The Door to Dawn

My parent’s house was built on a lot covered with trees. Red ribbons were tied around their trunks. Men came with chainsaws and cut the trees down. Their stumps were pulled and the soil shaved away. Now saplings of oak and maple are planted on islands surrounded by a lake of green St. Augustine. Next door, where the skeleton frame of a house stands, the process is repeated. Across the street red ribbons flutter.

I yank back the screen door and it slaps shut behind me.

“I’m home,” I squawk. A parroted phrase repeated daily—a preemptive warning rather than a greeting.

Mom stands at the kitchen sink washing dishes. A portrait framed by the window. White curtains with yellow daises drape her shoulders. Late afternoon sun washes through the window illuminating the dishwater’s rising steam. Her skin glows golden. She turns and smiles like an angel in the clouds. Mom is a mother of the time, all hairspray and starch, relentless in her pursuit of motherly perfection. One curl of hair hangs down in her face. She attempts to blow the distraction back into place. Then, with a wave of her hand she brushes the curl back to join the others, like a tide conforming to the sea. This image is the last happy memory I have of her.

I drop my books on the counter. Looking around, the kitchen is immaculately clean. The dining table is set for dinner. At the stove, a single pot sits on a coiled burner glowing red. On top of the pot a tiny metal cap rocks back and forth with a phit, phit, phit of steam trying to escape. A capped off geyser—the pressure cooker. I sigh. Mystery meat night. It will be gray and dead. But as Mom says, “infused with flavor.” I am mesmerized by the pressure cooker. I watch the cap’s hypnotic motions. I reach out to touch its power.

“Don’t touch that! You can’t remove the cap, it might explode.”

I want to remove the cap. I want to see it explode.

“How was school today?” she continues, transitioning swiftly from caution to mundanity.

“Okay. I’m gonna go out for a while.”

“Not too long, your father will be home soon.”

I head for the door.

“Eric, did you forget something?”

Mom gives me the look. I’m expected to know what I forgot, but I don’t.

“What?”

“You know.”

House rules. So simple, but so important. We are bound by them. Which one had I broken? She waits while I think. Patting my pockets like I’d forgotten my house keys, I mentally flip through an invisible Rolodex of do’s and don’ts I’ve cataloged over the years.

“I…I…”

Mom’s eyes lead me to the book bag on the counter. What started as pick up your toys, no elbows on the dining table, put away your schoolbooks, yes sir, no sir, has evolved into tyrannical demands of blind obedience. No loud noises. No laughing. No crying. No emotions of any sort.

“I’m sorry,” I say, harboring a shame too intense for the simplicity of the mistake.

“It’s okay,” mom responds through a forced smile.

It is never okay. Okay means normal. There is nothing normal about this house. Mom and I are on the inside. No one outside could ever guess.

I dump the book bag in my bedroom and run for the back door. My sneakers are rockets blasting me across the green universe of the backyard. I make my landing at a white wooden plank fence. This is my imaginary edge of reality. Behind me the new frontier of suburban sprawl, the crash of trees falling to chainsaws, the distant echo of hammers and saws building new houses. Here, the lawn mower stops and my imagination begins—here, at the woods.

Rolling out like a vast carpet from the edge of my dad’s lawn the woods spreads onto the horizon. The fence is all that holds the woods back. It’s tangled and twisted with weeds and vines. They reach out to me like so many octopus’s tentacles, wrapping around my hands and pulling me forward. Climbing over the fence I’m instantly swallowed. I run deep into the heart before stopping to catch my breath.

Standing there, surrounded by the whispers of wind through the leaves, I remember the day I was introduced to this place. Even before all the moving boxes were unloaded from the truck the neighborhood boys rang our doorbell. My mother answered. A small group of boys, covered with the sweat and grime of summer, stood behind the screen door. My future friends.

“Can he come out and play?”

They must have targeted me the moment we pulled into the driveway.

“What?” my mom said, confused. I put my hand on her back and peeked out from behind her.

“Oh, you mean Eric. Do you want to go out and play, honey?”

Mom didn’t understand my answer would define my relationship with the boys.

“Sure,” I affirmed, as nonchalantly as possible.

“Well, don’t get too dirty.”

The boys on the other side of the screen were beyond dirty. They were filthy. I could understand why. It was the beginning of summer and they were trying to scrub away the stench of school with dirt.

Following their example, I untucked my t-shirt and removed my socks and tennis shoes. It was summer—no shoes till the end of August.

In my backyard there was a well-worn path that led to the woods that I didn’t know was there, but the boys did. Along the way they stopped and broke off rotting tree limbs. Each limb was meticulously measured for correct size and weight. I guessed they were going to use them as walking sticks, but I was wrong.

Bent over and panting, a short chubby boy boiled red as a lobster by the summer sun stopped to catch his breath. He tapped me on the shoulder as I passed.

“Have you seen it yet?” he asked, still panting.

