I went to Jockey Hollow National Park to go for a long walk. I walked around the main loop. Perhaps it was about three and a half miles. The trees were mature, fat, and vertiginously tall. The forest had broad open areas that made it look inviting. There was an enormous tulip tree. I mean, enormous, both in girth and in height. The whole place, as elsewhere, is literally covered in raspberries.
For some reason--maybe it was the particular scent of New Jersey woods that stirred something from deep within--this walk brought back a lot of memories of my childhood. That era of circumscribed childhood life. The things I might have done were not available. I ended up spending a lot of time in the woods. Sometimes with my friend, sometimes with my cousin, and other times with my sister. We sat on logs and talked. We walked along old railroad beds. We hopped on stepping stones in streams. We always had sticks in hand as we went along. What comes somewhat strongly to mind as I remember this now is how we noticed differences in atmosphere and character between places in the forest, and--perhaps because that was our whole world--how big these differences seemed to us: the patch of tulip trees with its scattered light, that one place with the loose collection of birches where we carved our initials, the dark grove of evergreens inside the forest that we had always been hesitant to approach, till one day, when my father was working not far away, we came up to it, entered it, and felt ourselves to be brave.
Those days, long ago, with the future open wide in front of us, when the woods were my second home.
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