Not too long ago my family participated in an annual event entitled "las corridas." This event was composed of early days, hard work, much fatigue, and for the kids, fun! While the parents worked all day, the children remained behind to do as we pleased amongst ourselves and the trees. Memories of the hard field work of ever year allow me to know appreciate what I have now as well as cherish the memories of my fun in the trees.

It was our second year of going to Oregon, and I was only seven years young. My age prevented me from taking part in the harvest, so I stayed behind with about twenty other kids at our cabins. We were good children, and for that very reason we were left alone everyday when the parents went to work at three in the morning. Our daily ritual for the summer of 1996 consisted of waking up early in order to see the sunrise (which was very beautiful, since it rose to illuminate vegetation so very green) and play a quick game of hide and seek in the dark. Mornings were better than evenings for this game, since the darkness allowed for good hiding while the rising sun prevented any child getting lost for the night. We learned this only after a friend of mine got lost in the surrounding wilderness until an angry adult went to find him. After our early fun we would scavenge each others cabins for the best mixture of junk food and kool-aid. The rest of the day would involve getting lost in the woods and finding our way back before our parents came back from. Sometimes this proved a difficult task, such as whenever we spotted the three legged squirrel. This was a sneaky squirrel, never did we catch it on our own accord, but then again, the oldest child there was only seven. The trees were very tall but had many branches, allowing us climb them with relative ease. This came in handy whenever we tracked that accursed beast. We would resort to capturing lizards and grasshoppers since the squirrel was much too sly. Every day was the same, but yet different; we saw the same type of geography around us at all times, though every tree was different and had its way of being known. There was the tree where the big, gray owl which stayed there at night and the one that the little owl inhabited. There was the tree with the bird eggs and the one where we killed a giant lizard named Godzilla. There was the rock that my friend tripped on and broke his glasses while chasing a dog, the steep hill that we tried to climb every day (but only a kid from Fresno could climb) and the patch of treeless land where we went to war. It was this last piece of terrain that would send us to the cherry fields to work the next year, but it was definitely worth it.

It was either my idea or that of another kid my age (we were the oldest) to have a giant battle that would be worthy of a "corrido," or song that captured the events event. We were to do something so great that generations of cherry pickers would remember what we had accomplished. The other kid was the one to suggest that we should have a full out war. It sounded like a great idea at the time, and it also sounded very exciting. It should be known that this was a hyperactive six year old whom we affectionately called "pointy" (I do not recall why) but should have been instead called "trouble," since that was all that ever came out of him. We gathered all the eggs in our cabins and then evenly distributed them amongst ourselves. We used the eggs, in substitution of rocks for grenades and bombs in order to have the explosion effect. The idea sounded much better than the event that took place, since we ran through about a month's worth of eggs in about five minutes. We were still hit with fatigue though, so we decided to make some refreshments. This was the second idea that sounded good at the time. What we did next was gather every cabin's kool-aid packages and dump them into a giant Igloo container filled with water. We mixed it all together with about two and a half bags of Pure Cane Sugar (we decided that was enough.) Unfortunately, the mix did not taste very good so we left it in the cabin where we made it. Three hours later the parents came home, and so did angry tempers.

The sight of a blackish liquid in his cabin was reason enough for my friend's dad to be mad, since he tasted it and realized it was water, sugar, and probably his kool-aid. He did not find out it was the kool-aid of everybody else until the other parents found out about their eggs thanks to a big mouthed five year old. We were all to be punished with spankings and deprivation of outdoor activities for the rest of the summer (that was a whole three weeks!) During the day we were to be left under the care of a newly hired babysitter who made sure nobody had any fun. As angry as they might have been, no parents could incarcerate children because of their innocence, so we were let free to roam the trees once again (at least for that summer.) Every year that we went to Oregon we had unbelievable amounts of fun. We had pure fun without drinking or drugs, only bonding with nature and bonding with friends. We had fun where a tree was a fort, a bush a bunker, a squirrel a tiger, and eggs grenades. Although the summers consisted of hard work after that wonderful summer, we were still blessed with the moon light to continue our roaming of the land at night. We never did catch the squirrel, until a sixteen year old shot it with a pellet gun in the head. Unfortunately, we were not as excited about catching the three legged squirrel as we thought we would be. The summer was fun even with a dead squirrel, and I can only wish to return to the land of the trees.