It was all quarter-acre lots with smallish houses—five models to choose from: two split-levels, two ranches, one Colonial—leaving plenty of lawn, border hedges, trees and shrubs, vegetable patches and flower beds replacing the peach orchard that once stood—then in 1952 bulldozed into a moonscape, with only a dozen or so big oaks and maples allowed to remain here and there (the future owners arriving just in time to tell the woodman to spare that tree); but by 1962 it had filled with flora as people from across the Delaware moved in and surrendered to the urge to stake their claims with not merely chain-link fences and and property-line markers but gushing verdant exuberance, seemingly managed and manicured—but waiting for a chance to evade the mowers and hedge trimmers and pruning shears and limb saws, and rise in Edenic triumph once more, always growing to return to the time before houses and orchards and even Indians.
Despite all the lawns and gardens, there were even more people and pets, bikes and cars, garden sheds and swing sets and monkey bars and hammocks; and their children felt it first—the need for something wild, something haphazard, reckless. So almost from the start they began to look for places where nothing was tended—and where no one could see them except for whatever lived in the open. They found the edge of an abandoned construction site along a busy state road; an older building faced the traffic, and behind it a big shallow hole ringed with ten-foot mounds of excavated dirt had filled with rainwater. Who knows, though, if it was entirely rainwater? The surface was too smooth, with a multi-colored oil-sheen. Didn't really matter; Pete called it "Rainbow Lake," and they played king-of-the-hill and sailed makeshift boats on its viscous surface.
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