Beyond Where the Deer Trail Ends

There is an idea, which likely stems from the cynicism you acquire when you deal for any length of time with kids. It's the opinion that the pre-teen cannot feel. Ah yes, you say, they feel, but only as they’re told. Their “feels” are learned responses to an ad, or a pop song, crooned by some euphonious bright tenor; some well-trained, perfectly-coifed snotty young kid who happens to look good on a poster.

When I was 12, I hated those posters. I hated perfect boys and their absolute assurance which took no prisoners in the hallways of our school. I’d just moved from sunny Southern California to rural, piney Oregon, and found out they’re the same – the sunbaked, hair-streaked surfer dudes had everything in common with their ruddy-necked cousins whose badges of honor were 501 blues and heavy sueded fleece-lined coats. I was jaded, and had been for years.

My father, you see, was a perfect man. My mother adored his Navy photo, enthroned in our living room next to the picture of their wedding. Oh, homely mother in her simple bridal dress, clutching with joy at her little white Bible and a lily for love. An intelligent woman with protruding teeth, but oh, such pride in her eyes! And next to her, my father. An Arkansan who had shipped out to Long Beach just when Elvis and Johnny Cash were every girl’s dream. He looked like a cousin, and he’d strum his guitar just like Johnny when he played as he spoke between songs.

The ladies loved my dad, and he knew this. He knew how to flirt, and he always flirted. And he always drank. And when he drank, he would end Saturday afternoon in our smoke-filled family room watching wrestling uncomprehendingly, as I might watch it. My siblings were usually gone, like spectral images of themselves set free in the cosmos, not to be summoned by witch or conjurer. Certainly not by our mother.

But I was there, foolish girl, and often subjected to his favorite drunk-story, the piteous tale of how he was forced to endure taunts for choosing my mom out of all the beauties a fellah might find at the beach. Oh, such an agony, because his pals had called her a dog, and one of these was his best man. Humiliation! He had married my mother, a dog, in front of his friend, the best man, who likely regaled the guys at the base with a well-oiled version of her standing at the altar Bibled and lilyed and aw-shucks happy to be alive. What a schmuck my dad was, to love the likes of her.

Eventually, he could no longer stand the social demands of So-Cal life. Though his wife had pulled her teeth out once she had his insurance. Though she’d channeled Elke Sommer, gorgeous with her bouffant hair and mini-dresses on Scandinavian curves (a “good body,” my dad confided to his unwilling child-listener). The self-pity he carried was too, too much to be borne. And so, we left that life for the mountains that made him think of home. The welcome woods, the dusty roads, and the rustic trails that hinted at his boyhood haunts.

That move gave me a gift. Where my parents were unwilling to venture to the beach (in that Mom forever paired “the beach” with oil spills, and jellyfish, and sand you couldn’t leave), we were in that moment parked. In the Cascade foothills, on the side of a mountain, seeing valleys over valleys, and more valleys far beyond.

Our property butted against government land. BLM land. A no-man's land which today is well-populated by an armed citizenry dedicated to the growth and distribution of marijuana. Back then, though, you might only find a Vietnam vet, maybe a draft dodger, if you hiked in far enough.

But I was 12, and an avid reader. Didn't have the gams to walk further than the distance from our car to the kid’s clothes department in J.C. Penney. Then suddenly, I had great, green, gorgeous chunks of undefiled forest; a wealth of mountainous treasure. Giant conifers of varying types, with vegetation below that beckoned the deer to come and eat at their leisure. Come! Eat! We were close enough to housing, which offered them a buffer zone from hunters, man and bear.

I trekked into the woods a few times. Not often, since I feared this unfamiliar place, yet oftener than not, since I couldn’t stay away. I mostly kept to pathways created by my neighbors. One led to a railway tunnel straight through the mountain; the tunnel that echoed every night, rumbling like an earthy indigestion with the sound that in the city went clack-clack-clack-clack-clack as the train hurried by. The reason I heard it in the early hours was that just before the mountain, there must have been a crossing in some town, and the train always bellowed, “Heeeeeeeere! Heeeeeeeeere!” And sometimes in my sleep, I wakened just enough to recognized the rumble and the pound-pound-pound of the train in the mountain, passing through.

But one day I didn’t hike the tunnel. I wanted a different path. Ah me, the Road Not Taken. We had learned the song at school that had given me the poem, engraved within my mind and in my soul. I wanted a place that would make all the difference, so I took the lesser trail. Oh, a well-travelled route for a fox or a doe, but leave me my romantic, childish soul. I pushed through the branches and across a little stream, ‘til I felt my socks arrested by the hedge nettle vines. Blackberry bushes tore my shirt and at my skin, and sometimes there was blood that quickly set.

But then the little trail disappeared. Perhaps this was a place where the animals dispersed, or perhaps they never came this far at all. Perhaps the trail ended where the blackberries grew; it was the Blackberry Trail and I’d missed the little signs that I’d arrived. I thought the destination was far, far ahead. Now I'd lost the trail long ago.

I looked through the trees – what was my next step? Then the heavens of my soul opened up! Suddenly I knew, no other step was needed. A large, welcome boulder beckoned me to sit and behold this sheltering place. My place, my hidden paradise. My eyes feasted on an expanse of large ferns protected by the steadfast moss-clad pines. The sun wasn't welcome here; it filtered through the trees to the moist hillocks covered with a green moss-carpet. Oh, the very air was green.

Did I stay there the rest of the day? It might have seemed so. To be truthful, I probably loitered not more than five minutes. A far shorter duration than that required for the pastor at my youth-time church to launch and deliver a faithful sermon – which was certainly an eternity to me. Looking back, I know it couldn't have been long before I realized I had no idea how to return to the trail.

Then it was all heart pounds and feet rushing, caught in weeds, a struggle, and more of a rush until the blackberry brambles stretched their claws again and dug into my skin, beckoning me back to the known place where deer had come and gone and disappeared somewhere into the deeper wood.

Some days there was an afternoon train, and on this day, I heard it call to me. “Heeeeeere! Heeeeeeere!” The brum, brum, brum of metal wheels on hidden tracks not so far away rang dangerous to me. And so I ran down the deer trail, on to the path, then quick to the road back home. Oh, it was less than a mile. Maybe not a half mile ‘til I was panting in my own familiar yard. A brief, brief trip to an adventure.

The moments on the rock within the wood, the green of the fern, the moss, the air...they remain an oasis in my heart. My kingdom, where life is pure, where beauty is clear, and there is no shame in loving the place where you are.

If it’s possible to haunt a piece of earth, I shall haunt that little wood. Beyond where the deer trail ends.