Into the Woods
Story time from my childhood
This month I decided to foster my imagination through stories. I realized we tell ourselves stories about our life, our childhood, etc. Some people love to create stories, I mostly think about how to tell the true stories of my life. But while they can pop up in my head, memories from childhood that linger, I don’t usually take time to flesh them out, to really tell the story of the experience from beginning to end and then wonder (my May theme) why this story is important to me and why I roll it around in my head over and over again. I thought I would share one today.
When I was 7 my parents built a house out in what was at the time a far flung, barely suburb of Minneapolis, more like moving out to the country. Today it is a thriving metropolis but back then my grandparents acted like they were taking a day trip to come visit (it was less than an hour away from their homes in St Paul). My parents bought the last lot on the dead end of an established neighborhood where they built our house. Our street ended at a farm. Behind us was a 100 foot drop to a train track. This year the very last farm in that city will be developed into yet more housing for this now popular, upscale suburb. The farm at my dead end was turned into an industrial park during my childhood. Somehow they leveled the farm down to the train tracks and created one more lot at the end of my street keeping our neighborhood separate from the business district1.
Between our lot and the lot at the dead end was one more, now land locked, lot owned by the railroad. (Think of that dead space in the corner of your kitchen cabinets, that is this lot.) This is where I spent most of my childhood summers. My parents kept most of the back of our lot wooded and we could have played in there but the neighboring lot had something special. A very large tree which had at one point stood right on the edge of that steep hill down to the train tracks had fallen over before we came along. Its roots stayed in the ground just enough to keep it alive and continue to leaf out every season. It was perfect for climbing on and around, making into forts and expanding our imaginations. It could be a house, a boat, an obstacle course. It was dangerous and safe. You could be king of the hill on top or the peon on the ground below. One summer some other kids in the neighborhood decided it was their tree and we were not included. So on the days they took over we stayed inside watching 80’s afternoon tv. While it isn’t a core memory for me, my mom will still to this day2 bring up with bitterness the summer the neighbor kids wouldn’t let us play there. I never wonder where I got my mama bear instincts from.
The train tracks were another source of imagination. We would climb up and down that hill just because it was there. We were Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on an adventure walking the tracks with towering hills on either side of us. We weren’t in a suburban neighborhood we were alone in the middle of nowhere. One of our favorite things was to put pennies on the tracks and then wait for a train to come flatten them out. I remember one time realizing the train was coming3 as we were laying out our pennies and scrambling to get up the hill. We were hanging on half way up as it went by. How did we survive childhood? I suppose the same imagination that wanted to flatten pennies on the tracks could imagine what would happen if we didn’t get ourselves off that track quickly when the train was coming.
My brother and a friend spent an entire summer turning another tree a few feet down the hill from our backyard into a fort one year. They spent the whole summer cutting stairs in the side of the hill to reach it, then building a platform on a low branch, if memory serves there was a swing so you could swing out over the hill. (If my memory is incorrect then we will call this my active childhood imagination. There should have been one.) Years later, when my son was about 3 or 4, he found his way down to that tree on the old dirt stairs and then climbed the low branches. While he was conceptually only a few feet above the base of the tree and from the yard we were basically looking at him at eye level, none of us could reach him and the hill meant he was actually dangerously high above the landing point should he fall. Childhood adventures take on a different tone when you are the mom instead of the child.
One of the less fun things about our yard and the lot next door was the fact that it was full of poison ivy. This absolutely never deterred us from playing there despite the fact I was never able to figure out how to avoid it4. I can still remember the feel of the itchy blisters between my fingers and toes. Weirdly the dog loved to lick my poison ivy ridden toes and since it brought a measure of relieve I never stopped her. I even ended up staying home from school a couple times when it got too bad. I remember as a child hearing talk that the reason for the poison ivy was because there used to be fires on the hill caused by the trains. But I now live not far from the regional bike trail those tracks turned into and have not noticed poison ivy along this end of the tracks5. It got me wondering so I decided to do a little research and learned that while fires don’t bring poison ivy they do generously spread it. So I guess what might have been one little patch at some point had spread throughout our whole lot as well as both neighboring lots.
