Lost in the Woods

Now Playing: "Break on Through (To the Other Side)" by The Doors

I brainstormed about fifty titles for this blog, most of them toying with ideals of adventure, quarter-life crises, youth/adulthood, displacement, just about any other cliche you could apply to an already very cliche backpacking trip. Part of me thought that a title should be the last thing you give a piece of writing (or anything you create for that matter) because it seemed senseless to prematurely label something you haven't experienced yet. Another part of me thought that giving this thing a preemptive title would create a state of mind that would transform into the experience or define it in some way. The way people born into the name "Jeff" create their own brilliant and unique "Jeff-ness". I scribbled down "Nirvana Buffering" before I realized it was 3 a.m. and I was sleep-deprived, so I went to sleep. And when I went to sleep, I had a dream about the woods behind my childhood house.

When I was growing up in Massachusetts, I lived at the edge of a massive forest. It was the biggest, most mysterious place in the world and was filled with goblins, trolls, monsters, and other beasts of varying degrees of friendliness. I would stand in the back yard, poke my fingers through the holes in the chain-link fence, and stare out at the madness of branches and vines that stretched out into nothingness. I played by the fence, defending my home from armies of skeleton creatures by cursing them with a long, crooked stick I found in the yard (which is what gave me my magical powers). I orchestrated masterful military strategies and sent my elven and dwarfish troops onward into the dark, evil forest. They were proud to fight for 7 Quamhasset Drive, and they fought with honor. The woods were a hidden expanse of mystery I could see from my bedroom window and I could only imagine what they contained until the day I conquered them.

I hopped the fence and began walking through the brush, tromping through the battlefields where countless adventures had been waged. I walked for maybe ten minutes before the woods ended and I came to a road. I looked back and could see my house through the trees.

Traveling is my socially-accepted way of playing in the woods as an adult. My fence has twin engines and my elves are people with new cultures and ideas, but I'm approaching this trip with the same child-like wonder and imagination as I did in my brief career as a six-year old military leader. I hope to learn something, I hope to create something, and I hope to be a different person on the other side of the woods.