Contrary to my current geeky “the sun is trying to kill me” status, in my youth I was a very outdoorsy kid. The forests around my house were my playground – and being the imaginative sort, I made up names for all of it.
The great forest behind my house was the great Southern Forest, with the smaller one to the side named the Western Woods. The swamp in the forest was the Swamp of Gomez, complete with a hunting tower left there that became the Tower of Gomez (up on a hill overlooking the swamp). There was a stream that wound down through the valley and formed a pond before flowing into the swamp, and that valley was the Valley of the Golden Sun (and higher up it was called Princess Pine valley, for the plants that grew there).
After some years, some developer came by and cut down the Western Woods. The far end of it used to have a small playground/park, which was enlarged and now included a soccer field (soccer was quite popular in my home town of Sutton). As a kid, when I watched the trees being cut down, I thought it was a crazy thing to do. So when the machinery was gone, the Western Woods had been transformed into “Crazyland.”
It was a sad time to see all those trees gone – there had been a beautiful trail (used in the past by people on 4-wheelers) running through it, and it was quite scenic. It was a shame that they cut all the trees down, but on the bright side I did find some new things in the ruins of the forest. There was a small valley (actually the remains of a foundation, probably for a barn or storage shed of some sort) with a big triangular stone at one end. Being a child of the Nintendo generation (we’re talking the original NES and SNES here folks, not the Gamecube or Wii), it naturally became the Triforce Valley. All sorts of shrubbery started growing out there, and it became part of the scenery of my youth. I even built a crude fort on top of a hill roughly in the middle of Crazyland, where 2 trees had been left standing.
There was even a big tree-fort built up on the hill just behind my house, which became the South Sutton Ranger Station – from which all my adventures into the forest beyond would begin. I even had a trusty walking stick that I had carved myself from a young tree – and I spent entire days out in the woods, exploring new trails (of which there were many) and charting known ones. Somewhere I still have the elaborate maps I drew of the lands beyond my house, but if I remember correctly they’re so large they won’t fit on my scanner. Perhaps in the future I will be able to scan them in – they were quite good, and rather accurate as well. (I had a good memory for trails.)
Those were the golden years of my youth, as I remember them. The summer days spent exploring the countryside (or riding my bike around town), the winter days spent trudging through the snow and marveling and how the land had changed.
Sometimes I pine for those times again, especially living in an apartment in a city – where there are only a few trees nearby, and no forests within sight. It’s important to remember these things, though – or so I believe – and I’m sure we all have special memories from our time as children. Though these days I wonder what kind of memories the children of today will carry forward – memories of war, violent (but realistic) video games, text messages, the sterilization of public schools, and reality TV.
I guess as long as I carry these memories with me, I’ll never really grow up. And I think that’s a good thing.
