Wandering But Not Lost

By Rich Grady

I spend a lot of time wandering in the woods behind my house. I did it when I was a free-range kid in elementary school, and now that I’m a free-range septuagenarian, it still gives me a sense of belonging to something bigger than me. It also untethers memories of the past.

I used to cut through the woods going to and from elementary school as a kid, which was against the rules. I was like a swamp fox and had evaded notice for several years, until sixth grade when one of my supercilious classmates who was on the Safety Patrol tattled on me to my teacher who was also the school principal. She kept me after school and lectured me on the demerits of breaking the rules, and told me that I had to walk to and from school on the street and not via the woods. Being a kid who asked a lot of questions, I wanted to know why there was a rule against walking through the woods, since it was a shorter and more direct route to my house. As she ate her afternoon snack of pickled pigs feet and bread sticks, she proceeded to explain between bites that if there was a nuclear explosion, they needed to know where to look for the bodies; and if mine was in the woods, they might not be able to find me. This explanation stuck with me like the pigs feet between her teeth; and yet, I returned to my shortcut on subsequent commutes after clarifying with my Safety Patrol classmate that it was more assured that his tattletale face would be altered by a tatterdemalion such as myself before the principal would be looking for our bodies after a nuclear attack. Besides, as far as I was concerned, it would be easier to find me if there were fewer bodies to sort through.

I don’t remember being afraid of nuclear holocaust, but I do remember looking at pictures in a book about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that my WWII veteran father had bought after the war. He mostly read the newspapers, and didn’t buy many books for himself, so this one stood out on the shelves that he built to hold our encyclopedias. I read about nuclear fission in one of the volumes and recall it being all about making electricity as compared to incinerating a city and its people. The instantaneous and unprecedented destruction of these nuclear blasts – and the threat of more – factored heavily into Japan’s surrender shortly thereafter.

As these old memories melted and more immediate sensations of my walk in the woods on New Year’s Day prevailed, I listened to the crunch of my footfalls on the crusty snow, and felt the sting of the cold air on my face. I was bushwhacking with no particular destination or timetable, and I was acutely aware of my surroundings. Deer tracks had my attention but I left some bandwidth for the sound of creaking branches overhead, poised to leap if necessary to avoid a falling limb. I don’t call them widow-makers anymore, since I am a widower and the consequences of being struck by a falling limb seem different now, as do many things.

The woods are laced with stonewalls and sprinkled with artifacts of past human habitation – a rusted pail here, the bones of a car there. An old stone foundation begs questions of the past in the current moment – who lived there; did they build the house themselves; how many kids did they have; did they abandon the house; why? Will someone far from now ask such questions about me, my children, and my house? My school days are long past, but I still ask a lot of questions. And perhaps more than ever, I know that adults don’t have all the answers.

In retrospect, I think it was strange to make schoolkids worry about a nuclear attack, but it was plausible at the time – and maybe even more so, now. Kids today seem to have plenty to worry about, and I’m sure they have a lot of questions. I just don’t know where they are getting their answers, and I suspect that they are not getting out into the woods enough. The days of free-ranging kids seem to be long past. We were tempered by different flames back in the days of my youth. Accepting the possibility of mutually assured destruction had a way of hardening your constitution, like realizing that your parents were going to die someday. This dawned on me when my paternal grandfather died. He had come over from Ireland as a young man and met my grandmother who had also come across by ship. They got married and raised my father and his brothers and sisters in Dorchester during the James Michael Curley years, which spanned the Great Depression.

I wish I could talk to them about those times, but it’s too late now. I was too young to be curious about it when my grandparents were alive and too pre-occupied with my own era when my parents were still alive to ask about theirs. “None of us live forever” is something my father said to me when he was in the hospital and knew his end was in sight. I know that he meant it in a comforting way even though it was a matter-of-fact statement. He was ok with what the future held in store for him; and although he wasn’t an overtly religious man, he believed in God and prayed for us, his four sons, to be good men and to take care of our mother, our families, and each other. That was his gift to us.

As I walk in the woods, I pray for my kids and grandkids, too, and give thanks for my parents and grandparents, and my wife’s parents and grandparents, and all of the family members and memories that they spawned. And I thank God for love and life, and this divine milieu that I get to experience by walking out my back door, wandering but not lost.