I grew up in a neighborhood that had begun its transition from rural to suburban sometime just before my family moved in, a neighborhood that was fully suburban by the time I moved out on my own. I then spent my early adulthood until my mid-thirties living in cities.
Now I live by the woods. The forest presses right up to the back of my house. I like the quiet here, I like the way everything looks and feels and smells.
And I like the way it scares me a little bit at night, when I leave my house after dark for one reason or another. There’s no streetlights on the road where I live. When it’s dark here, it’s really dark. Especially under the trees, leaning over my house, watching my small self as I move around at night.
Fear of the woods and what lives in the woods is probably one of our oldest human fears. When I walk outside at night and get that little shiver of discomfort, I feel like it’s something I share with the people who have come before me, all the way back to the first of us. And I think that this fear, of a place unknown or of a known place made strange by darkness, is probably one of the roots of storytelling.
When I go out near the woods alone at night and know that I’m safe but feel that cool touch of unease on the back of my neck anyway, it makes me feel storytelling’s connection to fear, and it makes me feel my connection to storytelling in a living, breathing way.
Man, now I want spring to come faster, so I could go camping and tell stories around a fire.