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The remains of the old firepit I built when I was about 13. |
When I was a young'un, the woods around my house in Martinsville were a source of pure joy as well as abject fear. In the daytime, they seemed an endless place to explore, play army, hunt dinosaurs, practice kung fu, blow up model tanks, and all kinds of exciting things. But at night, whippoorwills, owls, insects, and other night creatures made eerie, sometimes ghastly noises that convinced me all was not what it seemed in the dark. It was the latter that so shaped my sensibilities early on and most directly influenced my explorations of fear in my fiction. It was from those woods that the "Fugue Devil" sprang and that "The Gray House" was born.
In my teenage years, with the onslaught of land development in the area, I
became aware of how fragile and how precious such places are — and how utterly
devastated I would be should they be destroyed by the damnable souls who see
such green areas as nothing more than sources of revenue. Happily, for the
most part, those woods still exist, though there are certainly more houses in
that part of the neighborhood than when I was growing up. In my current
wanderings, I can still find souvenirs of my past there: bits and pieces of
countless toys and models that I used in early pyrotechnics experiments (in my
teens, I fancied myself a budding special effects director); the beech tree
carved with the name of the kung fu club (haha) that Chuck Neely, Bob Cox, my
brother, and I came up with; and the two trees that boast the visages of
protective demons, which, in my young teen years, I carved around prominent
knotholes to emphasize the natural patterns in the bark, along with the words
"Defileth Not" — warnings to anyone who might go into those woods for any
reason other than to preserve them.
Well, with so many of those remnants still out there, perhaps those demons are
hard at work. I sincerely hope so.
First "Defileth Not" trees\. L) Circa 2012; R) Today
Second "Defileth Not" tree. L) Circa 2012; R) Today
One of the old beech trees that marked the boundaries of our old
Kung Fu Club sparring area, circa 1974.It reads "Marakami no Tsurugi," which means "Sword of Marakami." I don't recall who or what Marakami was,
but we used the name because it sounded cool.
