The Way Back is Dark and Narrow

  *This post is not about woodworking or craftsmanship. It’s just a personal story I feel like telling. Hope no one minds the digression. 

I grew up in rural Connecticut. “Rural” is a relative term here. My neighborhood was a cluster of Colonial farms long ago chopped up into subdivisions. Modern, two-story homes sit next to farm-houses from two centuries ago. Driveways were ploughed through the old rock walls that edged cornfields a hundred years ago. The main streets are paved wagon-trails; narrow and twisty as a snake. 

My parent’s place was one of the few intact farmsteads when they bought the house, the barn, and a few acres in the late 1980s. Another 90 acres went to a developer and was promptly tied up in zoning disputes for the next 15 years. So, at 8 years old, I arrived on a New England farm that had sat undisturbed for decades. The developer who owned the land was a friend of my parent’s and he didn’t mind if we walked on the old farmland while he fought to build houses on it. 

I had almost a hundred acres all to myself. 

New England is terrible farmland. It’s hilly, wet, and the ground is packed with rocks like chocolate chips in a cookie. Don’t imagine the orderly squares of golden wheat you’d see in the American Mid-West. Instead, you’ll have to picture blob-shaped fields squeezed in next to wooded swamps and car-sized crags of weathered, gray stone. Most of Connecticut’s forests have been cut down, but they’ve simply regrown, quiet and stubborn as the people who live there. In between the fields, the woods are as wild and dusky as anything Tolkien ever put to paper. 

This is where I grew up. 

My backyard was a tumble of meadows, streams, and sudden hills covered in oaks and maples. Stands of white pine huddled together and dropped their needles in ankle-deep carpets that muffled any footstep. Old rock walls ran through patches of forest and cow-sized boulders sat in clumps at the edges of fields. Had they been dragged there by a farmer and a team of oxen? Had they been nudged into place by the glaciers of another Age? I still don’t know. 

There was a swamp of waist-deep muck and hummocks of leathery grass that poked out of the mud like barnacles on a boat hull. Sometimes, I’d take an old broom handle for balance and go jumping from one mound to the next, terrified and thrilled by the idea that I might slip into the brown water. Other days, I gripped a wooden sword and crashed through stands of grass as tall as I was, slashing away at imaginary monsters. I had a small bow and blunt-tipped arrows that I sent sailing through the woods to thunk into the sandy bark of an ancient pine trunk. 

But I haven’t even told you the half of it. 

In the 1940s, the farm was owned by a famous Connecticut philanthropist. He was an heir to some industrial fortune and spent his days funding improvements to the local hospital and living the high life on his New England farm. He took the largest pond down in the woods and turned it onto a mini-resort. He trucked in sand for a beach at the edge of the water and built a half-dozen little log cabins with electricity and changing rooms and a pink Frigidaire that must have been stuffed to bursting with beer and cold cuts. There was a tennis court. 

The philanthropist died and the farm was vacant for a while. Details are sketchy, but by the time my patents bought their slice of the old estate, the years had pulled everything half-way to the ground. The log cabins still stood but they were starting their slow tumble back into the earth. The pond was half-filled with silt and a snapping turtle the size of a manhole cover had moved in. Weeds erupted though the tennis court and stood like cacti in a desert. Everything was covered in a rind of spider-webs and pine needles. And there I was, 8 years old and gripping a wooden sword, wandering daily through all of it, slack-jawed at the sheer rotting craziness of the whole thing. 

And look: I was a weird kid. I didn’t have a lot of friends and I never got along with the few other kids in the neighborhood. I played alone a lot. I hiked and fished and just imagined my way through my childhood out in the woods. 

Once, I stumbled into a complete deer skeleton laying scattered on the forest floor. The skull sat on my bedroom shelf for years. Another day, I found a fist-sized chunk of rose quartz so clear and pale that it nearly glows in your hand. It’s a cliché to say that every day was an adventure, but it honestly was.

The time I spent in those woods made me. 

Being alone like that in such a dark and wild landscape lit up my imagination. I loved fantasy novels and acted them out. I was the hero and villain. I killed the dragon. I was the dragon. I made up my own stories and the land echoed them back. A dead tree trunk was a tower. A round bolder was a hermit’s hut. A twisted branch was a troll’s club, dropped in panic on a midnight raid. Every scrap of the land was a story, an idea, a spark.

When there’s no one around to see you, no one to judge you, you really can think of anything. You can be anything. 

