An unnatural shape caught my eyes, and I looked at it for what felt like a very long time until I could finally discern what it was. About ten feet in front of me, resting among a mass of tangled sticks and loose leaves, there was a deflated pool float that was shaped like a shark. Even after I understood what it was, I continued looking at it, trying to figure out why it was there. This only added to the surreal feeling, to the point that I was sure that I must be experiencing a dream rather than the world itself. After a while, though, it seemed like I just wasn’t going to wake up, because I wasn’t asleep.
I stood up to orient myself, and I caught a flash of some trampled shrubs that looked like a path, but the woods were thick behind it, so I turned to look elsewhere. I didn’t recognize this place. I played in the woods by my house all the time, and so I knew them really well, but I had only been in them when it was dark once before. I had run through my woods straight to my house at the last edge of dusk countless times without even having to think about how to get there. But there’s a big difference between dusk and dark, and as I stood there taking in all that there was to see in the dim light, it started creep into my mind much more forcefully that these might not be my woods after all.
A shiver that I think was only partially due to the chilled air ran through me as I wondered how someone was supposed to find his way to a place when he didn’t know where he was starting. I took a deep breath and a single step and felt a shooting pain in my foot. I lifted my leg quickly and reeled off balance, falling back to where I had woken up only moments ago.
I moved my eyes from the terrain to my throbbing foot and saw what had felled me. I had stepped on a thorn. It stuck about an inch out of the middle of my foot, but it only bled when I quickly tore it out of my skin. I wound my arm back to throw it someplace where it wouldn’t pose a danger to me any longer, but as I searched for a safe spot, I realized that there wasn’t one.
By the light of the moon, I could see that the thorns were everywhere. The whole ground was laced with this natural barbed wire. I had been lucky to only step on a single thorn just then, but as this occurred to me, I became conscious of the rest of my body. I looked at my other foot, but it was fine. As a matter of fact, so was the rest of me. I searched over my legs and feet with my eyes and hands. No cuts. No scrapes. I didn’t have another scratch on me. I wasn’t even that dirty. I cried for a little bit and then stood back up.
I opened my mouth and filled my six-year-old lungs to capacity, and just as I was about to scream for help, my breath hitched in my throat as a thought lodged itself powerfully in my mind: what if someone heard me? I held the air tightly in my chest and stood puzzled by my own question. I needed help; shouldn’t I hope that someone would hear me? All at once, I began to think of the fiends and monsters that I had imagined stalking and chasing me through and out of what might be these woods. I found myself wishing I had never played those games. I let the air escape slowly to give myself a last chance to use it in case I changed my mind and wanted to yell. I didn’t. I would have to find my own way. I didn’t know which way to go, so I just picked a direction and began walking.
I walked for what felt like hours.
I tried to walk in a straight line, but there was no path to follow. I made sure to course-correct when I had to take detours around tree limbs that were too entwined to move through or patches of thorns that were too broad to step over. Every time I would make my way past one of these natural obstacles, I would be confronted with a seemingly identical tapestry of foliage, and the feeling of hopelessness would begin to assert itself a little more. I just wanted to see something familiar, and each time the woods appeared particularly thick, I thought I had found my landmark.
Marking the outer edge of my usual explorations, there was an enormous pile of discarded and decaying Christmas trees that my best friend Josh had found once during a game of hide-and-seek. Although he had been driven out of its concealing shelter fairly quickly by fire ants, we would return to it many times to trample on the stray and spherical colored ornaments that had been left behind.
We had many stories about where the trees had all come from, but I assume now that the genesis of the pile was much more ordinary than what we had hypothesized. Whatever the origins, what was left was a tangled mass of still decorated, however sparsely, holiday trees that looked, from a distance, to be a single colossal Christmas tree. This would be the easiest thing to spot in my woods, and if I found it, I would know where I was. But that was only if these were my woods.
As I stepped delicately through the brush, an idea began to form in my mind. If I could climb a tree, I might be able to see my way to the woods’ exit. I became less despondent and began searching the canopy for a proper scouting position. None of these trees seemed tall enough, but if I could find one that was, I might be able to see a house. I might even be able to see my house, I thought.
I stood still and balanced carefully on my now-aching feet. The trees that loomed over me when I had woken up in these woods had been tall, I recalled. But I struggled to remember just how tall they were.
“What about the branches?” I mumbled to myself. I remembered seeing branches above me, and if they grew low enough, I knew that I would be able to climb up the tree. If I could find my way back to that spot, I could work my way up the tree and possibly see a way out… but that would mean going back.
I shifted on my feet and tried to make the best decision. Turning around, I took a few steps back toward the direction from which I had come, and I froze as a phrase echoed in my head:
How far can you go into the woods?
I hadn’t been tortured by this question for well over a year, and I stood there a bit bewildered by the fact that it had suddenly come rushing back into my mind.
On an afternoon, toward the beginning of kindergarten, I had come home from exploring a part of the woods that I had never seen before. I was excited to tell my mother how far I had gone, and she seemed — even if she was only humoring me — to be equally excited to hear it. When I had finished describing my journey, she congratulated me and asked if I thought I had finally seen all the woods there were in our neighborhood. I told her that I didn’t think so, but that I wanted to. She smiled as she asked, “So, how far can you go into the woods?”
This sounded like a challenge, and so I answered confidently, but none of my answers seemed satisfactory to her. “Really far,” “Super far,” and even “All the way” were all rejected as viable responses; after each attempt to close the issue, she would just return with the same question, becoming more amused by the minute.
At a loss, and wanting to be able to answer her question so that she would stop asking it, I asked the only other authority figure I knew: my teacher. She gave me a quizzical look and asked me what I meant. I didn’t even really know what I meant, and so I just repeated the question. She thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know, let’s see,” as she walked me over to the map that was tacked to our classroom wall.
She asked me the name of my street, which I had memorized, and she took a moment to find it before touching my shoulder and holding her finger on a big patch of green. “I think these are your woods,” she said. I repeated my question yet again; I told her that my mom had been asking me this question repeatedly. As I told my teacher this, she seemed to realize something and took her finger off the map. She smiled coyly saying, “I don’t know. How far can you go into the woods?”