The twinge of his voice was full of anticipation. Whatever he was talking about must have been important to him, because he looked like he was about to drop dead.

The path ended at a dense fortress of trees. Their trunks had grown so tightly together we had to turn sideways to get through. It felt like something out of a movie. Like the trees were trying to keep us out or keep something in, and only a few of us, maybe less, were going to learn the truth.

The woods—that was the simple phrase the boys had used to define this place. But the trees were of monstrous height. Covered in tortoise shell bark, the trunks and branches twisted and intertwined upwards until they blocked out the sun. This was a land where giants once roamed. But we were kids. The path forward was slow and difficult, but we eventually made our way to the heart. I didn’t have time to decide if this was a death march or some sort of test before the answer came.

A lanky boy with Popeye knees and elbows peeled off his sweat-soaked t-shirt.

“Close your eyes,” he said in a strict fatherly voice, “we’re gonna play hide-and-seek.”

The t-shirt was wrapped around my head as a blindfold. It smelled of body odor and dirt. I chocked back a desire to vomit.

“Go on!”

Small hands landed on my shoulders, on my back. Every hand, in unison, thrusting me into the unknown.

Like an unholy church choir, the boys yelled in harmony, “Don’t open your eyes or you’re dead.”

I stumbled through the woods. Every time I slowed down I was pushed again. In the darkness between the giggles of the boys I heard the crunch of leaves, the wind through the trees, a nearby stream, and then silence. We stopped.

The hands on my back now spun me around and around until I stumbled from dizziness.

“Start counting back from 100.”

“100, 99, 98…”

I heard another voice. Someone else was counting. 96, 95, 94. I stopped counting. They stopped counting.

“Hello?”

“Hello,” the vastness of the woods answered back in my own voice.

“Keep counting!”

“Keep counting,” a frustrated voice echoed.

Stumbling about in the black void beneath the blindfold, I reacted to each new sound of the woods. Strange birds called out in the darkness, the tree limbs creaked and twisted. I became aware of a thumping sound slowly growing louder, then realized it was my heart. I counted faster and more loudly to bury the thump beneath the sound of my own voice.

“64, 60, 48…”

Then I bumped into something big and reached out. The texture was rough to the touch. I wondered if I had somehow run into an elephant’s trunk. I stretched my arms across its surface. It was wider than I could reach. I ripped off the blindfold. Looming in front of me was a massive oak tree. Twisted by age, its arthritic branches draped the ground like a massive wilted flower. For a moment I forgot about the boys. I was in awe of the massive thing in front of me.

The name “David” was carved into the trunk. I traced a finger in the deep cuts of the scar.

David instantly became my Croatoan. I wondered who he was. I wondered where he had gone.

I could see, in the haze of my thoughts, a rabbit chased by a hound dog hopping across an opening in the tree line. A shot’s fired. The rabbit drops. A young boy, David, quickly approaches. He is followed by his father. They wear coonskin hats and carry muskets. With his father’s knife, David cuts open the stomach of the rabbit and peels back the skin. They build a fire and eat under the shade of the oak tree, which is young and stands straight. That night under the stars, David’s father presents the knife to him as his father did to him. David awakes the next morning and carves his name to deposit a memory of this moment in time.

When I touched his name David and I stood together at the exact same spot. The woods were there for him hundreds of years ago, and they were there for me then. When I thought of him I felt simultaneously old and young. I was David then, and I was Eric now. We existed in the woods as one.

Remembering my mission, I counted down, “3-2-1, ready or not here I come.”

The boys were well hidden.

Shouts came from every direction.

“You’re cold, very cold.”

“Cold!”

“Warmer.”

“Very warm!”

From my left, the shirtless lanky boy jumped from behind a tree. Rushing me, he jabbed one of the rotting branches under my armpit. I knew what to say.

“You got me!”

I fell to the ground dead. Killed by his makeshift spear. The other boys cheered, appearing from behind trees like forest elves.

I was in.

For the boys, the woods were a place for skinned knees and mud-covered feet. Warrior yells and tribal rituals. A stick became whatever the imagination created: a sword, a spear, a gun. A fallen tree and a few strategically placed branches became a fort. Fierce battles were won and lost. Bodies littered the forest floor, only to be resurrected for the next battle.

To me, it was a carnival funhouse of blinking lights, warped mirrors, endless doors to endless mazes. Each door opened to a new discovery. Creeks connected with rivers, hills with hollows, valleys with meadows, sunset with dawn, night with day.

I learned then that nothing in the woods lives unless something dies.

Red and golden leaves drift down from the canopy above. They touch the ground and join leaves that have curled brown. If I kneel down and pull back the curtain of the strange world below, the coffee brown soil will boil with life. A squirmy psychedelic world of yellow and red striped salamanders, blue and green lizards, shiny black beetles with massive snapping jaws and foot-long earth worms twisted into squaring knots.

I left the tree in the sanctuary of my memory, but as time passed the boys grew tired of the games. And when I returned to the woods alone it was like going home.