As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods,"The woods" was our part-time address, destination,purpose,and excuse.If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home,his mother might say, "Oh,he's out in the woods,"with a tone of airy acceptance.It's similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym,or even "away from his desk."For us ten-year-olds,"being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring.Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today.History seemed to be mostly about explorers.Our explorations,though,seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way.Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks,shooting frogs,picking blackberries,digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were.If you read a story in which someone does that successfully,be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight,and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees.There were four or five trees that we visited regularly—tall beeches,easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree,too,that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end.By then some of us had reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence.In March,the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter,two friends and I set out to go exploring.We climbed a tree,and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree.Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.

    As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods,"The woods" was our part-time address, destination,purpose,and excuse.If I went to a friend's house and found him not at home,his mother might say, "Oh,he's out in the woods,"with a tone of airy acceptance.It's similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I'm looking for is on the golf course or at the gym,or even "away from his desk."For us ten-year-olds,"being out in the woods" was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.

    We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring.Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today.History seemed to be mostly about explorers.Our explorations,though,seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way.Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks,shooting frogs,picking blackberries,digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.

    Often we got "lost" and had to climb a tree to find out where we were.If you read a story in which someone does that successfully,be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight,and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees.There were four or five trees that we visited regularly—tall beeches,easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.

    It was in a tree,too,that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end.By then some of us had reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence.In March,the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter,two friends and I set out to go exploring.We climbed a tree,and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that we really were rather big to be up in a tree.Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.