As I stood there in the woods with my arms tucked inside my shirt to avoid the frigid air, I thought about this question and remembered how I came across the answer; this stirred a warm fondness in me that almost made me forget about the reason that question had come back into my mind to begin with.
I discovered the answer just a few weeks after I asked my teacher. My grandparents called to chat with my mother and me, and when my mom handed me the phone to talk to my grandfather, “Pop,” I thought I could have a little fun and be on the giving end of the antagonizing for once. Before he could even ask me how I’d been, I charged at him.
“Hi, Pop. How far can you go into the woods?”
“What?”
“How far can you go into the woods?” I repeated knowingly, although I knew nothing at all.
“Oh. Well, I suppose about halfway,” he said, snickering.
“What? How come you could only go halfway?”
And then, as if he had been waiting for this moment for his entire life, he bellowed:
“Because if I went any farther, I’d be coming out!” He began laughing so hard that it transformed into a coughing fit, and he handed the phone off to my grandmother.
It took me a while to appreciate the nature of the question and its answer. I had never heard a riddle before, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I would ask that question to dozens of people in the months to follow.
Standing there barefoot in the woods, thinking about this riddle, I found that it wasn’t amusing anymore. However, now it was more than just a silly question. I had walked a long way; for all I knew I couldn’t walk any farther in — the last tree might be just ahead. If I turned back now, I might be walking back into the woods rather than out of them. I pivoted where I stood and resumed the trajectory that I had adopted when I set out.
Everything was eerily quiet as I pressed on. The only noticeable sounds were of crickets, cicadas, and the light grinding of leaves under my sore feet. Occasionally, however, I would step too hard on a healthy stick, and its cracking would drive the noisy creatures to silence. I would stand there paralyzed by the sudden hush, and I would hold my breath and listen for sounds I hoped not to hear. When the insects resumed, so would I. Desperate to keep their noise, I trod carefully on the undergrowth, but it was thick, and here and there my foot would press down on a stick just enough to snap it; the bugs would arrest, and so would I.
This relationship persisted until the last interlude that I remember. I broke a stick, the insects hushed themselves, but instead of the expected silence, I heard what sounded like an infant crying in the distance. I could feel the blood draining out of my limbs as I listened to this wailing that didn’t sound as far in the distance as I wished it to be. I felt a churning in my stomach and a weakness in my legs. Standing completely still and being careful not to make any noise, I waited. But the sound didn’t stop. Suddenly, another sound joined the chorus. A large stick snapped just behind me.
I panicked.
I think now, as an adult, the sound I heard that night was a cat in either heat or rage, but I had no thoughts in my mind as I ran veering in different directions, taking as much care as I could to avoid big thickets of bushes and collapsed trees. I was paying close attention to where I stepped, because my feet were in such bad shape, and I suppose I instinctively wagered that it would be better to move less quickly than not at all. I paid too much attention to where I was stepping and not enough attention to where those steps were leading, because not long after hearing the cry, I saw something that filled me with such despair that I find it difficult to articulate its potency even now.
It was the pool float.
I was right back where I had woken up.
I stood there dazed, staring at the pool float. It looked oddly familiar to me now that the initial mental haze that had plagued me when I first awoke had dissipated. I wondered if that was because it was the only thing in the woods that I actually recognized, but that didn’t seem quite right. I shook it off and attended to what really mattered.
I had traveled for what felt like a great distance, but I hadn’t really moved at all. This wasn’t magic or some supernatural folding of space. I was lost, utterly and completely.
Up until that moment, perhaps in an effort to focus on what I could control, I had thought more about getting out of the woods than how I got in, but being back at the beginning caused my mind to swim. My feet had not hurt at first, but they were agonized now, and I had made not even an inch of progress. I had been hoping that these were my woods from the time that I had awoken in them. I had hoped that I simply didn’t recognize them due to the obscuring and distorting darkness. But my optimism had long since disappeared, swallowed like everything else by the engulfing blackness.
Had I run in a huge circle around that spot, or did I just get turned around and start making my way back? I realized that even if I set out again on the path I had tried to follow at the outset, there was no way to be sure I would actually chart the same course; and if I took a completely different course, then I wouldn’t have even made progress in terms of scouting the area through my original excursion. And although I had pushed it to the very back of my mind, rhythmically, like a metronome, my mother’s riddle marched back to the frontlines — its footsteps faint at first but gradually building in a crescendo that became so loud I could think of nothing else: into the woods.
As this echoed through my thoughts, I suddenly pictured the woods as a vast circle of trees. As I turned on the spot on which I stood and looked around me, a fear crept into my mind that I might be standing at the very edge of the circle and that whatever direction I picked would just lead me deeper, farther into the woods.
As I continued scanning the landscape around me, my eyes fixated on one of the trees that I had seen towering above me when I first woke up. I looked at it dully — the way you gaze at something when you aren’t actually seeing it, despite how unshakably fixed your eyes have become; like staring at a wall when you’re lost in thought. Slowly, both my eyes and mind regained their focus, and I moved my head up.
It was tall.
I forced the despair out of myself and made my way to the tree, being careful to avoid the thorns that were blanketing the ground. As I stood on the exposed roots of the tree and looked straight up the height of its trunk, I thought that the tree must surely be tall enough to allow me to see my way out. I reached my hand up and grasped the lowest limb, but as I tightened my grip, my arm began shaking. Trying to steady myself, I moved my other hand up onto the branch, but when I tried to pull myself up, I felt my body protest. I remember thinking that night that it was simply too cold to climb the tree, but I know it wasn’t the cold that stopped me. It was fear.
I released the branch and looked back to the spot where my night had started. I could still see the place where I had woken up; it was a relatively clear spot in the middle of an otherwise debris-laced ground — as if I had tried to make a snow angel in the dirt and had given up in the middle of the project. It was a strange sight, but not any stranger than the rest of this place.
Fully conscious of my feet’s condition, I walked back to the small clearing and sat down with my legs crossed.
“What if there’s no way out?” I questioned, torturously.
I was too defeated to feel anything but apathy, and I turned my attention back to the tall tree and the stars above, looking upon it all with listlessness. Tracing my eyes over the stars, I had an epiphany. I had heard so much about explorers navigating the world by sea — traveling to undiscovered lands and building new civilizations. I had learned that they could do this by following the stars, and my spirits rose in a flash as I realized that I might be able to do the same. At the time, I thought the North Star was just the brightest star, and so I looked for and found the one with the most brilliant shimmer. I followed it.