Apparently none of the storybook scary tales of danger in the forest ever stuck with me. In rural North Carolina in the fifties, no one worried about evil happening in the forests that surrounded us. We did not understand it at the time, but the cathedral of leaves where we played immensely enriched our lives. As a fifties explorer of the local woods, I could not make the connection because I had yet to experience any of the great cathedrals of the world. Now it seems pretty obvious.
In the summertime, we got up in the morning and headed to the coolness of the deep woods. The towering trees and the brooks that ran through them were our playgrounds. We built dams, seined for minnows, made forts, and played elaborate games in the woods. Sometimes we hardly bothered to leave the woods for meals. We barely escaped the trees as dark descended on the forest.
As we grew older, there was Boy Scouts. We often camped in nearby woods and it wasn't unusual for the adults to check on us but not spend the nights with us. One of the groups in the Boy Scouts is the Order of the Arrow. Part of the initiation is a night in woods by yourself with just your sleeping bag. While I did not sleep particularly well, it was not because I was scared of being alone in the woods. Never in all my hiking or playing in the woods do I remember hurrying because I was afraid of something in the woods. As teenagers we hunted squirrels in the woods after school but only after taking courses from the NRA on safe gun handling.
Fast forward to life after college and we are living on a farm in the hardwood hills north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. We were surrounded by forest on every side. There was no shortage of bears. The forest was so thick that we had no fences for the cattle at the back of the farm. In the fall I led the cattle sixth-tenths of mile up a trail that I had blazed to a fall pasture on another farm. At night during the calving season, I made a long walk to the barn once or twice during the early still dark hours of the morning. I never worried about any danger other than perhaps getting very cold while wading through the snow and pitch black forest looking for new calves and their moms.
New Brunswick is a land of almost endless forests. Once two older timers, Harvey and Charlie, both born and raised in the local woods, were helping me search for a bull that had gone missing in the woods behind the farm. We crested a ridge and the three of us surveyed the horizon which was 360 degrees of woods under cloudy skies. It dawned on the three of us almost instantly that the way back home was not apparent. You could have said that we were lost. There was no panic. We just picked a direction and started walking. Eventually we saw something that looked familiar. We got home with no problem and no concerns about going back into the woods. Had panic gripped us, we could have ended up walking three or four miles in the woods.
Eventually our family came back to the states and landed on the foothills of Twelve O'Clock Knob Mountain overlooking Roanoke, Virginia. The woods stretched up the mountain with only one road breaking the long expanse of forest. It wasn't long before I had a trail up the mountain connecting to and utilizing an old road. Our Labrador Chester and I spent days cleaning the trail and waging a holy war again poison ivy. Chester and I were sometimes joined by my wife in our hikes. The three of us put in miles on the mountain in what can only be a cathedral of tall trees with beautiful that dwarfed the mostly spruce trees in our New Brunswick forests. Only once do I remember my wife who was hiking alone with Chester mention that she was concerned by what was likely the growl of a bobcat. She wasn't worried for herself but feared Chester might chase it and get hurt.
While we spent fifteen years on the North Carolina coasts, I never found forests there that made me feel like I was back in those woods of my childhood. We recently moved back to the North Carolina foothills. It has not taken me long to find a new cathedral of leaves. I am certain that this new trail in the tall trees with leaves that have their own color palette will continue to enrich the next chapter of our lives. The park with the trail and the stunning trees that remind me of my childhood is less than four miles from our home. It is where I took the picture at the beginning of the post.
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