Running through clothes drying on a line, my grandfather wrote. I can remember the clean smell.
It’s the scent of cedar that hooks me right back to Wisconsin. My father would put fresh boughs in the fireplace and the scent of ashes disappeared, as if it had never been. I smell cedar and I am back under those trees, running the secret paths with knives in my pockets, heading toward my secret forts.
I was given the run of those woods, in my childhood. If I wasn’t fishing, I was in the trees—climbing them, or scrambling beneath them, crawling through the underbrush. There were always paths through those woods, to connect neighbor to neighbor, and there were always forts and hideouts. When my mother was a girl, she and her sisters built Horse Hideout, a maze of interlocking paths all bordered with piles of white rocks, shards of limestone. My favorite part of Horse Hideout was near the top of the slope, a bed-sized stretch of moss. Deep green, soft and velvety. Sometimes I stretched out, there, and gazed up through the trees’ branches, into the blue sky, the distant waves in my ears and echoing off the bluff, the moss so cool and so soft against my bare arms.
I never stayed there long; I had my own forts and hideouts to attend. Squirrel Hideout, Fish Hideout, Cave Hideout, Seagull Hideout, Chipmunk Hideout, Fox Hideout, Raccoon Hideout, Snake Hideout. They were not so well-known; in fact, they were secret, difficult to find. Not far from Horse Hideout was a fifteen-foot-tall pile of stones and gravel, forgotten, no doubt the dredgings of some channel. This was Lookout Hideout, which only I could scale, whose identity was known only to me. From it I could not see far, as it was surrounded by tall cedars, but I could look over into a wide tangle of prickly bushes, and in there, deep inside, was Rabbit Hideout.
Rabbit Hideout was the headquarters, the nerve center, and held the secret to all the others. It was actually impossible to see, from Lookout, and almost impossible to reach. There was only one way in—a tight tunnel through the thick branches of the bushes, under a thick, prickly ceiling. In the middle of that treacherous snarl, the roots and branches had somehow grown upward and tangled above, so a small space was created, just large enough for me, nine or ten years old, to sit there completely hidden. I had a desk, in there, which was really only a flat, rectangular wooden box, one long side open. I kept a spare pocketknife in the desk, and a heavy piece of blue beach glass that I used as a paperweight. Under that piece of glass was a folded piece of paper, a very important map that showed the names and locations of all the other hideouts, their number constantly multiplying (finding and naming them was, after all, the point). At the bottom of that map, I know, was this symbol:
Which was the symbol for my name—or merely my secret symbol, for it had no sound, and didn’t stand in as a code or placeholder for my usual name; it simply showed that I had found and named the hideouts, and that I had made the map, that I was master of these woods.
In his journal on July 11, 1938, Charles Burchfield writes, “To see, in the upturned face of a child directed toward oneself, a look of complete trust, liking and admiration is to me one of the finest and at the same time most disconcerting experiences.”
Four years earlier, he recounts this story: “Saturday afternoon—took Martha, Catherine & Arthur to see ‘where I burned a tree down’— . . . The children expected the remains of the tree to be there yet—I found a burnt stump near the spot which I declared must be the one. This little episode had something of the mystical about it. I can hardly describe how it felt. Somewhat of the strange reality of the dream. I had not imagined that this woods would still have the same beauty or romance that it had for me as a boy; but it did . . .”
As soon as my daughters could speak, they began demanding stories of me, stories about myself when I was their age; I complied, and was startled that the majority of the ones that came to me were from Wisconsin, where my family only lived in the summers—a fraction of my boyhood. Perhaps this disparity is due to the fact that I wasn’t in school in those months, and had more freedom, due to the woods and the lake. Or perhaps it’s that there was so much forgotten, left behind and unfinished for me on that peninsula.
This past August, I took my daughters there; this was only a few weeks, less than a month ago. It gives me so much pleasure to see the lake and the woods through their eyes, to walk with them through the places where all the stories happened, to be there in those stories and times again.
The three of us, each daughter holding one of my hands, set off down the paths, under the trees. It was a gray, blustery day. My sister’s black Labrador ran ahead of us, came back to be reassured that we were following, then ran ahead again.
“Tell us a story,” my younger daughter said.
“Show us the forts,” said my older one. “Show us the hideouts.”
None of it, of course, was quite as I remembered; still, it was there. We climbed Lookout—now covered in ten-foot maples, and sumac, and shorter than I expected.
“There,” I said, pointing to an expanse of stones. “Rabbit Hideout was there, all under a snarl of prickly bushes.”
“Where?”
We descended Lookout, our feet sliding on the gravel, and came out of the shadows, into the clearing. I stood right where the wooden box, where my secret desk had been.
“Someone cleared the bushes away,” I said, “but here’s where my desk was, where my map was, that showed where all the other forts and hideouts were.”
“So we’ll never find them?”
“How will we find them?”
“I still know where they are,” I said. “Most of them, I remember.”
They began to build their own fort, then, dragging branches and resting them atop one another, making a kind of lean-to. As they worked, I told them about the knives I used to carve, the different shapes and uses of those made from cedar and from birch, the fierce little daggers I carved from sumac. Taking out the knife that once belonged to Mr. Zahn, I broke off a piece of cedar and began to demonstrate.
“If you already have a metal knife,” my older daughter asked, “why would you make knives out of wood?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It doesn’t really make sense. That was just what I liked to do.”
