Every morning around seven, I hear the downstairs door crash open and Will comes bounding into the kitchen. Through the left-open door the birds that woke him sign off with their melodious shrill and my “me time” is shattered. I’ve usually got my tea by then, seated at the kitchen table or computer. Boy attacks me with a spontaneous hug–messy, sudden, all limbs and a grin. His backyard nap has ended with the dawn racket of squirrels and birds just starting up their day. Morning makes a fine alarm clock.

Today marks six weeks since Will moved out to live in a tent. Half his quarantine thus far lived with this spin: alone in the woods. Social distancing to the extreme. Did I expect anything less from this boy? For the first two weeks while the world was cleaning closets, gardening, looking up obscure recipes and tackling fix-its that broke in a different millennium, Will was busy, too–digging a hole. It will leave that metaphor where I found it. The hole is there still–an 8′ by 10′ crater about 6′ deep. He dug for four and five hours at a clip until his shoulders disappeared, and then his head, a 90-lb human excavator. Little heap-fuls of dirt up over the edge of his man-made abyss as I watched out the kitchen window. We will have to keep digging still to get to the why.

But it kept him busy. And like all good prequels it points irrevocably toward the main movie. On his way for a bigger/better shovel to continue his digging project, he comes across a 6-man tent all folded and neatly packaged and put away in our shed. It was there, mom, so I had to. I wanted to see if I could set it up all by myself. I guess he could. Today, it is still neat, but it is decidedly not “away.” It is a tidy homestead, nestled between trees, rain fly overhead and hopeful 50-foot extension cord plugged in, powering the electronics world that woodsman Will has enjoyed creating and having dominion over these many weeks. Don’t tell me your family camps without a heater, a fan, desk lamp, TV/VCR unit and a hand-me-down-Wii?? What? You left your Captain American décor and show-library of books that won’t get read at home? For shame! For a while there was even a Lego bin under his cot. Life’s essentials there, Thoreau. I notice he’s hung an American flag out back and is using the tether ball pole to hold a clothesline. Whole place has that “We’ll leave the light on for ya” appeal to it.

Now, almost three months later, it may be that the Ozark Trail 6-man special has come to an end. Over the weekend we watched a scary family movie. Like, ghastly scary. I left the room to go re-up my membership to the Bad Parents’ Club. It was late when the movie ended, and Will decided that the bed in his room looked pretty good to him. Felt good, too, as he stretched out in it showered and changed, so changed. I sent a boy into the woods and he came back this mix of all things, like the Lego box that’s under the bed he’s in: Dozens of kits that are supposed to be built one and only one way, blown apart and broken down to multicolored elements. Then reassembled into something so creative, less predictable and weird looking. But those are the beautiful ones. The kinds of Lego creations that come with a story, not just a label and a picture on the box. That’s boy. Boy in his own bed tonight. It was strange, having new breathing in the house. My headcount going up and down our stairs that night (which I do every night–Who’s here, who’s in his or bed this night?) increased by one. And a hundred. Tell me your story, son…

The next morning he still came crashing down the stairs like ten men being chased by an elephant. Noise and boy are one. I notice with a start that he is growing. Shaggy head well past my chin, arms hung loose like they’ve cranked his shoulders out a few clicks and he’s getting used to it, not that gorilla swing of some men, but definitely like he’s constructed of loose parts till they begin to grow into each other. At random times throughout the day his silver mouthful breaks into a smile. Mom, I’m so happy. Why am I so happy? I wouldn’t begin to answer the question of the biochemical explosion that we lovingly call Boy, but I have my theories. For one, homeschool is ending and he has, for the first time in his textbook-less world a true sign of mastery: A huge pile of school papers that he completed all by himself. For two, he’s been off a cell phone since last November. Corona didn’t invent social distancing, that thing did. For three, look at his real estate: a home among the trees with birdsong your first and last company in a day.

