Finding the Way Back

“Those who get lost on the way to school will never find their way through life.”
German Proverb

There was really only a block between my house and Cedar Lane Elementary School in Vienna, Virginia. It made sense that I should walk to school. There was even a crossing-guard with a cap and day-glo belt that cut diagonally across his torso to help me cross the street and a straight-forward expanse of sidewalk in countable “step on a crack break your mother’s back” perfect squares. Still I was drawn to the woods. Even in first grade I was drawn to the woods that seemed dense and immense behind the block of houses that faced away from them towards the civilized asphalt of street. Perhaps I had already stuck a big toe in those woods playing on a swing-set with Wanda and Brenda whose back yard brushed right up against them. I don’t know what kind of map I carried around in my head at six to believe that the woods were a short-cut. Did I have a capacity for birds’ eye views and geometry? Did I really believe that walking through them would get me where I needed to be? Or was I simply led by the call of the wild?

I soon discovered that the woods were an otherworld hushed up by the angels. The creek was on the wrong side of me somehow, the water gushing in the wrong direction, but the noise of that gushing sang out to me anyway, luring me deeper. I think I believed that if I kept walking I would eventually wind up at school. Cedar Lane waits for me, will always be waiting for me with its frightening bulk of red-brick and grill of windows sternly watching for me to arrive. I am no doubt too young to know geometry, too young to know that the path through the woods should be parallel to the sidewalks that run up either side of the block and therefore should take no longer or not much longer than sidewalks do, given creeks to cross and stumps to balance on one-footed. I do not know this and will soon discover that Time does not exist in these woods and the teacher can keep calling the roll over and over again and never get to “W” for “Watt”—my last name—and will never even miss me so I can keep kicking at pine straw and dead leaves believing that I am walking even when I am, happily, going nowhere at all.

First days of school always feel like that walk through the woods to me. I know there is a finite number of steps I should take between here and there, home and school, but I wake up not intent-enough on getting there, wake up ready for risky meandering.