By R.J. Melby

Stories hung over that place.
When I was perhaps ten or eleven years old, growing up in Anoka, Minnesota, I loved exploring the woods down the street from our suburban town house. I’d deemed it Woodland, treating it as my own Narnian hiding place where I could lean against a tree and lazily crack open a book. It loomed behind a playground where sun bleached slides and rusty spring rockers resided.

Winter was the best time to wander through, since that was when one didn’t have to pick ticks from their legs and navel afterward. There was a large, rolling swamp at the center of that forest, and my siblings and I would cross it to Sunny Acres Park when the water froze. Of course, one day the ice wasn’t quite so thick, and I repeatedly slipped a boot through the ice and into the swampy muck while pushing through the jungle of reeds and cattails.

In the summertime we hiked around the swamp. Sometimes we’d find treasures, like when my little brother found an old, abandoned bike our da later patched up. Other times, we’d find ghosts in the form of old tents and sleeping bags left behind by bums. Those woods stretched around the suburbs in patches. As I got older, I’d pass by one of these patches on my walks to work. That was back when I was still living with my parents in Anoka.

I couldn’t drive yet –didn’t have a permit, much less a car. But those woods never lost that haunted air. I was a cashier at Walmart at the time, just out of high school. Long, dark hair hung over a blue vest. Strolling the sidewalk, it was a staple of my little journey. It stood as my reminder of nature, still my Narnia and my Shire.

Once, a coworker told us that he’d been mugged while walking through those woods. As he talked, he was nonchalant about it, the same way he’d brag about his chewing tobacco addiction. “Yeah, a guy stopped me on the way home from work the other day,” he said. “Had to shell out my money.” The other guys and I eyed each other. The idea of getting jumped added to the forbidding atmosphere the forest exuded. Backpack slung over my shoulder, I had to remain vigilant, eyes locked in case someone were to leap out with a knife.

There was still that calming aura as well, however. Since childhood, the forest was a square of natural growth, a place of breathing life that towered over a person. Squirrels would scurry back and forth between the trunks. Sometimes, the occasional snake would slither by. It reminded one how transient and immaterial people truly are, in the grand scheme of things. I’d gone through my first breakup around that time, moved from working at Walmart to working at Cub Foods as a meat clerk, and my grandpa’s passing was just around the corner. At the time, it was a refreshing, humbling hit before the humdrum artificiality of retail work.

Years later, I was met with a shock. It was after my girlfriend and I had moved out to Mankato while she was going to college there. I tagged along for a taste of freedom from my parents. One day, on one of our visits back, I noticed the forest was gone, swept away. Whoever did it left only a dry patch of soil. The construction workers apparently worked fast, like an angry swarm. One could imagine the creak of falling lumber and ripping bark, the squeaks and squawks of wildlife evicted from their homes. Eventually, a storage facility was erected in its place, tall and white with garage doors that pimpled its immense face.

Looking out the window, I asked my partner about it. “When did they do this?” I asked. “They’ve been working on it for a while,” she told me, shrugging. She visited home more than I did, so this wasn’t any surprise for her. I was always too busy working, and her dad was in his seventies and in poor health.

Now, I wouldn’t call myself an environmentalist or a tree-hugger. Yet, it is a shame to observe this painful transformation. The creep of industrialization, we are told, is inevitable. Forests, some say, may be harder and harder to come by. But change should be about growth, not about active parts falling off like baby teeth, right? As Earth hits its age, that is, when it too must make a drastic change, will she choose to cast us out in the same way? Continually, things must change. But it can’t always be good. Change, change, and change will come. But every time I drive by that storage facility, a sigh escapes my throat.