Penpal (3 page)

As I stepped delicately through the brush, an idea began to form in my mind. If I could climb a tree, I might be able to see my way to the woods’ exit. I became less despondent and began searching the canopy for a proper scouting position. None of these trees seemed tall enough, but if I could find one that was, I might be able to see a house.
I might even be able to see my house
, I thought.

I stood still and balanced carefully on my now-aching feet. The trees that loomed over me when I had woken up in these woods had been tall, I recalled. But I struggled to remember just how tall they were.

“What about the branches?” I mumbled to myself. I
remembered
seeing branches above me, and if they grew low enough, I knew that I would be able to climb up the tree. If I could find my way back to that spot, I could work my way up the tree
and possibly
see a way out … but that would mean going back.

I shifted on my feet and tried to make the best decision. Turning around, I took a few steps back toward the
direction
from
which I had come, and I froze as a phrase echoed in
my head:

How far can you go into the woods?

I hadn’t been tortured by this question for well over a year, and I stood there a bit bewildered by the fact that it had suddenly come rushing back into my mind.

On an afternoon, toward the beginning of kindergarten, I had come home from exploring a part of the woods that I had never seen before. I was excited to tell my mother how far I had gone, and she seemed – even if she was only humoring me – to be equally excited to hear it. When I had finished describing my journey, she congratulated me and asked if I thought I had finally seen all the woods there were in our neighborhood. I told her that I didn’t think so, but that I wanted to. She smiled as she asked, “So, how far can you go into the woods?”

This sounded like a challenge, and so I answered confidently, but none of my answers seemed satisfactory to her. “
Really
far,” “
Super
far,” and even “All the way” were all rejected as viable responses; after each attempt to close the issue, she would just return with the same question, becoming more amused by the minute.

At a loss, and wanting to be able to answer her question so that she would stop asking it, I asked the only other authority figure I knew: my teacher. She gave me a quizzical look and asked me what I meant. I didn’t even really know what I meant, and so I just repeated the question. She thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know, let’s see,” as she walked me over to the map that was tacked to our classroom wall.

She asked me the name of my street, which I had memorized, and she took a moment to find it before touching my shoulder and holding her finger on a big patch of green. “I think these are your woods,” she said. I repeated my question yet again; I told her that my mom had been asking me this question repeatedly. As I told my teacher this, she seemed to realize something and took her finger off the map. She smiled coyly saying, “I don’t know. How far
can
you go into the woods?”

As I stood there in the woods with my arms tucked inside my shirt to avoid the frigid air, I thought about this question and remembered how I came across the answer; this stirred a warm fondness in me that almost made me forget about the reason
that
question
had come back into my mind to
begin
with.

I discovered the answer just a few weeks after I asked my teacher. My grandparents called to chat with my mother and me, and when my mom handed me the phone to talk to my grandfather, “Pop,” I thought I could have a little fun and be on the giving end of the antagonizing for once. Before he could even ask me how I’d been, I charged at him.

“Hi, Pop. How far can you go into the woods?”

“What?”

“How far can you go into the woods?” I repeated knowingly, although I knew nothing at all.

“Oh. Well, I suppose about halfway,” he said, snickering.

“What? How come you could only go halfway?”

And then, as if he had been waiting for this moment for his entire life, he bellowed:

“Because if I went any farther, I’d be coming out!” He began laughing so hard that it transformed into a coughing fit, and he handed the phone off to my grandmother.

It took me a while to appreciate the nature of the question and its answer. I had never heard a riddle before, but the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I would ask that question to dozens of people in the months to follow.

Standing there barefoot in the woods, thinking about this riddle, I found that it wasn’t amusing anymore. However, now it was more than just a silly question. I had walked a long way; for all I knew I couldn’t walk any farther in – the last tree might be just ahead. If I turned back now, I might be walking back into the woods rather than out of them. I pivoted where I stood and resumed the trajectory that I had adopted when I set out.

Everything was eerily quiet as I pressed on. The only noticeable sounds were of crickets, cicadas, and the light grinding of leaves under my sore feet. Occasionally, however, I would step too hard on a healthy stick, and its cracking would drive the noisy creatures to silence. I would stand there paralyzed by the sudden hush, and I would hold my breath and listen for sounds I hoped not to hear. When the insects resumed, so would I. Desperate to keep their noise, I trod carefully on the undergrowth, but it was thick, and here and there my foot would press down on a stick just enough to snap it; the bugs would arrest, and so would I.

This relationship persisted until the last interlude that I remember. I broke a stick, the insects hushed themselves, but instead of the expected silence, I heard what sounded like an infant crying in the distance. I could feel the blood draining out of my limbs as I listened to this wailing that didn’t sound as far in the distance as I wished it to be. I felt a churning in my stomach and a weakness in my legs. Standing completely still and being careful not to make any noise, I waited. But the sound didn’t stop. Suddenly, another sound joined the chorus. A large stick snapped just behind me.

I panicked.

I think now, as an adult, the sound I heard that night was a cat in either heat or rage, but I had no thoughts in my mind as I ran veering in different directions, taking as much care as I could to avoid big thickets of bushes and collapsed trees. I was paying close attention to where I stepped, because my feet were in such bad shape, and I suppose I instinctively wagered that it would be better to move less quickly than not at all. I paid too much attention to where I was stepping and not enough attention to where those steps were leading, because not long after hearing the cry, I saw something that filled me with
such despair that
I find it difficult to articulate its potency even now.

