Wandering the Shenandoah Woods

When I was a young child I was very lonely and, having nothing better to do nor friends to play with, I would, by the age of 11, wander the woods outside my house with a .22 on my shoulder and a tomahawk hanging from my belt, the consolation for my loneliness being a vast woodland that I could explore and populate, in my imagination, with all the wonder and beauty that I wanted. This was the happiness of my youth, when treasures and minotaurs alike sprung fully formed from my brow. In the long hours after school I explored the banks of the small creek that snaked from broadleaf to pine forest down through the hills, building lean-to forts at defensible locations as waystations for me and my band of imaginary knights to camp within while on a journey that was much greater in my head. From a hill, any hill, I imagined the great battles of history, Gettysburg and Austerlitz and Cannae, where in my head I was always the great general. Because I was too young for an iPhone, but old enough to handle a gun, which was probably a safe tradeoff in the long term, I had no way to navigate home except by memory the miles back through the forest once the sky began to darken. As the dusk turned to night, I would travel by intuition, careful to move silently with the terrain, for I often imagined that monsters were encroaching with the gathering dark.