Planetary Stories Project

"To Act Globally, Think Locally – Through Stories"

Black Earth Institute

Place: Tarrytown, Westchester County, New York, USA

The Discovery
By JP Briggs

Characteristics of place: Housing development and forested New England upland
Type of Story: Fictionalized personal narrative
Keywords: woods, housing development, stream, creek, turtle, deer, movies, TV, coming of age

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The day after we moved into the new housing development I headed for the woods. Our house was the second built in the area. The other family had no kids my age. The development at that time consisted of blacktop roads arranged in knots and loops. The lots along the roads had been cleared of trees. Raw dirt driveways led to piles of stumps and exposed earth with a few clumps of weeds or wildflowers the bulldozer had missed: lots awaiting the improvements of utilities and similar-looking new homes.

Our lot was at the end of one loop with a thick pine grove behind it.

The grove attracted me immediately. Here muted ground gave underfoot, hushed air filled with resinous aromas and hot, splintered shafts of sunlight. The light strengthened and weakened as it sifted down through the canopy onto the thick floor of needles.

The grove ended abruptly at a cool, hilly upland forest of hardwoods, weathered glacial ledges and unruly brooks.

This tumultuous terrain held no fear for me, and I eagerly explored it. Over the next months — which when you’re nine seems like decades — I ranged far from my entry trail through the pine grove. I meandered in the deciduous forest. Sometimes I slid down steep slopes through dead leaves to the bottoms of ravines on my belly or the soles of my athletic shoes. Sometimes I clambered up cracks and scrambled across the many outcroppings of gray ledge which suggested an immense dynamism that long ago, and for some vastly mysterious reasons, had fallen silent, leaving the rocks poised with their roots going down into the origins of time.

The look and feel of these woods inspired and excited me: the pools of water shining from hollows in the ledges; the naked, slender trees whose bark had shrunken and fallen off, some of them toppled in steep angles against their living neighbors; clutters of leaves and twigs tangling themselves into weirs among the stones of fast moving creeks; the wonderful places behind some of the weirs where the water swelled into black, molten pools, streaked with blurry reflections.

Dark moss clung to the larger rocks in the creeks and littered the flanks of the massive ledges thrusting from the hillsides. Lichens splotched tree trunks in scaly disks that glowed luridly pale green and yellow in wet weather. Faint game trails ran through dead leaves and into the brush, the occasional two-toed prints in black mud coming into focus so quickly that it seemed the deer had just passed. A few times I’d heard a swishing sound in the leaves and caught the lash of a snake disappearing into a crevice. Twice I found a box turtle crawling partially obscured in the middle of nowhere, snapping shut as my shadow reached it and waiting mutely like a stone for me to disappear. Birds shuffled in the leaves or demurely flickered and called in the high treetops. The hardwoods were old and gnarly thick. Sometimes I lay on my back, dizzying my vision with their convergence into tangles of vanishing points. In the autumn, the whole area, from grasses to overstory, cascaded with colors.

Weekends and on school vacation days, I provisioned a small backpack with sandwiches and a themos of juice and set out to eat my lunch beneath one of the soaring, companionable trees. The woods allowed me to get away from my troubles at school where I had been immediately picked on because I was shy, gawky and new; and at home where my parents seemed to be always subliminally discussing divorce.

I especially liked the moments in late fall — leaves down and browning on the earth — when snow cast its spell through the woods. I loved hearing the hiss of frozen crystals, as hard as grains of sand, on the leaf litter; I loved being part of the steady transformation of the solid matter of the forest into something unexpected and ethereal.

By midwinter, the deep snow restricted my movements to the brooks nearest the pine grove. My family had always lived in cities or suburbs, so the recourse to snowshoes never occurred to us.

In warmer weather I brought my boy’s violent fantasy life into the woods. A natural loner, with parents who both worked, my understanding of the real world was mainly formed by the movies I saw on TV. In the wide parts of the creek nearest the house I launched gray plastic models of battleships and blew them up with gasoline I poured into old medicine vials. Unfortunately for my imagination, this never yielded the heroic explosions I sought. Gooey drops of plastic floated downstream and clung to the rocks.

