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When I was 12 and what happens to boys hadn't happened to me yet, I loved to walk alone. I would walk five miles down a railroad track to my grandparents' place or walk seven miles in the opposite direction to a lake I liked to look at, after I had walked to the far corners of our town a half-dozen times that day. It wasn't beyond me to walk 20 miles without even stopping to think about it, as I haven't, really, until now.
The places I most liked to walk were outside any sign of habitation—in the carved gap of a railroad line or along a dirt road that led through pastures or corn fields to a woods. When I walked I thought of others who had walked this way before, and the only ones I had heard of who had walked as much as I seemed to walk were the apostles of Jesus Christ (along with Jesus, of course), and a U.S. president who once lived in the area of Illinois where my family was living—Abraham Lincoln.
The place I liked above all to walk was to a woods halfway between my grandparents and the lake I liked, the straight north of those two points, or so it seemed to me then, though its actual direction was west. I strolled toward it along the edge of a road that was such pure sand it was as hard to walk as the sand of an unpacked beach. All along the route hedge apples lay in the sand like limes so bloated that the pebbling of their peels resembled worms locked in molten swirls. You didn't want to think what the thing was up to. The hedge apples struck the sand like shot puts, and if I kicked one it was almost as heavy and left a gooey sap on my bare toes. Hedgerows crowded the road, growing wild in this place as deserted and hot as the Sahara—the perimeter of a state forest I was headed toward.
Once I had sized up my route for the next mile or so, or to the next hill or curve, I never looked ahead of my feet as I walked. I don't know why. What flowed past or flew in from the side or swung up to encounter me was more of a surprise that way, I suspect. I partly wanted to be surprised, or safely scared, as boys that age do—a natural scare that never approached the terror I lived with. My mother was dead and had died away from home of a disease I had never been able to fathom or my father had never been able to explain, so I had come to feel that my worst thoughts about her had caused her death.
The latticework of shadow from the hedge-apple rows thickened to trunks and overarching shadows of trees—tall elms still free from the Dutch elm blight—maples, burr oaks all gnarled, horse chestnut, and a dozen other varieties our science teacher had pointed out on a field trip when I was so overwhelmed by the trees themselves I couldn't take in their names.
But I knew them as well as aunts and uncles from my weekly walks through this state forest that was also becoming a wildlife sanctuary. I felt so much at home I sang as I sang nowhere else, sometimes mere notes that I felt began to reach the tones and patterns of plainsong—this I loved, mixed with incense, as much as anything about the church I attended each week.
"Oh, beautiful trees!" I sang. "Oh, sky above me! Oh, earth beneath my feet!" It was really a shout, blasts of assurance, the same song I sang each time I walked, as if to announce my presence to the elements I addressed—the sky and earth that had seemed to govern my life from its beginning. Then these trees.
I was never afraid or lost my way no matter how many and how varied the routes I took (besides not looking ahead), and I never felt the sense of the absence of my mother that I felt everywhere else. She was born on the plains, far from actual woods, where an individual tree offered shade but too many got in your way and were a bother or threat. I had walked with her in the spaces of the plains and at the edges of woods, the blue-green conifers of Minnesota mostly, and the movement and placement of her limbs as she walked communicated to me a sense of this. But people were made to talk, unlike the spaces of earth (both empty and filled-up) that seemed to want so much to talk they trembled with an omniscience that caused me to listen as I never did with people, not even her.
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