2001-08-30 - 3:23 a.m.

When I think back and try to think about when my life started, in the sense that it's when my memory of my life starts, and thus is all that's really real to me at all, there are flashes of times spent running in terror from the librarian ghost in "Ghostbusters," learning to read with Dr. Seuss's "Go Dog, Go" and the day my brother sleepwalked out of our apartment and down the street. There are snapshots of Head Start and memories of memories, or times in my past that reminded me of times even farther back in my past, to the point that the primary memory isn't there any more.

The day my family moved from our apartment in Millinocket to our camp on Smith Pond was a turning point in my life. It was the day that my family, in my mind, anyway, changed from me, my mom, and my brother, to me, my mom, my brother, and my step-father. It's also the sketchiest early-life half-memory I have, but also the point that my memories start to be clearer, more concrete.

For years, that day was something that would come back to scare me as I tried to sleep. Not that anything particularly scary happened that day, but everything was changing so drastically in my life that it scared me so much it took me years to even remember what moment in my life that memory was attached to. All I saw was a terrifying jumble of memories of things moving by my head as some very large person (I finally figured out this was my step-father, who, when I was a child, seemed *much* larger when he was trying to be in charge) barking incomprehendible orders at the people involved. Even today, when I understand the memory, the day is nothing but a reconstructed version of the once-terribly frightening visions that kept me up some nights, desperately trying to understand them.

Maybe it says something about my character that the moment that first seems solid, unlike the others before it, which fade away as fast as I figure out what they are, is the first time I was brought to the bus stop at the end of Fire Road 12 at Smith Pond to wait for the bus on my first day of kindergarten. My mother brought me, and I stood at the stop, a spot where the dirt road I lived on met the highway (which highway I couldn't tell you, when I was a kid, it was just "the highway"), fanning out on either side where many cars had gone either direction, left toward Baxter State Park and Millinocket Lake, right toward town in Millinocket. There was a line of trees on the other side of the highway, and on our side, a deep ditch on either side of the dirt road. To my right when I got there, facing the highway, a wide short path cut into the woods a little ways, then narrowed into a snowmobile path. That little path was where we were supposed to stand when waiting for the bus so we wouldn't be standing in the middle of the dirt road (we'd never stand in the highway, because from what our parents told us, we were under the impression that there were evil high-speed drivers waiting in the woods for little kids to step into the road just so they could be run down). I remember one year, we showed up there, and a brand new lean-to had been built in that little path area for us to stand in while we waited. Of course, being a bunch of unsupervised kids, we didn't stick to our assigned areas very much unless it was raining, but it was nice of them to try.

But the reason this moment was so important wasn't where it was, but it was the day I met Colleen. My family had just moved to the area, and other than my next-door neighbor, George-y, who at the time was an infant, and not much fun, I didn't really know anyone. I was introduced to Colleen, a girl who was one year ahead of me and going to one of the other of three elementary schools in Millinocket (This was when the town was doing well, and actually needed three elementary schools. Two have since closed, and one was turned into an assisted-living seniors home where my step-grandfather is currently living). And through her, we get the most vivid, most concrete memory I have. Because it's something that happened a countless number of times throughout my childhood. Years passed, and the only things that changed were the seasons and the relative height of the trees compared to me.

The walk to Colleen's.

I made this walk all the time. A couple of days a week, depending on the time of year, every year, from 1986 through the summer of 1995. It started outside my back porch. To my left was the pond, water lapping on the shores at a small grassy drop-off just a few feet away between some bushes. I stepped up and a bit to the left around the wide, dark gray tree with the flaky bark I used to pick off in small chunks when I got bored. The roots pushed up and through the red/brown sawdust-like ground around it. I used to always slide my hand across the bark, feeling the dry, wrinkled bark sliding against the palm of my hand, making a soft scraping sound as I tiptoed my way around it, skirting the edge of the trunk, not so much because I had to avoid anything else, but just because I was a kid and I wanted to. Dark and light gray-spotted poplar trees dotted the small walk between my camp and the next one along the way, left and right I'd swerve, sliding my hands on the smoother bark of the thinner trees as I walked through the shade, past the large light-gray moss- and lichen-covered boulder that leaned out over the water.