But you know how the story goes. I didn’t stay a child forever. Soon enough, I was a teenager, and the old woods behind my parent’s house just kind of faded out. Those woods couldn’t help me make new friends or keep the ones I had. They couldn’t help me talk to girls. They couldn’t give me a career or a living.

So I drifted away from the outdoors. My wooden sword sat in some corner of the barn and turned gray with age. I discovered video games. I took up the guitar. I went to parties.

I think I was about 15 when the houses finally started going up in my woods. It all seemed absurd to me. One house was plunked down next to the philanthropist’s pond, where the land was as damp as a sponge. Driveways were plunged straight through swamps and gaudy McMansions were thrown up in the middle of fields. These were homes built by people who couldn’t see the land; they didn’t know it. They couldn’t set a house where it would catch the morning sun. They couldn’t plan the view out a kitchen window because they had no idea what to look for. These houses were like Lego bricks mashed into the land by a giant fist. It was grim and depressing.

But I didn’t cry while my childhood was paved over. At that age, I had bigger problems and the playgrounds of my youth were as distant as broken toys jammed under the bed. I saw the land being chewed up and crisp, ugly houses being built, but I hardly noticed. I remember the day my father and I closed up a hole in our fence, the last little entry point I had down to my woods. I think maybe I was a little sad, but mostly I just wanted the job done so I could go watch TV.

Those of you who know me know the rest of the story: college, then work, then graduate school, more work, a tooth-and-claw struggle into an academic position and a quiet exit when things didn't work out. Then a hired woodworker. Then a custom furniture maker. Then a video creator and author.

And somewhere in there, the woods came back. As I got older, and especially as I moved around the country, I realized what a rare childhood I’d had. Friends of mine grew up in tiny housing developments, or apartments, or trailer parks. Lots of them never even had a yard. I had a whole world and I didn’t even realize what a big deal that was until it was long, long gone.

My woods came back to me in daydreams as I stood at a cash register, stocked a shelf, or killed time in a grad school library. They came in bright flashes of memory as I drove down the road and the trees reached over for a second and threw my car into shadow. My woods came in vivid, nighttime dreams where I was young again and wandered again and was alone in the wild again.

I was probably in my twenties before I really understood what I’d lost. And then, I felt the loss that I barely noticed as a teenager when my little world was swallowed up by other people’s upper-middle-class lifestyle. And my sadness didn’t matter at all because my woods had been gone for years. 

And look, we’re all grownups here. We know that when something’s really gone, it’s gone forever. I know that the woods and swamps of my youth have been dug and paved and landscaped into oblivion. They’re mostly gone and a little bit that’s left has become someone else’s backyard, as inaccessible to me as another planet. There’s no going back there.

Or is there?

Just last week, I took my little daughter home to see my parents, who still live on their slice of colonial farmstead. Just the land around their house and barn is beautiful enough to entertain any six-year-old. I showed my daughter the cracks in a rock wall that will hide a treasure and the dim folds in a hedge that will hide a whole person and let them watch the world in secret. She loved it.

But I can’t go home without staring over the back fence and wondering how much of what I loved has been obliterated. How much is still there? Could I wait until dark, hop the fence, and prowl darkly back to my favorite paths? For a big guy, I’ve got a quiet step. No one would notice me.

Or they would, and they’d call the cops.

Besides, all that sneaking and pretending and hiding from grown-up eyes, that’s a child’s game. I’m a grown up now and when grownups want something, they ask. So, I did.

I walked down the long, ridiculous driveways, knocked on the front doors of my parents’ neighbors and just asked. 

And of course, everyone was very nice. They were a little confused at first. People in Connecticut are private (maybe a little uptight) and they are not used to folks showing up unannounced on the front doors of their country estates. But I’m a good talker and everyone sort of shrugged and said some variation of, “You want to go for a walk…back there? I’ve lived here for 10 years and I’ve never been back there.” And I would smile and explain myself again. Slowly. And they would smile back and shrug and tell me to have fun.

One gentleman walked me to the back of his yard, where his lawn suddenly turned into chest-high field grass. He told me he never walks down there because of “you know, tics and stuff.” He said he could hear a creek in the distance and asked if that’s where I played. He told me I was welcome to go down there, but I better keep my phone handy in case I got lost. I told him I couldn’t possibly get lost.

And so, last week, after more than 20 years away, the bald and grown-up version of me went crashing through a tangle of thorns and undergrowth and into my woods. They were mostly still there. 

There are houses back there now, but they were built on the high, dry land of the hayfields. The woods and streams and swamps are too wet and rocky for building, so they were left alone while time moved on around them.

Wait. Did I mention the cows? I don’t think I did. 

