The moors of boyhood

I struggled through the dense fog.  All sounds were muffled.  I could see but a few feet of path ahead of me.

Suddenly, to my right an enormous skeletal figure loomed.  A huge tree, its branches bare, reached out its arms.  "So cool," I thought.  "I love hiking across the endless, fogbound moors of England."

When we're young, and have had few exciting experiences, we rely on our imaginations for our adventures.  I knew I wasn't in England.  I was trudging along a city sidewalk, on my way to junior high.  I was passing a large park-like space in front of the senior high school that was adjacent to my own destination.  The fog had rolled in off the Columbia River, not the Irish Sea.  The tree that loomed above me was  perhaps twenty yards away.  It was a tree I walked past every day -- beautifully leafy in summer, forlornly leafless in winter.  But it was only a tree, a rather unexceptional tree.

But fog changed all perceptions.  Nothing was visible but the sidewalk on which I walked -- and the mysterious tree.  Sure, maybe I was merely in the home town in which I'd been born and reared.  But I might be in Yorkshire, or on Dartmoor, or creeping across the Scottish highlands.  And for a few moments -- as the shadowy tree became visible and then vanished back into the fog -- I found myself half a world away from my tedious life as a schoolboy in the Northwest Corner.

About the same year, I first read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Hound of the Baskervilles.  I read it with shivers running deliciously down my spine.  Now my wanderings across the moors were not merely atmospheric, not merely a search in the fog for familiar landmarks -- but wanderings replete with danger.  What savage creature, eyes burning with fire, might come bounding out of the swirling mirk?  What escaped convict, desperate for his freedom, tensely awaited my approach -- knife in hand?

In a couple of weeks, I'll be hiking across the moors of northern Yorkshire.  In past summers, I've hiked across the lonely expanses of Rannoch Moor in Scotland, and on stretches of smaller moors in Westmorland.  I've loved experiencing the beauties of real, honest-to-goodness moors -- although so far they've always been sunny, never foggy.

But the real moors I've hiked as an adult have never seemed as real, as mysterious, as "English," as "moorish," or as goosebump-provoking, as those densely-fogged moors I constructed out of my imagination in junior high school.  The best stories in life are often those we make up and tell ourselves.