I went outside today and it was cold. My body was confused because my face felt warmth from the sun. My limbs wanted me to shed the heavy outer layers I carried but my brain knew I couldn't. I felt the rays of the sun, but it was still winter and the temperature was near 40 degrees. My body told me that it would be fine, that it wanted to run and play, to throw and catch things with no hindering jacket or long pants on. My mind knew better. It told me the truth. I would do these things with no warmth for a few moments, but then my body would start to ache and cry for protection. I would then have to put my coat back on, and putting on the layers that I believed I was free from for another season would be too much. March is not winter, but not yet spring, either. I can wait.
I read a Robert Frost poem yesterday. It was about a flower resting on a windowsill during the winter. A harsh, rough, cold winter breeze blew by and swept against the window, saw the flower, and loved it. The flower did not know what to do. A pane of glass separated them. The breeze left.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Tales from the Woods
A Forest is a strange place. When I was younger, the wood behind my parents' house was many things. My brother, friends, and I played there daily. We searched for new paths, animals, creaks, hideouts, uprooted trees, and criminals. The Forest was not bigger than a few square miles, if that, and seperated our middle-class neighborhood from a country high way and a trailer park. It was riddled with paths and our forts and hideouts, its creaks stopped by our dams, and its inhabitants spooked by our constant yelling and whooping. I think that we suprised the Forest most of the time, but the most memorable moments were when it suprised us. A Forest is a place for adventure, but also of fear and danger. We looked for these and found them without much difficulty.
forests in literature have been used in many ways. Sherwood Forest was rumored to be haunted. Robin Hood and his gang used this to their advantage by setting up camp there. Using the forests reputation, they were able to conduct their crusade against the greedy rich for longer than would have been possible anywhere else. The tales of Robin Hood and his merry men from my boyhood excited me. The Forest was their home and they knew its secrets and intricacies and used them to their advantage. Their hideout was one day found and attacked, but many of them still escaped into the woods and the Merry Men eventually arose in victory. I wanted to have this relationship with the small patch of woods behind our house. I wanted to know where this creak came from and went to and where its deepest point was, I wanted to know where the tallest tree in the woods was, I wanted to know what types of animals lived there and how I could track them, and most of all, I wanted to know the Forest, to be able to get from one end to the other without having to explore or to cut my way through brambles and weeds.
One spring day my brother, my friend Allan, Allen's little brother Neil, and myself were trying to dam up the creak again. We were in a relatively open area, with not much brush around and tall trees with a canopy that the sun just barely peaked through. We were combining piles of sticks and leaves with mud and sand from the creek's own bed to make a sopping mass of nature that spanned the entire creak. Our hope was to create a small pool that would attract wild life, like crayfish, frogs, turtles, raccoons, deer, and, as the rumor went, a bobcat.
The dam we built was fairly successful, and when we returned a few days later a large pool, almost knee deep, had formed behind the dam and it was an ideal place to search for crayfish, frogs, turtles, and other aqueous animals, but we never had the patience to hide out nearby and watch for deer or the ever-illusive, rumored-to-be-in-the-woods-some-where bobcat. We spent most of our time their splashing about in the water, yelling at each other to get out of our crawdad hunting zones, and often we ended days there in water and mud fights.
On a particularly overcast day in early fall we returned to the dammed creak to find the dam destroyed. The water had finally burst through and flooded the surrounding area creating an enormous, smelly mud hole. Being young boys we had no problems walking through it to find the remnants of our dam, a large strip of sand, broken sticks, and wet, spread out in a five feet radius from the original spot of the dam. Allan and I were the oldest of the bunch and had put the most work and thought into the dam. We looked at each other with a bit of regret, but with excitement brimming at the surface.
"This stinks," I said. My shoes sank almost completely into the mud. I remember thinking my mom wouldn't be happy, but she rarely felt happy whenever we came back from these trips.
"Yeah, but look at all of these cool mud. Look at that tree over there," Allan said and pointed at a tree that was originally five yards from the creek bed. The mud hole had crept up to it. A large branch of these tree had broken off during a storm. It leaned up against the tree and was ensnared there by vines and weeds. It curled down, almost in the shape of a slide, into the mud. That's what Allan thought of.
Naturally, we slicked up the slide with some water and mud and our little brothers tried it first.
forests in literature have been used in many ways. Sherwood Forest was rumored to be haunted. Robin Hood and his gang used this to their advantage by setting up camp there. Using the forests reputation, they were able to conduct their crusade against the greedy rich for longer than would have been possible anywhere else. The tales of Robin Hood and his merry men from my boyhood excited me. The Forest was their home and they knew its secrets and intricacies and used them to their advantage. Their hideout was one day found and attacked, but many of them still escaped into the woods and the Merry Men eventually arose in victory. I wanted to have this relationship with the small patch of woods behind our house. I wanted to know where this creak came from and went to and where its deepest point was, I wanted to know where the tallest tree in the woods was, I wanted to know what types of animals lived there and how I could track them, and most of all, I wanted to know the Forest, to be able to get from one end to the other without having to explore or to cut my way through brambles and weeds.
One spring day my brother, my friend Allan, Allen's little brother Neil, and myself were trying to dam up the creak again. We were in a relatively open area, with not much brush around and tall trees with a canopy that the sun just barely peaked through. We were combining piles of sticks and leaves with mud and sand from the creek's own bed to make a sopping mass of nature that spanned the entire creak. Our hope was to create a small pool that would attract wild life, like crayfish, frogs, turtles, raccoons, deer, and, as the rumor went, a bobcat.
The dam we built was fairly successful, and when we returned a few days later a large pool, almost knee deep, had formed behind the dam and it was an ideal place to search for crayfish, frogs, turtles, and other aqueous animals, but we never had the patience to hide out nearby and watch for deer or the ever-illusive, rumored-to-be-in-the-woods-some-where bobcat. We spent most of our time their splashing about in the water, yelling at each other to get out of our crawdad hunting zones, and often we ended days there in water and mud fights.
On a particularly overcast day in early fall we returned to the dammed creak to find the dam destroyed. The water had finally burst through and flooded the surrounding area creating an enormous, smelly mud hole. Being young boys we had no problems walking through it to find the remnants of our dam, a large strip of sand, broken sticks, and wet, spread out in a five feet radius from the original spot of the dam. Allan and I were the oldest of the bunch and had put the most work and thought into the dam. We looked at each other with a bit of regret, but with excitement brimming at the surface.
"This stinks," I said. My shoes sank almost completely into the mud. I remember thinking my mom wouldn't be happy, but she rarely felt happy whenever we came back from these trips.
"Yeah, but look at all of these cool mud. Look at that tree over there," Allan said and pointed at a tree that was originally five yards from the creek bed. The mud hole had crept up to it. A large branch of these tree had broken off during a storm. It leaned up against the tree and was ensnared there by vines and weeds. It curled down, almost in the shape of a slide, into the mud. That's what Allan thought of.
Naturally, we slicked up the slide with some water and mud and our little brothers tried it first.
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