for the ghosts in the old logging forest

 my childhood home sits on a street adjacent to a forest. i grew up playing in the woods at almost every opportunity; i'd get off the bus after school, dash up the dusty white gravel road, and out through the then-empty lot at the end of my street and into the trees. i'd dump my bag under the same spruce tree at the very edge of the treeline, where it could just be seen from the road, and scamper off into the woods. occasionally, my friend kaylon, who lived next door, would join me, and occasionally his friends sawyer or wyatt would as well, but more often than not, it was just me. 

but kaylon and i did hang out enough to build a series of forts throughout the forest through the decade that he lived next door. and every time i go home, i feel something tugging me back to those forts we built out of sticks and fallen branches and any other piece of wood we could get our hands on and cut down to size with a hand saw we stole from my garden shed. we'd carry armloads of detritus up and down the steep banks to insulate our wooden shelters. 

there was an old junkyard in the woods there too, and though we technically weren't supposed to go there because it belonged to someone who had beef with my father, we did anyways, and we'd steal junk from there to decorate our forts. i think we probably built five of them over the years, and these weren't one-person a-frames propped up on trees either. we became adept at looking over the naturally-occurring dips and rises and washouts in the land and choosing good spots to build, ones that were largely protected from strong winds or rainwater running down to the marshes during summer storms. 

even now, i know for a fact that anyone walking out in the forest can still find signs that we were there. there's a fort we built on a stack of logs someone had cut from a felled tree and never came back for, right near the tangle of wild raspberry bushes that i'd visit every day during the summer. there's still a little shelf i dug into the sandy bank, where i tucked the unbroken glass bottles i stole from the junkyard. there's scraps of camouflage netting from the demolition of the old cabin that had once stood near the bridge over warner brook, tangled on the stumps of broken-off branches like tattered flags. right by the trail down into the marshes, where my mother walks the dogs, you can see the little stove i fashioned out of bricks i found in the side of a hill once. out in the marshes, across the brook in a spot that can't easily be accessed unless the ground and the brook freeze over, there's the most remote fort, where i could climb a massive old willow tree and watch the comings and goings at the nearby mechanic's shop. 

kaylon and i lost more than a few tools out in the woods. the hand saw, a few shovels, a couple knives. i wonder what happened to them. if i could walk out to the marshes some winter morning, shuffle across the frozen brook where i once fell through the ice and find a rusted saw or the wooden handle of the shovel sticking up from the earth. maybe they're already buried, gone for good and returned to the earth at least until the next hurricane irene comes through and turns over the earth, revealing things we never knew we'd been walking over for years. maybe the kids up at the mechanic's shop already pilfered the ones we left at the fort by the willow tree. maybe someday, after i'm in the ground just like those stolen tools, some future archaeologist will find them, study them, mull over how they got there.

it's so strange to think that one day i visited those forts for the last time and didn't even know it would be the last. or that that hasn't happened yet, but i still have no way of knowing with complete certainty which time will be the last.

at any rate, the next time i'm in town i should pay a visit to the ghosts of a childhood filled with stained clothes, ticks, bruises and scratches.

to stretch out and relax on the roof of a rusting old wrecked lincoln in the junkyard, where i used to lie and watch the planes fly overhead through the gaps in the forest's canopy.

to climb the old willow tree, see if it still holds my weight, if i can still remember the sequence of maneuvers i would use to reach my favorite spot in the branches.

to find the little cairns, the collapsing cluster of shelters built in a little circle, the weathered sandbags we once stole and muscled down the hill to one of the forts to build what i still consider our fort-building magnum opus. 

i want to see the impression we left on the steep, sloping banks and in all the little nooks of our slice of the vermont woodlands before a decade of planning and strategizing and stealing and building goes back to the earth like it was meant to do all along.