I could look through the trees lining the water there, and see another rock, farther out in the water, in a place most of us never dared to swim to, because of our fears of the blood-sucker (what we called leeches)- and catfish-infested areas of the pond, where the ground was covered in "muck." We didn't know what it was, this muck, but we knew it was nasty if you touched it, and we had this irrational fear that if we were to brush it with our feet, there were blood-suckers in every inch of it waiting to be disturbed and come after us. In truth, I never saw one of them for almost seven years once they started stocking the pond with fish every year. But that doesn't mean we weren't still worried about them from our earlier days when they were just frequent enough to keep them in our minds.

But out just a bit, in the center of the mucky areas between the sandy spots in front of my house and the one next door, was a rock that peaked out of the water just a bit, no more than a foot and a half where it was highest. There was a slight dip in it. And this is where the two mallard ducks that lived on our pond would nest every year. They showed up our second summer there, and we even had names for the two of them. And every year these same two mallards would return, nest in that rock, have their ducklings, and swim around for us to throw corn to them and smile as they were followed around by their most recent line of ducklings. None of us ever bothered them, because we didn't want them to have a reason not to return. We just happily watched over our happy duck family, sort of a collective joy of those of us in our little part of the pond.

As I broke through the shade, the red-brown sawdust-like nettles faded into the sand of the ground at the camp next to mine. An aging picnic table, most of its paint worn off, leaving the wood to soak and bend and crack in the ever-changing weather of central Maine, sat in front of the cabin, which was slightly larger than ours (it was tall enough to have a loft area). One winter, a faulty wiring problem in the porch light on that cabin caused a fire which gutted the entire thing while we stood and stood on the ice of the pond out of the way while the fire department worked to at least keep the fire from spreading to the surrounding trees, as the camp and everything in it was already lost, and the family was outside when it started. The only thing that survived the fire was the basic outer structure of the camp, which, last I knew ("last I knew" being a few years ago) was still standing.

Past the dirt yard and gravel driveway I'd walk, and through an opening in the line of bushes and trees that formed a barrier between their yard and the next. During the summer, that wall was the brightest green I've ever seen in nature. It was only matched by the color of the vast field I'd see as I pushed through to the other side.

If you drove along Fire Road 12 to the end where it goes to the Golden Road (a place we weren't supposed to go, since the only thing that normally drove on it was fast-moving logging trucks), you would notice one thing. There is only one place where there is a home on the left side of the road, and on the right side, is the biggest expanse of practically empty space you'd see for the whole ride. From the road it would give you a great view of the pond, as all that's there is a big empty field.

As kids, we didn't see this as an empty field. The people across the road from the field owned it, and, as you'd get in any friendly small community like ours, were friends with everyone. They kept the field mowed and healthy, and all of us kids would just run around in it, playing tag or baseball or whatever we felt like playing at the time. Close to the bush wall where I'd just pushed through, in the water, was a big boulder we used to climb on, then jump from into the water where we'd swim around the sandbar that made that place so comfortable for us all to swim and walk around in.

To this day, that boulder is still the place where, when I was ten, I watched a man I'd never seen before stand all day, fishing, catching trout after trout, doing better than any fisherman I'd ever seen, until he'd caught his limit. Then he just smiled at me and went along his way. I never saw him again, but that memory, something so *different,* yet so similar, thrown into our lives like his lure into our pond, sticks with me. I don't even remember what the man looked like, other than his hair had pretty much gone white, so he was an older man, but I remember his fishing gear, and the group of trout hanging from the waist of his pants, because they were what caught our attention.

Past the boulder, farther along the field, I'd pass the box thing on a pole. None of us, not even the girl whose father owned the field, knew what this gray metal box was. It was about a foot wide on the base and about a foot and a half tall. It stood on a pole about four inches high and an inch and a half in diameter sticking out of the ground. I'm sure if I went back now, I could tell what it was, but as a kid, it was nothing but a place where you could go to be safe when playing Tag.