It was the pool float.

I was right back where I had woken up.

I stood there dazed, staring at the pool float. It looked oddly familiar to me now that the initial mental haze that had plagued me when I first awoke had dissipated. I wondered if that was because it was the only thing in the woods that I
actually
recognized, but that didn’t seem quite right. I shook it off and attended to what really mattered.

I had traveled for what felt like a great distance, but I hadn’t really moved at all. This wasn’t magic or some supernatural folding of space. I was lost, utterly and completely.

Up until that moment, perhaps in an effort to focus on what I could control, I had thought more about getting out of the woods than how I got in, but being back at the beginning caused my mind to swim. My feet had not hurt at first, but they were agonized now, and I had made not even an inch of progress. I had been hoping that these were my woods from the time that I had awoken in them. I had hoped that I simply didn’t recognize them due to the obscuring and distorting darkness. But my optimism had long since disappeared,
swallowed
like everything else by the engulfing blackness.

Had I run in a huge circle around that spot, or did I just get turned around and start making my way back? I realized that even if I set out again on the path I had tried to follow at the outset, there was no way to be sure I would actually chart the same course; and if I took a completely different course, then I wouldn’t have even made progress in terms of scouting the area through my original excursion. And although I had pushed it to the very back of my mind, rhythmically, like a metronome, my mother’s riddle marched back to the frontlines – its footsteps faint at first but gradually building in a crescendo that became so loud I could think of nothing else:
into the woods
.

As this echoed through my thoughts, I suddenly pictured the woods as a vast circle of trees. As I turned on the spot on which I stood and looked around me, a fear crept into my mind that I might be standing at the very edge of the circle and that whatever direction I picked would just lead me deeper, farther into the woods.

As I continued scanning the landscape around me, my eyes fixated on one of the trees that I had seen towering above me when I first woke up. I looked at it dully – the way you gaze at something when you aren’t actually seeing it, despite how unshakably fixed your eyes have become; like staring at a wall when you’re lost in thought. Slowly, both my eyes and mind regained their focus, and I moved my head up.

It
was
tall.

I forced the despair out of myself and made my way to the tree, being careful to avoid the thorns that were blanketing the ground. As I stood on the exposed roots of the tree and looked straight up the height of its trunk, I thought that the tree must surely be tall enough to allow me to see my way out. I reached my hand up and grasped the lowest limb, but as I tightened my grip, my arm began shaking. Trying to steady myself, I moved my other hand up onto the branch, but when I tried to pull myself up, I felt my body protest. I remember thinking that night that it was simply too cold to climb the tree, but I know it wasn’t the cold that stopped me. It was fear.

I released the branch and looked back to the spot where my night had started. I could still see the place where I had woken up; it was a relatively clear spot in the middle of an otherwise debris-laced ground – as if I had tried to make a snow angel in the dirt and had given up in the middle of the project. It was a strange sight, but not any stranger than the rest of this place.

Fully conscious of my feet’s condition, I walked back to the small clearing and sat down with my legs crossed.

“What if there’s no way out?” I questioned, torturously.

I was too defeated to feel anything but apathy, and I turned my attention back to the tall tree and the stars above, looking upon it all with listlessness. Tracing my eyes over the stars, I had an epiphany. I had heard so much about explorers navigating the world by sea – traveling to undiscovered lands and building new civilizations. I had learned that they could do this by following the stars, and my spirits rose in a flash as I realized that I might be able to do the same. At the time, I thought the North Star was just the brightest star, and so I looked for and found the one with the most brilliant shimmer. I followed it.

I was careful to keep the star that I picked in my sights at all times. If I reached a point where the trees above obscured it too much or for too long, I redirected myself on a path that avoided them. I ignored every sound that tempted me to whip my body around to confront it, and despite the pain, I surveyed the ground primarily by the feel of my feet rather than the sight of my eyes, knowing that if this star was lost so too would be
my way.

Eventually my surroundings began to look more familiar; a network of fallen trees that I recognized as ones that I had used as balance beams offered my first legitimate sign of hope, though I walked around and not across them this time. Soon after, I came upon the Christmas tree pile – its scattered ornaments glimmering dimly in the weak moonlight. I gave it a wide berth to avoid the glass shards that might still pepper the ground from the times that my feet, when they were less vulnerable, had pressed down upon the glass balls of holiday flair and crushed them. My nerves were
beginning to calm, and when I saw a dirt void called
“The Ditch,”
I knew that I had made it out; the
feeling
of relief that washed over me brought with it a smile that was more
sincere
and joyful than
any I had
ever worn on my face before.

Despite the impulse to quicken my pace when I had my bearings restored and no longer had to watch my North Star so vigilantly, my feet were in so much pain that I had to be mindful of each step. A distance I had covered in mere seconds in my nightly exodus from these woods seemed to be never-ending. I walked with a limp in both legs in an attempt to avoid putting too much weight on either foot. But when I saw the edge of the woods’ dirt floor cut off by the paved cul-de-sac of my street, I grew so happy to be so close to home that I broke into a light jog, despite how much it hurt. When I actually saw the roof of my house over a lower-set neighboring house, I let out a
light sob and
ran faster, wincing with each step. I just wanted to be home.