Boyd C. Allen, Introduction to the Outdoors

Boyd C. Allen

Come and learn to enjoy the outdoors with me as we try new things together.

 

My introduction to the outdoors came early and long. I grew up in Salem, Ohio, a small town, middle of nowhere. Even in the center of town, the blocks of streets surrounded acres of woods. I purchased my first bow with my allowance money by following an alley to a creek and the wooded creek bed through town all the way to the hardware store.

Our parents’ manner of raising us was as simple as it was effective.  “Parents live in the adult world; you are not an adult; go outside.” Outside. Period. That is where children belonged.

We did not own a trampoline, there was no park nearby, we did not go to camp. Why would we go to a camp when we lived next to the woods, our friends had fields, there were multiple creeks, and we all owned tents and knives and bows and arrows and bb guns and dogs and wagons?

My sister (Beth) and I and our friends Alan and Brian and Marcy awoke each summer day, ate a bowl of cereal, and left. We all ended up somewhere around noon when we got hungry and thirsty. We recharged and went back out. Each corner of the woods on the block held another group like ours; some we played with and others we fought.

At the lower end of the hill, a nasty kid named Tim lived in the stone house on the corner. His brother had a motorcycle. His parents never left the house. He grew pudgy and overly white, and we avoided him. Mark and Danny lived on the street below.  During the summer that Mark and I were nine, we began to build. We dug a mud house out of the steep bank of the creek, just like the dirt houses we read about in school. We were settlers. Mark and Danny were thick kids who later played football for CMU.

Later, we had a train of small kids dragging wood from every garage and woodpile in the neighborhood. We used ropes to drag 2×8’s into the trees for cross joists. We pounded nails and bent nails and split boards and split our fingers and kept pounding and used corrugated metal for roofs and whatever planks we could find for the uneven floors.

Occasionally, a father would appear out of nowhere, standing next to us, scaring us half to death. My father would gaze up at the tree houses and question us: “What size nails held the cross joists? Had we used any screws? Would the flooring planks hold the joists to the tree or would it be better next time to put them inside the tree trunks? Whose ladder is that?”

The homemade ladders we attached to the trees always twisted off.  We tried ropes, but the girls couldn’t climb them. Eventually we made real ladders that we could use and then pull up. I called my tree houses “forts”. Everything was a fort. The Russians were coming. I snuck home late and hid the ladders to other peoples’ forts. Older kids came in at night and filled the trees with cigarette butts. They built bigger forts on the ground with padlocks and roofs and couches inside and snuck girls in.

We were still making spears and missing rabbits and practicing with sling shots and missing rabbits. We cut down a tree which hung up in the canopy and slid off the stump and onto my foot. Alan had to find friends to lift it off because we couldn’t tell our parents; they would have confiscated the hatchet that I snuck out of the basement.

My hunting knife slipped off a pole I was splitting to make a spear. It slit the top of my thumb long and deep. Brian and Beth and I went to Alan’s to show him how you could see through the meat to the bone before going home to butterfly it.

I grew up and walked from under the trees and went to high school and played sports and acted in plays and had a girlfriend and a car and a job.  I went to Pitt and to Geneva college and got a job and married and raised kids and walked the neighborhoods at night and fished and hunted and hiked and biked. And the whole time, a part of me felt trapped.

Each month, somehow, I walked at night under a full moon peering through the trees. . . Ohio. . . Pennsylvania. . . Florida. . . Georgia. . . Colorado. . .

Each year, since I turned forty, I have increased my time outdoors. Boating, fishing, kayaking, hiking, camping, backpacking, canoeing, scuba diving, snorkeling, mountain biking.

To let the child from the woods die would be to die inside. I am aching to live forever with that child. Join Me.