Perreteir

        It was a time when things were simpler, a time when the woods were fuller, thicker; when you could walk more than five miles into one without hearing the sounds of nearby traffic.
         It was June, likely, though such a memory’s details can get a little fuzzy with time. The summer air was clear, hot, and fresh. You could take a deep breath in those days without worrying about what you were taking in. The view was mostly green, lightly golden when the canopy grew thin and let the sun in on clearings. The sounds of cicadas whining, of chirping warblers and babbling rivers, of frogs chugging and leaves blowing in the wind was all that was heard aside from your footsteps crunching through the leaves.
         The sun pierced through the canopy, dappling the forest floor in patterns not unlike those found on a Dalmatian pup, a golden checker on a brown and green board. Even though it was summer, the floor was still blanketed in the previous fall’s foliage, a reminder of how stagnant such places are.
         Paths were hard to come by in those woods, and many times you used a stream or an ancient rock wall to keep your sense of direction. And if all else failed, you used the sun.

         Perreteir was what we called it, the small patch of forest that surrounded Nathan’s house, I mean. It was probably no more than ten square miles, but to us, in those days, it was bigger than the world itself. Everything was bigger back then. Every nook had a mystery, and every whisper in the trees had meaning. We called it Perreteir because we were unoriginal—a combination of Perry, my last name, and Pelletier, his. Looking back now, the name was horrid; twasn’t catchy or simple, too long and strenuous to say.
         We even drew up maps. The naming of the regions fell to me, and I named them after what I saw, after what was significant: Stone Wall Lane (after one of the many broken, disheveled stone walls that were made during the early days of the country), Airy Field (after the sound the breezes made as they blew through the seemingly constructed rows of birches in a particularly open clearing of land), Chipmunk Hotel (a huge rock formation that we dreamed housed a whole kingdom of rodents, with a hierarchy and social structure, with small chambers and halls wrought deep within the earth), Cannon Ruin (after the desolate cannon we found in a ditch that we liked to fantasize was used during the Revolution), and, of course, The Stream, the focal point of the entire kingdom.
         And as with any kingdom, it needed a castle. Unfortunately for Nathan and I, stone blocks, mortar, and slaves to do our building were not available to us. So, we did the next best thing: we stole.

          Nathan and I had just finished drawing up the first map. It was simple, uncolored on wrinkled parchment. But, as with everything in those days, it looked professionally-made. I was scribbling some symbols, perhaps a set of squiggly lines that represented The Stream, when Nathan came in from the porch. “We gotta make a fort,” he said, and I looked at him blankly, “Y’know, like the ones in the stories?” I merely nodded.
         We didn’t know how we would build it. Heck, we didn’t even really know what the word “fort” entailed. We did know, however, that we’d need some wood. But where would two ten year-old boys find enough wood to essentially build a fort? Nathan knew.
         Apparently, Nathan’s uncle of some unfortunate circumstance had owned a rather large plot of land about a mile south of his house. We would go there every now and again, sometimes to steal things such as the assorted screw driver, planks of wood that we would use to build tree bridges—boards leaned across tree branches that we would use to traverse the canopies. Or, at least, in our minds that’s what we did.
         Anyway, Nathan proposed that we head over to his uncle’s to fetch some wood. I asked, “How much?” and he simply shrugged. At the risk of sounding redundant, constantly reminding you of how things were “in those days,” everything was simpler in those days. We trotted down the seashell-laden road that led through the private neighborhood and to the uncle’s property.
         Nathan told me to stay put as he headed towards the house, dark and quiet. There was no car in the yard, save for the rusted, ramshackle pickup that sat deserted in the grass. I lost him inside the house for a few moments, and then he returned from the darkness with a smile on his face. “No one here,” he said, “let’s go around to the back.” And we did. The yard was a thick green clearing in the woods, and piled all around the tree-walls were stacks of wood. It looked rotted, dark, and wet, but it would serve us just fine. It took us three trips in all to take the little wood we did, and we made sure that the newly extracted booty would go as unnoticed as possible amongst the remainder.
         We came back to the Airy Field, as we called it, and set the wood down in piles. After all of the wood was loaded, we went to building, hammering in boards with rusted, bent nails. There was only one hammer, so we alternated and the other used a rock. Eventually the rhythm of construction took hold of us, and we no longer had to think about what we were doing. We just let ourselves become part of the process, a neutral observer rather than the most-active player. The whole task took probably two hours or so, and when it was done we had a castle.
         Surely, now that I look back on it, the “fort” was merely a clump of damp wood nailed at odd angles that vaguely resembled a cabin shape. But at the time it was grander than the grandest castle of our dreams. Each shaft of light that crept through the “windows,” caught the outdoor dust, and I envisioned a great cliff-side fortress that overlooked a bay, where the sun could pierce the stained-glass windows each morning and each evening.
        For one whole week we cherished that place. It was our area. No one but we could enter. It was our area. And then, as magnificently as it had arrived, it was gone. We came one afternoon to play, and instead of being greeted by the great Fort Perreteir, we saw a few forgotten planks, some nails, and a hammer. Apparently Nathan’s uncle had found of our plans and our spot. That was a point of great struggle in my young days, having all that I loved stripped in a single day. It was then that I started noticing the world for how it is, not how it was.