I live only a little more than 10 kilometers from where I grew up, and the house I grew up in was located only a 5 minute walk from a forest. Needless to say I spent much of my childhood roaming that forest, but for some reason that I can't explain, I haven't been there much since becoming an adult, let alone with my camera.
That had to change. One Sunday morning in January I ventured into my old stomping grounds armed only with my camera and a mind full of memories.
When you are a child, everything seems bigger. And the fact is that when us kids went into the woods, we only covered a fraction of the forest, which is not all that big to begin with. But to us, that fraction seemed like a huge world, and at times it seemed like we had it all to ourselves. We just went over there, without our parents, and maybe even without telling anyone that we were going. In the summer we would be running around with our homemade, wooden guns, playing war games. In the winter we would bring our bobsleds and slide down the hills that were so much bigger than what the little kids were confined to. Until the even bigger kids would notice us and tease us and chase us off. One year we brought our Action Man army and built trenches for them deep among the pines. Another year, we stumbled on a big, expensive camera lying on the ground. We turned it over to the police and later received a finder's fee from the owner.
And then... disaster hit! Big machines. Men with chainsaws. They cut down our favorite part of the forest. We were devastated. How could they? Who gave them the right to ruin our playground? We had become the victims of a huge atrocity not unlike what the Indians that we liked to pretend to be had suffered.
But we were powerless. We were also getting older, and maybe our days of roaming the forest were coming to an end, anyway. Reluctantly, we had to accept the inevitable. The forest, like our childhood, was being pried away from us, and an era was coming to an end.
All of those things were going through my head as I walked down the path that we had always just referred to as "The Big Path", which cut through the forest and constituted an unofficial border to how long our childhood selves dared venture into the wilderness. So far I hadn't really recognized anything from all those years ago, which was hardly surprising. More than 40 years had passed, and most of the forest would have been cut down and regrown a couple of times over. It could have been any other forest.
Until it wasn't.
Coming around a curve, I was suddenly sucked into a time vortex, the like of which you normally only see in movies about time travel. The vortex was formed by ancient tree branches arching over a path bottomed by a sunken hollow way. It immediately hurled me back in time... probably to around 1980 when I was 11 years old. And there it was... the place I remembered. The hill where we had been sledding in the winter, where we had roamed with our wooden guns and wild imaginations. I could hear the voices and laughter of long lost childhood friends. For a moment all the worries that seem to define adulthood disappeared, and there was only the happy sensation of 11-year-old bliss in my tummy.
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