Smokey the Bear

29th September 2011

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Smokey the Bear

Memoir Excerpt

Asheville, North Carolina, 1960’s

Our property apparently reached only a little ways beyond our backyard into the woods and my mother showed me where that line was and told me not to go past it. She never really enforced that boundary, but she did refer to it from time to time. I’m pretty sure she didn’t think I’d really adhere to that limit. She grew up on a farm, and she understood perfectly well the need to explore.

It was lush woods and there was plenty to do in it. My best friend Michael and I played cowboys, and sometimes cops and robbers. But very often the spirit of the woods gently reached out and redirected us from whatever we started out doing and our agenda shifted to climbing a tree or building a dam in the creek or eating berries or something.

There were several enormous half-uprooted tree stumps at the bottom of the glen, about twice as far from our backyard as we were “allowed” to be. The parts where the saws had cut had become like 3-D maps, canted at dangerous angles, raked with natural canyons and carpeted with forests of moss. There were intricate spaces under the roots of the stumps where you could hide weapons or magical items. And for a long time the place where the stumps were was the limit of our range.

Then one morning Michael and I were trying to find box turtles or something maybe and we strayed further down into the woods, along the sloppy bottom of that little draw. At one point one of us raised his head and said, “Hey, look!”

Everything was golden and glowing on its own. There was a luminous mist around us. It was beautiful in a way that nothing else we’d ever seen was beautiful. Everything we were doing stopped, and everything we were thinking stopped while we stood there. It felt like we were somehow in a new type of place. This wasn’t part of the world we’d been living in.

Not only was it a special place, but it felt like something was happening there. Something peaceful and kind and very good.

At that age, we had no words to describe it. In fact, I still don’t. Because of all the mist around, it looked kind of smoky, and that’s probably why we started calling it “Smokey the Bear.”

For years when we spoke of it to each other it was always in reverent tones. And even though we passed through that part of the woods from time to time, it was never the same and we never pretended it was.

Tagged: memoir mystical salamander opprecht

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