The black dog lay in a patch of sunlight, watching us, snapping at flies, chewing on a bone. Overhead, the trees’ branches leapt and clattered in the wind.
“A skeleton!” the girls cried. “A human skeleton!”
“Is it a human skeleton, Daddy?”
The girls had found the bleached, scattered bones of a deer, shards stretching from the shadows into the sunlight.
“Maybe,” I said. “It could be.”
Next the girls found the rusted grate of a grill, and built a shelf upon which they lined pieces of bone, special stones. That would be their food, in this wilderness where they lived, where they had to do everything for themselves. They made decisions; they discussed how their lives would be: a hybrid of The Boxcar Children and Laura Ingalls Wilder.
I stood to one side, watching and listening for a while before asking, “What will I do?”
“What do you mean? You’re not even here.”
“Who am I? The father?”
“We don’t have a father.”
“Really?”
“We’re orphans.”
I wandered farther away, into the shadows beneath the cedars, still trying to hear what they were saying. After a while, I circled back, convinced them to let me take a picture.
Then the dog dropped the bone in his mouth and suddenly barked. He shot away dragging his leash through the underbrush, up toward the road.
We ran after him, laughing, spiderwebs in my face; the girls stumbled, shouting to not be left behind.
When we came out of the cedars, onto the road, the dog was close by, tail wagging, being petted by a person, a woman with her back turned to us. Shouting, the girls went around, past me.
The woman stood, shielding her eyes with one hand, and smiled as I approached. It was Mrs. Abel.
She stepped forward, hugged me quickly, and then leaned back to look at my face.
“You came back,” I said.
“I wondered when I’d run into you,” she said. “It’s been so long.” She kneeled again, where the girls were keeping a hold on the dog.
“And what are your names?” she said.
I felt shaky, having her so suddenly there, after all this time. I was glad for the distraction, the shield of my girls, who were shouting, introducing themselves. I looked more closely at Mrs. Abel as she answered their questions. Older, yes, her long hair gone white, in a thick braid, but still slim and strong-looking, still in her faded jeans, a man’s Oxford shirt with a ragged hem. My shadow fell toward her, the dark shape of my head across the beaded toes of her pale blue moccasins.
“We found a skeleton!” my older daughter said, pulling a bone from the pocket of her dress. “A skeleton of a person in the woods, near Daddy’s old fort.”
“I believe it,” Mrs. Abel said, standing, and then we were all walking, back down the road, the four of us and the dog, toward the driveway to my parents’ cabin. The girls were holding her hands as we walked.
“I’ve known your father a long time,” she was saying. “He used to think he was the best swimmer along this whole shore.”
“He still is! He tells us.”
“How about you girls—do you swim?”
“I’m an Otter, but I could be a Seal.”
“I’m in Polar Bear.”
“Those are their swimming classes,” I said.
“Impressive,” Mrs. Abel said. “You’ll have to come swim with me, at my house.”
“Where’s your house?”
“At the end of this road.”
The girls looked over at me. “Can we go there? Can we swim?
“Maybe,” I said. “Not right now.”
Mrs. Abel swung her arms, gently jerking my girls forward. Her braid slid back and forth across her shoulders, a white rope against her pale blue shirt.
“You’re here how long?” she said, glancing sideways at me.
“Two weeks,” I said. “Five more days. My wife comes tomorrow—she had to stay behind, to work.”
“I hear it’s beautiful,” she said. “Oregon. And you’re still writing.”
“Trying to,” I said.
We passed the dark opening in the trees where the cow path led up along the bluff, to where Mr. Zahn’s house had been. The girls began explaining the path to Mrs. Abel, and she exclaimed with surprise, as if it were unknown to her.
“I’ve read some of your books,” she said. “I could recognize you in them. And that story about the crazy taxidermist—that reminded me a little of Robert, all the animals he made.”
“Well, that’s pretty old.” I felt the weight of Mr. Zahn’s knife, heavy in my pocket. “I mean, I wrote that story a long time ago.”
“Still,” she said. “And I finally got all your letters, as well. They were wonderful to read.”
“You never wrote back.”
“Well—” She smiled. “It was years late, when I finally got them. But it was nice to be reminded. That all feels like a different life.”
Ahead, the Red Cabin flashed gray through the trees. Down by the main cabin, my sister was packing her car, preparing to drive home to Milwaukee. The girls let loose of Mrs. Abel’s hands and ran down the driveway, screaming, the black dog bounding at their heels. We watched them go.
“You sent me the second half of the story,” I said.
“What?”
“About the girl and the bird, and the forest underwater. You sent it to me.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’d forgotten all that, the story—but then this spring I found it when I was cleaning out a storage locker.”
“But why did you send it?”
She laughed. “Because it reminded me of you, because you mentioned it, in your letter, and that reminded me. It was something my husband sent to me, once. He probably wrote it himself.”
“So the girl in the story is you.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s not so simple—you should know that. It’s a story.”
The girls began yelling at me, calling for me that my sister was about to leave. My parents stood next to the car, now. My sister slammed the trunk; the dog ran around and around, then leapt into the backseat.
“We’ll have time to catch up, later,” Mrs. Abel said. “Don’t make them wait.”
“Later?” I tried not to sound too anxious, too eager.
“I have somewhere else to be, this afternoon, and tonight. In the morning? You can bring your girls by to swim.”
With that, she turned and walked away from me.