I ran down the path, bare feet flying on our forest floor. I liked to run the paths we had made, paths mostly free of gooseberry thorns. Still, I had to be careful. When you grow up going barefoot spring, summer and most of autumn, you learn to hold your feet differently. And keep an eye out for things that look sharp and sticky.
"Our forest." Potent words to an eight-year-old. Had the land next to ours been bought by someone else, had the land become a subdivision as had been threatened a decade earlier before recession brought progress to a halt, my mom said she would move. I was horrified at the time, unable to imagine home as any other place than the one I knew. "I won't live next to a subdivision," my mom replied and she meant it.
Our forest was still scarred by bulldozer tracks, now mostly overgrown. A crew had felled several of the old growth oaks on that 22 acres of river bluff timber, and I knew each and every one of the remaining trees by that first year after my mom landed the real estate deal that secured our name to that particular piece of property. For a young boy, the 22 acres were a wonderland.
For the next quarter of a century, our forest became a sacred space. I grew through adolescence in that place, shaded, secure beneath a leafy canopy that understood me in ways in which I could not even understand myself. There were the plum thickets near the barn, plum thickets magical after a snow, thickets through which I would crawl, pretending to be a rabbit. Beyond, stately but small-in-stature sassafras trees. The second sassafras (the one to the right of the trail) was home to a large jack-in-the-pulpit lily that bloomed for Mother's Day. I would watch for that lily, watch and wait. And once even photographed the pitcher plant bloom for an article.
Down near the ravine, black walnuts and wild grapes and the deer trail that ran the edge of the muddy bluff. In a show of teenage strength, I dragged big rocks from that long and winding ravine to place in a garden near the house. When winter froze the world still, I would go to the ravine to ice skate the stream. When winter froze the world even further and temperatures plummeted sub-zero, I formed a plan. Skates slung over my shoulder, I slipped on fleece moccasins, the closest thing to barefoot. I still remember the feel of the snow, magical and light as I ran down the trail. Once that winter my mom snapped a photo of me skating, catching me mid-stride, all adolescent angles. My big sister saw the photo later and laughed harshly at the ungainliness of the moment. Inwardly, I was sad.
There was the Indian Tree, a white oak bent to direct a people long-gone, thoughtlessly cut apart by loggers and left for dead. There was the Winnie-the-Pooh Tree, a perfectly proportioned oak that looked over the far side of the ravine. And there was the ancient and massive Morning Hawk Oak, a black oak so-named because most mornings, a red tailed hawk would land there.
Most important to me though were the Sentinel Oaks, a white oak and a black oak through which we had crafted the first path into our forest. Down, past the sassafras, over the wet-weather seep where morel mushrooms grew, around the sloping meadow of grasses and briars and raspberry canes. The oaks were old and massive, the haunt of squirrels and crows. Unknown to me at the time, that February evening after my mom closed on the property, she put on her worn green coveralls and hurried to those oaks, placing her hands on their cold and rugged bark. "You're safe as long as I'm alive," she promised. And on that night, I know those oaks knew.
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