When I was a boy, a local farmer pastured his cows in the fields where I played. The occasional, cud-chewing herd doesn’t seem important, but it was. Even a few dozen cows will keep a field clean and low. Their grazing trims the grass and blocks the growth of trees and shrubs that try to slip out of the woods and plant themselves out in the sun. Even more, the cows would get bored with the fields and go tromping into the woods themselves, where they would tear up the undergrowth and eat the saplings as they sprouted. I never gave the cows much thought, but in their constant eating and stomping and shitting, they held back the press of vines and brambles that will choke a patch of woods. Because of those cows and their endless grazing, the land of my childhood was open and almost park-like, even for all its wildness. The woods were close and dark in the middle, but the edges were open for anyone to walk in, especially a little boy who was bookish and not really so very adventurous. 

So, when I showed up last week, the largest hayfield was a riot of bushes and saplings. The spaces that hadn’t been mowed were half-way to a jungle. Give a white pine a patch of clear ground and it will shoot skyward like a rocket. Some of these trees were 20 feet tall. Just yesterday it was a field, and my mind could hardly take it in. I stopped in the field long enough to snap a few pictures, but then I pressed on to the woods.

The line between field and forest was like a ramp of solid green starting ankle-high at the edge and rising in a snarl of vines and bushes right up to the trunks themselves. Where I had once just skipped in under the trees, now I had to fight my way through. As the bushes got closer and taller, I twisted sideways, tight-roped through tiny game trails, and finally crawled last few feet until I could burst through into the shade and the carpet of dry leaves.

And in under there, things were surprisingly…the same. There was the same spot where the creek, a fence, and a rock wall met at a corner and just guided you into the wood. There was a high ridge (much higher than I remembered), with an old track running atop it. It could’ve been an old wagon trail or a dirt road leading to one of the little mica mines that dot the area. Whatever it was, it was still flat and stony and surprisingly free of trees; a broad, easy path for the traveler’s feet.

I walked and the details came back. The place where the creek tumbled around a patch of round boulders. The big rock, flat as a tabletop and covered in an inch of green moss. In my memory, there had been a place where the creek disappeared, but you could still hear it gurgling underground. In that spot now, a single tree lays fallen and uprooted. I guess the water just ran underneath that web of roots when the tree was still alive, but the disappearing creek was a thrilling mystery of my childhood.

A lot of things were different. As you’d expect, everything was just smaller in a grown man’s eye. A patch of ground where I would have ranged for half a day as a boy took me 20 minutes to cross on grownup legs. Some of the enormous, grandfatherly trees I remember are only medium-sized. All these woods are pretty new, I suppose.

Other things were just gone. I built a fort, or at least the start of one, but there’s no sign of it. In another spot, I’d made a circle of stones and my parents and I had built a fire and made s’mores one night. I wanted to find that spot, but it was gone, buried under leaves or just swept away. I don’t know.

On the way out, I passed the philanthropist’s pond. There’s only one cabin left and everything around the water is manicured and polite. I remember weeping willows drooping stringy leaves into the water, stacks of dead branches, and tiny turtles sunning themselves on rocks. That’s all gone now. The weird, tumbledown landscape of my youth has been turned into someone’s front yard.

I could get upset about that. I could get upset about a lot of things that are old or rotting or just gone. But it’s not like I’m the first person to walk this land. I’m probably not even the one who loved it most. Imagine the farmer, the pioneer who cleared it. Imagine the man and his wife and his children who hacked a farm out of the northeastern wilds and maybe grew enough food their first year to just barely escape starving over the winter. Imagine them slowly prospering and building my parents’ house, the place where I grew up. Bring those people back and let them see what’s happened to their land. I bet their hearts would snap from the strain.

Not me. I feel okay. I can look back and realize that the vast landscape of my youth wasn’t some unchanging wonderland. It was just a moment. A brief period in between farm and neighborhood where land sat waiting to endure the next wave of humans to come and use it. The trees and the fields grew. A herd of dairy cows kept things neat. And in between one moment and the next, one boy packed in years of climbing, jumping, splashing, yelling, and fighting. 

I got something almost no one else has. I had a stretch of boyhood that fires my mind to this very day. I won’t waste a minute being sad about the parts that are buried under someone’s foundation or the other parts that just won’t conform to my memory. None of that matters because it’s all still there. Waiting.

* If you've made it this far, then thanks for sticking with me. This is kind of an experiment for me. I could do more writing like this and I will if people want to read it. Let me know in the comments. Thanks for your time.

--Rex