Illustration: Andrea Cobb
When we moved to Englewood Cliffs in 1959, much of the town was still being blasted out of the basalt cliffs that gave the place its name. Everything seemed new, from the ranch houses that lined streets still awaiting pavement to the perfect lawns that stretched to the curb, uninterrupted by sidewalks.
The only thing that wasn’t new was the wild bit of acreage around the block that we kids would come to refer to as the woods. It was our magical playground, with trampled trails that wound through dense undergrowth, fungi that mysteriously appeared after a rainfall, and oaks so tall they didn’t seem to have tops at all.
In spring, small pools filled with tadpoles that slipped, creepily and deliciously, through fingers; in fall, acorns nestled in oak-leaf beds like Easter eggs awaiting discovery. My friends and I created a dollhouse in an oak-tree hollow, employing twigs for decor and acorns for the dollhouse family. One winter, after an ice storm, I was walking alone through the woods (it was the ’60s—letting kids wander alone in the woods was considered a perfectly reasonable thing to do) when I came upon a small grove of fruit trees that the storm had transformed; every limb and tiny branchling was limned in ice, and the ground beneath the trees had frozen into a glassy pond. It was my first experience of awe.
A few months later, running through the woods, my friends and I discovered the cinder-block foundation of a house under construction. We scrambled into it and made it part of our wild playground, unaware that it presaged, for us, the end of wildness.
In the mid-’60s, my family moved to Manhattan, and I didn’t think about the woods for quite a while.
But then, when I was in my 30s, my husband and I moved to Nutley, a long-established New Jersey town where, just around the block from our 100-year-old house, we discovered a slender slice of woods, undeveloped, most likely because it was set on a severe slope.
Even in an age when childhood is circumscribed by devices, the woods have an attraction that defies the easy lure of technology. Last spring, for about a week, I walked through the woods every afternoon and came upon the same group of boys each day, leaping into a stream beneath a waterfall, their joyous whoops reverberating through the trees. Eventually, a sensible neighbor called the cops, who chased the kids away.
If I could pass one law in our overdeveloped state, it would be that every township must contain a small slip of woods, a place devoted to nothing but wildness, where trees and wonder would abound, and where kids could run free and ignite their imaginations (until some neighbor calls the cops) and then do it all again the next day, and the next, through all the seasons of their childhood and beyond.
Leslie Garisto Pfaff has a special interest in nature and the environment.
[RELATED: How the Pandemic Got Me Into a Garden State of Mind]
No one knows New Jersey like we do. Sign up for one of our free newsletters here. Want a print magazine mailed to you? Purchase an issue from our online store.