Woodland Traces   By Mary C. Trejo   PAGE 2 of 3  <BACK

Now I am traveling home.  The interstate is a fast grey river alive with the improbable energy of numberless speeding cars and heavy diesels.  Restless, I begin to imagine the metal river of which I am a part propelled by an unbroken chain of internal combustion engines, stretching the unimaginable miles from coast to coast.  As I picture power and motion I feel a kind of apprehension as I think of the vulnerable mass of all the people on this curving highway, rushing down through the heart of the continent.  I superimpose a kinder thought: older, slower automobiles fill my view as I force the fast traffic to give way to what I choose to see as a less hurried group of drivers.  But I have no real affinity for these imaginary motorists at all, I think.  As I wind the reel back, I set up another transparency--the wooden boxes of stagecoaches, or wagons, pulled by horses, mules, oxen.  This pleases me, and the predictable culmination presses into my vision: I see now the foot travelers, edited quickly out of their pioneer costumes as my interest lags, now dressed as Indians, then in the skins and furs of the nomads of prehistory.  With some effort I hold the four successively superimposed levels of my fantasy, the jarring speed and hard metal, the touring cars, the wagons, the walkers.  I feel most drawn to the walkers; somehow, in the same way that my rural childhood was defined by the concrete and the tangible, they too, while most remote, seem most real.

Self-conscious and irritated by the neatness of my vision, I acknowledge the truth of this concrete river, but I am bored now and the imagery seems less clever.  Then in a glad moment I see that I have moved into juxtaposition with a companion stream of life: it is spring, and above me the sky is traced by winding bands of migratory birds.  Their essential color is silver grey, they too are numberless, and in this changing season they are going home.

Thoughts of returning home draw me back in memory, and I am once again the secure child who confidently claimed and navigated the shaded yard, the barn-lot, and beyond.  The thick lawn was subtly marked by trails, one made by my family rounding the corner of the yard, the other, more indistinct, made by the furred paws of our family of cats.  This trail I preferred to follow as it wound with feline economy through the flowerbeds, under the fence, and out into the open meadow, where meals of field mice waited.

Once beyond the yard, the landscape of the farm was filled with possibilities for treks to wonderful places.  The path to the barn, a tall structure of wood gone silver with age, was a road of hard-packed earth leading to dusky interiors where the huge cattle stood at milking time, exhaling heavily between mouthfuls of grain.  The way to the henhouse was equally worn, smooth to bare feet, and was the avenue to another shadowy enclosure where sometimes eggs could be found underneath the warm feathers of the irritable birds.

But as always, I was drawn to journey farther.  The lane was waiting, and beyond it, the woods.

(continued)

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