I would cross the rest of the field, hopping over the shallow stream that I watched form over the years of melting snow running down through the grass into the pond, and cross over, past another line of trees into the next yard. It seemed every yard had a bunch of trees before the next one, and each bunch was different. This bunch was weird. From the ground, you could see past it just fine. A few well-spaced trees, not many bushes between. But somehow, the tops of the trees were thick enough that they would obscure the sun from the entire yard. The cabin there, with it's yellow-orange and white trim, was where my friend Ryan used to live before his mother and father got divorced and he moved. I haven't seen him since then, though apparently he's around. My parents actually saw him at the Styx concert I went to, but he was already obscured in the crowd before they got my attention. I'd only been in the house once before he left, and never since. I hadn't ever known anyone who'd gotten divorced then, and the place had a gloomy feel to it ever since. I hurried past there.

Next was the house that I knew the least about. Because I couldn't tell where his yard started, or where it ended. It had the most nebulous borders of any of the yards in that area of the pond that I considered home. Poplars and white birches all over, grayish gravel spread all over the seemingly very long distance from the shore to his brown house with white trim. Something always seemed odd about that place now, and I've realized, it's the only one that wasn't pretty much built on the water. I mean, none were *on* the water, but they were all fairly close and had an unobscured view except his. There was something eerie about it that I never liked. I moved past his house even faster than Ryan's old house.

Then, past the basketball court where I once had a bird crap on my arm while I watched Colleen and her brother Rob play each other, I would, once again, break through the shade of the trees to find another yard. And this, was my final destination. This was the place where I spent so much of my childhood life. In fact, you could say it defined most of my childhood. The tall yellowish, two-story house with the long flat yard drooping into the water, where their smallish wharf stuck out into the water. Across their driveway was the pen where, for a few years, they kept a few pigs because, well, they wanted to keep pigs.

That wharf was where we put a piece of Scotch tape over the record tab of a New Kids On the Block tape and put it in her little Fisher Price tape recorder and we made a little radio show completely on a whim because we were kids and we wanted to.

One of our favorite games when I was really little was to pretend we were puppies. We were almost never *just* puppies, we'd be like, super puppies or detective puppies, but always puppies. It didn't make sense, but we did it because we were kids and we wanted to.

She'd change into her bathing suit and we'd run into her paddle-boat and paddle it over to my house, and I'd change to go swimming. Then we'd paddle the boat out to a slippery rock in a deep part of the pond, standing on the top of the rock, which was actually three feet underwater, and slide down until we were under ourselves, only to pop up and do it again. Because, of course, we were kids and we wanted to.

Then one day, my parents decided that we were moving back into Millinocket. I was never going to make that trek from my house to Colleen's again. That walk so familiar that I can still, when I close my eyes and think back, feel the sliding of the poplar bark against my hands, the brush of the bright green branches, the bright sun as I pushed through the bushes into the field. Without so much as consulting me, they decided I would never walk that again. At least, no longer as just a kid on a walk to a friend's.

And so, with a few quick changes of my life spread out over a few years, I left Smith Pond, seemingly for good. I lost touch with Colleen, only to regain it a few months ago, then forget to keep writing and lose it again. I really do miss those times when I think back, and wish I had realized then how important it was that I not lose it. But I didn't. It's weird to think now, that Colleen is married. She's no longer Colleen B., she's Colleen D. She's married to someone I've never even met, who's only a name mentioned a few times in my distant past by other people who never before had any effect on me.

So now, with a new-found necessity, I've decided that tomorrow morning I am going to call a driving school so I can learn to drive, not just for the simple convenience of it, but because now, when I do understand its importance, I can go back and capture as much of it as possible. I am going back to Smith Pond, and I am bringing my camera. I'm taking as many pictures as I can of everything. I'm taking pictures of every important part of the walk. I'm taking pictures of little things I remember. I'm going to go find Colleen's mom and see how long it takes for her to recognize me, darker hair, much taller, skinnier, deeper voice. I haven't seen her in over six years, but I know she's still there. Then I'm going to find out where Colleen is living now (last I knew she was working for a ski lodge) and talk to her and hug her and hug her and hug her. And then I think I'll take a whole day and just write about it. Because that's what it'll take. Just thinking about this is filling me with this *need* to do it, and I know when I do, a flood of memories will rush back to me. I feel like there is nothing that's happened to me in almost a year that could have as much of a chance of making me cry as this would. And I want it. And I'm going to do it. Why?

Because I'm an adult, and I want to.