What it is about this story, about that tree laying down on the lot next door, about playing on the train tracks? Why did I continually risk poison ivy to go into the woods and why do I think so fondly about that portion of my childhood? How has it defined me?
I think one of the answers is freedom, independence, that is what it represents to me. That 80’s childhood where I could go into the woods and escape the world for a moment. A place I could be anyone, imagine any life scenario. It was an escape but not to run away from my life but to run to who I was becoming.
I still love to go into the woods. To hike, to experience the quiet, the mystery. It refreshes my soul in ways I can’t explain. When I am stressed I always want to run away to the woods. To just stand surrounded by trees for a little while and re-find my balance. I am not outdoorsy, I don’t love camping, I don’t pee in the woods, I don’t dream of roughing it. Ever. But I love the woods.
When my kids were growing up I tried to share this love with them. Our first house had woods on a hill that went up to train tracks. Basically what I grew up with in reverse. We moved away when my son was 8 but I was always trying to convince my 5 year old to go into the woods. I ended up signing him up for nature center pre school which gave him an organized taste of the woods and he fell in love with hiking through boy scouts.
A decade later I read “Last Child in the Woods” when my daughter was a pre-schooler who also did nature center pre school. Off we went to walk the nature center trails and then of course I would veer off course because that is where the real discovery’s are made, but not too far because I am a weird mix of rule follower and rule breaker. I want to break the rules but I don’t actually want to get in trouble. We got our cabin near the woods a few years later and she has been on lots of hikes in the woods with us where she complains the entire time and then tells us how much she loved it when we get home. And I think for her both are in fact true. She does have good things to say about 4-wheelering through the woods though.
One of my favorite nature center stories is from when my son was probably 5 or 6. I had my 3 nieces who were all around the same age. I was marching them down a trail through the woods which took us along a path that included a wooden boardwalk across a lake and marsh6. Just before we got to the end of that portion of the trail and back on land a fox jumps out of some marsh grass and stands on the trail looking at us. Behind us is slippery goose poop, to the sides are the lake. We have nowhere to run and so we all just stand there staring at the fox as he stands there staring at us. Finally, after what felt like forever but was probably a minute, he turns and runs off into the woods. We never saw him again. It was a highlight for me even as I am unsure the kids at their ages understood or even now remember it. Are the adventures we take our children on for them or us?
A few years later we moved to a house a few blocks from a creek where a fox lived. It became a regular occurrence to look out the back window and see him walking down our alley. While never the thrill of that moment on the trail, seeing the fox never got old. Animals are part of that wooded adventure, they live there surrounded by the trees and remind me for a moment of that place I spent my childhood becoming.
In a couple weeks I am going up to my cabin alone for the first time. John will be gone for a week and I have decided to take a couple days for my own adventure. I have a favorite path I take when I am up there. Can’t wait to go sit in the woods, imagine adventures and discover who I am becoming in this season.
Dirt moving and engineering are magical. I could run straight off the end of the street through a farm field and now there is a 100 foot drop at the end of the street into an industrial park that feels so far away it does not connect to our neighborhood at all. City planners and city engineers are magical.
Legit she mentioned it a couple weeks ago.
There was actually a crossing further down the tracks we could see when standing on them and there was a light that turned green when the train was coming.
To this day I cannot identify poison ivy. In concept I know what it looks like but not with confidence. I am constantly saying to John when we hike, “is that poison ivy?” I am not as brave at this age when it comes to skin rashes as I was when I was 10.
OK I would not know if I saw poison ivy on this end of the trail but I actually asked someone who lives off the trail and he said he does not know of poison ivy along this section.
No railing along the boardwalk and covered in slippery goose poop. I am the complete wild card aunt who does not concern herself with safety measures for the impulse control impaired 4-7 year old’s. They were fine. And nobody else in the family was there to see the potential danger of them slipping into the water. So it was fine. Don’t tell anyone…