Taking a long drive over the holiday weekend, I used a coveted “not it” position with my wife and took the passenger seat as we crossed Maine and into northern New Hampshire. Locking my eyes along each tree line, each hill top, I remembered how mesmerized I’ve always been with the woods.

As a child, the woods were my refuge — drawing me in from the earliest of age and occasionally to my detriment as my parents and sisters frantically searched to find me. Still, I couldn’t help myself. Each orange spotlight in a small clearing of green, each bed of ferns, drew me in deeper and deeper as the dense perfume of spruce and pine embraced my senses until I forgot myself in the unpeopled world around me.

Behind Navy housing, I had napped beneath boughs and dreamed of a Tolkien-esque world where Elves still wandered the woods and little people from Irish lore made mischief deep inside small hillocks. Why not, after all? I had seen bear tracks, moose, fox and other signs of creatures in the small acreage of forest that were never seen roaming McKeen Street. Why couldn’t I run into some enchanted thing if I spent enough time beneath the canopy?

In the winter, I would again return to the woods and tuck my smaller self beneath the dense coniferous boughs, where winter had yet to touch the crisp brown leaves and needles by the tree base. There, I would stare up through the tree and see where winter met spring, as green needles stretched out to be draped in white blankets. Occasionally, a breeze would steal through the trees, raining down a soft flurry of sparkling diamonds around me, convincing me more and more I was in the presence of magic.

Much later in life, I would spend five years in a small cabin in the far northern reaches of the state and for a time, recapture some of that feeling — the wonder of being, not an observer but a part of nature. Even further from other people, I lost myself to the forest, aware of the coming dew of an August evening, the skittering of a red squirrel, and the soft pat of a bear paw in a nearby clearing. There was no job. There were no bills, no past, no future, no worries — there was just the soft pat of the bear paw and an awareness, somehow, of my own breathing.

I’m older now. There’s a mortgage, a car payment, a broken motorcycle waiting in line behind the broken porch, the broken chimney and the many broken commitments in life.

Still, I look to the forest. I trace the shades of light and dark green, envisioning the delineation between deciduous and conifers — between scrub and scree. I stare with the intensity my old husky, Sheba, once had with the coming of the first snow — a thousand yard stare of intense longing at no one given point.

I no longer have the body for scrambling under boughs or lugging timber for shelter. Still, something deeper than myself stares longingly into the trees, for — what? I feel like I’m on the verge of knowing when, from the driver’s seat, Alicia breaks into a snippet of a song that was stuck in her head and it flees from view. My tether to the earth snaps taut and I’m again pulled back to civilization. I shake off any logical notion of my return to the magical realm of my youth with the words of Frost, “I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

Douglas McIntire is a writer and educator in the Midcoast. He can be found trying to talk to trees or reached at [email protected].