You drive down the interstate, a long vanishing highway columned in trees; it’s nice to think that there exist such undisturbed swaths of forest, areas that remain relatively untouched. But just beyond that calm facade of trees are the children; they are the area wildlife in this respect; it is rare that you see them, but you know they’re there. And the forest is where they go to do the things they cannot do in the company of adults, the things adults would prefer to believe are beyond the capacities of most children to perform. But children are capable of most anything.
Their resourcefulness is evident throughout the woods; it is children who are responsible for the engineering of that bridge, that overpass of dubious constitution. These trees conceal outposts, tentative little safe houses, coded points of rural intersection known only to privileged initiates. Teenagers much too old to be frequenting or building tree houses erected that lofty fortress, and risk life and limb just to get high and recline with true friends within the suspended safety of its reclaimed plywood walls. The trails themselves are an emergent result of furtive teenage pattering, the product of several generations of committed partying, permanent recordings of flight paths away from the tyranny of structure and parental observation.
In the Midwest, all children are afraid of the woods. At a very young age, one learns the fundamentals of forestry: the woods are where bodies are dumped and buried, are safe-havens for deranged homicidal recluses who wait patiently in their rotten gullies for the chance, late-afternoon passing of some naïve schoolboy along the trail. If profane rituals and arcane conjurings are to be performed anywhere, it will be in the woods. The little mind of the child has assimilated the lessons of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Evil Dead and Friday the 13th long before it gets to knowing much else. That Thing which prompts one to abruptly flee the basement and ascend the staircase with such blank abandon, That Goddamned Thing so nourished by filth and dead leaves, It which so detests the light; the forest is its natural home, and while in the forest, there is no upstairs, no mommy and no nightlight.
Whether real or imagined, these felt conditions prime the forest with a kind of charged flammability, a readiness to accommodate the most unorthodox of childish impulses; beneath this canopy of euphoria, decisions are made in quite a different fashion. Because it is anticipated that nearly anything may unfold within its shadowy perimeters, activities which transpire in the forest tend to collect into rather unordinary forms. Children step into a world in which they genuinely believe that ordinary laws of physicality have been somehow suspended, and then conduct themselves accordingly; sightings of packs of children dressed in black robes of their own fashioning are not at all uncommon in the forests of the Midwest. Their parents and teachers are operationally deceased and they are guided about by a weird melody that is all their own; the agents who patrol and enforce the border between the dead and the living may not exercise their authority in this autonomous playroom. Their little paranoias, their homegrown mythologies built in cooperation from anecdote, pagan holiday and horror cinema, generate a little wooded alternative into which they may step and watch the ordinary dissolve into a kind of nothingness.
It could be that parents are able to quietly intuit the danger inherent in permitting free-range of the child’s imagination, which may in part account for the existence and popularity of the Chuck E. Cheese franchise. After all, they were once children themselves. Better to do the imagining for them. Better to create an environment of safe, animated critters with nice songs and innocuous messages, rather than license them to unleash monsters of their own reckless fashioning upon a neatly-ordered world of etiquette and ethics. Better to assuage those ever-ripe imaginative facilities with safe approximations of the supernatural before they have the opportunity to discover their latent gifts and powers. At all costs, insert something between your children and the forest, lest they dispose of you in it.
The first euphoric sparks of individual freedom are born here, in the woods, and the extent or range of the free will is measured in transgression. All the more evident and, moreover, all the more undeniably authentic is my freedom when it purposively violates standards that even I appreciate and hold dear. It notes an action that is fundamentally objectionable, antithetical to all reflex and instinct, and then delights in its macabre ability to deliberately perform that action in the face of such natural impediment. Once originally untethered from the authority of parents, schools and churches, the mind simply wonders what else might lie further down this corridor of freedom, and is thus apt to indefinitely posit all sorts of ways in which it might more fully realize a sort of transcendent autonomy.
It’s herein that we locate the attraction to and appreciation of the serial murderer, and how this character of tabloids and horror fiction is elevated to the status of hero in the mind of the forest-dwelling child. The serial killer is, like the child, wordlessly appreciative of his predicament in the world, a predicament which he shares with each of us. God has abandoned us, and any effort you expend toward enriching your existence will be indifferently erased upon death. But he parts ways with us in that the serial murderer fails to observe the conditions of any sort of social contract, and views such pedantry as a trifling impediment standing between himself and immediate gratification. But he is not bound by any doctrine, nor is he the servant of his own conscience. It’s true: he obtains pleasure from killing, but not necessarily from the process of killing itself as such; the euphoria consists exclusively in the complete and unrestricted fulfillment of individual freedom, and the means of acquiring such fulfillment are of little concern. The particular takes precedent over the general; my little gesture of independence will secure my own independence, and your independence is your own business. Fuck the implications it might have for the social contract. In this moment, in this gesture, I am wholly free, and precisely how that action might dovetail with convention is of absolutely no concern to one who endeavors to be completely free. He understands that his actions will not only completely destroy the humanity of another, but will concomitantly destroy himself, and yet he proceeds. Thus, the forests are populated and ruled not simply by little miniature Jason Voorhees, little Dahmer Juniors, but also by little Raskolnikovs and junior Meursaults.
The forests are a refuge for high school burnouts, where jean-jacketed and acne-faced children go to drink warm beer and fight. It is in the forests that they acquire their first taste of liberty, bask in the joy of their first and best inebriation. They begin to drink and smoke more than their little bodies will permit them, and become invested with notions of impenetrability and providence. They conduct themselves in a manner that is loud and violent, they show off and fight and vomit. Rarely do such events escape the detection of local police; being teenagers, they lack the facilities of tact and subterfuge required to conceal such activities from the bored, meddlesome ears of nearby residents. More importantly, it is a statistical improbability that such ostentation will escape the detection of a scythe-wielding madman, who, smelling of dead chrysanthemum and of leaves, will punish the improprieties of these wood-dwelling teens with dismemberment.
It’s under a canopy of deciduous trees that they clumsily part ways with virginity and existence; down by the crick a young couple gets to knowing each other. They sip warm foam from red plastic cups and over the bonfire take in the complex dance of shadows across the face of their beloved. They are dizzy and possessed of lust and euphoria, struggling to craft sentences and gestures of studied, refined care, treading lightly in fear of discouraging the interest of the other. They stumble with their words, they manufacture little accidents and justifications intended to reduce the physical space between them, they entwine glacially, over a period of hours, confess to each other in carefully weighed phrases, and cross thresholds as the emerging sun thrusts into relief their dishevelment, their shared disrepair. The light gurgle of the brook gets etched into the memory of the head just before it is severed by the dull blade of an axe.
