The Woods

Outside the window in my room, for as long as I've been alive and more, has been the woods. Not the woods in some strange Jungian poetic fairy-tale sense, where the forest represents the unknown and unmapped, the alien and frightening; rather the woods in a completely literal sense, with the forest right outside my window. These woods featured quite prominently in my childhood; bizarre sounds coming through the window at night as I lay in my bed on Star Wars sheets and desperately tried to tune them out, to find peace and sleep. My friends and I explored these woods — or we would have but I had no friends in those days. Instead I recall my father taking me on nature walks through the woods, dim recollections of a few lifetimes ago. I can't recall the wise things my father said and how they forever changed me - I wasn't paying any attention. I had this little clear plastic box with a magnifying bubble in the lid and if you put a bug in there you could see how the bug looked at a higher resolution, a precursor to HDTV. Or sometimes my grandfather would take me into the woods to let me shoot his BB rifle. There was this swamp in the woods and I remember one time it was frozen over and I was playing on it and I fell in and I got in a lot of trouble because I was supposed to be doing my homework not cavorting around some icy swamp. At the edge of the forest, where my house sat at the top of a dead-end street, was a mulberry tree, and picking its fruit -- sometimes sweet, sometimes surprisingly sour -- was a favorite summer activity.

As I got older the woods remained a source of poignant memories, if not quite as innocent. One February my friends and I snuck out at four in the morning and ventured into the still-dark woods to destroy a fort, built by the bullies from the trailer park on the other side of the swamp. It was one of those triumphant childhood victories that you see in coming-of-age type stories. Except I never actually came of age. Later, my first love and I would sneak off to the woods to have furtive and fumbling sex amidst the brown leaves floor and the dead and hollow trunks. Like you see in coming-of-age type stories. A few times in recent years I would look out my window and see a half dozen or so deer nibbling the leaves of the forest perimeter. There were even still reports of polecats coming out of the woods and overturning garbage cans, though I never saw any myself.

Today, they are knocking down the woods. To put up "lower-income housing". And in today's frightening economy, who can even blame them? Now when I look out my window instead of the comforting haze of green I see heavy earth-moving machines rolling about, transforming the terrain through their blunt and brutal rituals. Driving up the hill towards my house I see the wide expanse of sky where before I saw the jagged line of tree-tops, the horizon wiped clean and left blank. The berry tree was knocked down, though in truth I hadn't tasted its fruit for years. The adult world is different. You can drive. You have money. If you want berries, you buy them at the store. If you want to learn about nature, you turn on the Nature Channel... in HDTV. If you need to set up lower-income housing, you knock down the woods. It's logical. It makes sense. Who wants polecats rummaging through their trash? Who wants deer running out in front of their car? I'm no romantic fool - I know that where I sit now was once woods too, until they knocked it down and built my house here. What I am witnessing outside my window is just another note or two in a symphony that has been going on for ages. The truth is, these woods were an aberration, an odd and wonderful anachronism, and it was time for the new reality to catch up.

My niece doesn't view things as phlegmatically. We went for a walk through what can no longer be called woods after the machines and their blue-collar operators had left for the day. What was it Oppenheimer said? "I am become death, destroyer of worlds." It was unrecognizable. Wood chips and soft upturned earth carpeted the land. The swamp was drained. I was stunned... not because of the destruction but because with the old trails destroyed and the land laid bare the whole area was so small. In my mind I had always pictured it as vast and unending, a metaphor for the universe itself. Sarah scoffed as only a child who is pure at heart can. "I can't believe they're doing this!"

"I can," I replied with adult wisdom or cynicism. "It's the way of the world."

"It's stupid!"

"Honey, that is the way of world."

About a month ago, completely by whim and at random, I took a quick detour back into the woods. They had fallen into terrible disrepair, even before the contracts were signed and the machines rolled in. The mouth of the trail had been covered up by years of lazy neighbors dumping their raked leaves and pine needles right in the front, and it took me some effort and navigation to forge my way back to where the trail cleared again. Still, most of the trails were grown over and it was obvious no one had traveled them in quite some time. Others were quite obviously still in use as evidenced by the beer bottles and food wrappers in various states of returning to nature. I don't know why I did that, walking out into the woods that time, but I am glad I had the chance to because even though I did not know it then, it would be for the last time.

They're tearing down my childhood, and I feel nothing.