dense woods by any means – one could probably walk down the banks, cross the creek, and come out on the other side in a matter of seconds. But to the eyes of a nine-year old, it was a vast land of mystery. Scott had fed me with his stories of Hobo Jungle as long as I could remember.
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