More frequently, I wandered the terrain, picturing myself a woodland Indian, that is, the European-American stereotype of an Indian — a lone doomed figure at home in the wilderness. I deeply identified with this mythical Indian because I felt alone and alienated by the world outside the forest. I felt empowered by the landscape because I could think of it as my solitary domain. 

The ridge of one densely ledgy slope contained nooks and a boy-sized cave guarded by a stockade of white birch trees. Here I brought blankets and containers, built fires and pictured myself an aborigine.

The cave lay fairly far into the woods and I usually couldn’t spend much time there before being called by the deadlines my parents imposed. One late spring day I knew I had more time than usual before I needed to return home. Since I had explored everything up to the caves, I decided to see how much farther into the woods I could go.

Excited, I packed a compass along with my sandwiches and bottle of soda and headed west.

For a considerable distance the terrain beyond the cave looked much the same. New creeks ran through new tumbles of rocks — new dynamical shapes to the moss and lichen covered new ledge; new game trails ran through the underbrush and showed new prints in the fine dark mud. Wildflowers and fiddlehead ferns thrust up, unfurling in damp spots around the creeks. At one point, I teetered on logs crossing a swampy area, gloomy with derelict snags — objects huge and weathered, infested with woodpecker holes. Bird notes rose from unseen sources. In the wet places, mosquitoes whined. The amiable spring air felt warm with a cool undercurrent. Every foot of land I crossed I claimed as mine.

Around midday I stopped with my back against a tree and ate one of my sandwiches. A chipmunk scampered close to consider my leavings. Checking my compass, I continued west. I passed through a dense thicket that scratched my face and arms, coming into a glade where I saw hooked, closely spaced animal tracks I didn’t recognize. After the glade, the land angled steeply toward a ridge. I don’t know why, but the light there suggested that an open area lay beyond. Something turbulent and engrossing seemed to be going on inside it.

Slabs of boulders as large as houses hung on the steep slope as if cascading down. I climbed, panting and sweating, slipping on leaves, banging my legs against boulders, teetering against the difficult angles, pulling myself forward by grasping small saplings. The light ahead seemed to grow brighter and more agitated. Suddenly frightened, with a sinking feeling, I reached the crest of the ridge.

Below me the land fell away into a short, curving stretch of six-lane highway. Cars and large trucks burst violently into the curve, as if being pumped into the open space from both directions of surrounding woodland. Exploding the air, each vehicle shot through its brief arc, then vanished at the speed of death. The advent of their concussions seemed to create or sustain a huge vacuum into which they were sucked. It was like stumbling on the construction site of an alien species that had no appreciation for the fact that human beings even existed and no desire whatsoever to communicate with them.

I stood on the ridge for a time beyond time.

It was mid-afternoon when I re-entered the woods. The thin trees cast pale shadows. The boulders on the hillside seemed shrunken. I remember the distances from the ridge to the caves and from the caves to the house appeared remarkably short. I remember the hollow sickness that had seized my insides during the whole of my hike back.

After my discovery, I returned to the woods to play, occasionally blew up model ships and pretended to be an Indian, but it wasn’t the same. More homes went up in the development; other boys moved in and I joined them, now accepted at school. One day I took a girl who’d moved into our development to visit the woods, a year later carving her name in one of the birch trees, and eventually uncovering the unbelievable intimacy of her body on the soft needles of the pine grove. On the day I broke up with her, we walked among the old boulders and trees of the upland. It was one of the many times when it seemed to me that the highway I had discovered in the woods haunted everything.

Many years later, returning home as a responsible adult with a family (my parents had moved into a town nearby, and then my father died), I drove that highway with the full intention of locating the exact spot on the ridge where I’d stood. I wanted to study the place and test its meaning. I found it. But as it turned out, the spot was on a bad curve, the traffic was heavy and there was no way to stop.