The woods in the late afternoon/evening are luminous green. They glow with being. The undergrowth simmers with a whispered an invitation: Come… Come and see. Take a walk with me…. When they were little, real little and going out anywhere presented itself a logistical effort (it still does) the appeal of those woods was so easy: just take a walk. Who needs a fancy park or offsite green space for a juice-box, sunblock, time-constrained play date? We live in one, for car-seat tantrum’s sake. I could take them to the woods for the same effect without going anywhere. Now, with this unseasonably cool and delicious spring like I haven’t seen in Virginia for 20 years, the natural world has reasserted its comfort value. No wonder boy chose new digs (get it??!) in the midst of a global pandemic. I realize that we have given him something that doesn’t come out of a can, or Alexa, something that can’t be scripted or programmed or paid for. It is something we are all experiencing: the taste of time. Raw time, unprocessed. It’s how we grew up. Outside by day, in by night, with a whole day gone to… to what? I couldn’t say. So far as possible, he has turned time into a verb.

Those early “homeschool” days were hard. Digging through the rubble to find a motivator. Something that would power boy through the work they sent and sustain learning without his teachers or his naggy mom. Day in, day out, rain or shine, holed up in a tent doing home school. Those were some strange and wonderful days. Many of the inventions of “Learn at Home” were not even on the curriculum–the squirrel trap, the UV light radiation chamber (into which we feed eggs, mail, a gallon of milk). The skateboard swivel chair. The fake gas mask/hazmat get-up. The laptop from Uncle Skip, which Will parlayed into a two-week seminar on computer programming. And his most recent industry: lights on his go-kart, his crowning glory. In honor of the upcoming Memorial Day holiday, Will is outfitting it with flags for a one-man parade up and down our street. Sporting new turn signals and brake lights from an electrical engineering course he self-registered for these past two weeks, the kart has been deemed roadworthy. Will plans to motor through the neighborhood as a tribute to our nation and our fallen heroes.

We have a deadline here: Memorial Day. He has decided to decorate, locating the few places on the little metal frame without lights or wires where he can install flags. Late one evening I find he and Bill strapping “Angler’s Mate” fishing rod racks to the sidebars and back of the kart (See Burk Emporium: Think I May Have One of Those). Into the chrome tubing they mount American flags that tower over the cart–two on each side and one off the back. Even at low speed the one in back, big as a tablecloth, unfurls and waves out in glory behind him. The effect is really quite something. In full patriotic regalia, he slowly motors down the driveway bound for the open road, parent film crew hurrying behind him, looking every bit from the back like an errant rider from Hell’s Angels hurrying off the rejoin the band. It’s not a go-kart. It’s a freedom machine.

We had to give up on reading Walden, which is sad but my people found it archaic and over-worded. What?!! That explains why they don’t read my blogs. 🙂 So after dinner we have been reading My Side of the Mountain instead, about a boy pioneer who holed up in a tree and lived completely off the land. I knew a boy like that in our backwoods, waking at dawn those early days in March, scrounging sticks and tinder to light a fire to cook his own breakfast. The gloom and hardship lifting slowly, like a dew, just aching for the next success and yet quietly stripping down to survival mode in case one didn’t come. It was, for no other word will do, a denoument into essence, into what really matters, the mother of all “Learn at home” that will outlast this quarantine. Haven’t we all been back to school just a little during these days? In a culture where “success” has been so measured by ridiculous sticks — “happiness,” “achievement,” “material excess,” and now, the most recent inanity — “likes” and “friends,” I am glad all three of mine have been relieved of these lies. For everything this pandemic and quarantine have taken away, it has given a few truths I am delighted to rediscover. In different ways our children have each opened up their survival kits to see what’s in them and found more than they expected. And for once school taught what life always has on its curriculum, Heraclitus 101: Know What you are Made of. This is why you have 43 nights alone in a tent by a boy who was afraid of the dark.

This past weekend with the spring weather he’s decided indoor tent living is too posh for him, and has strung a hammock between two trees. Now it’s boy completely preposition-less–nothing under him, over him, nothing around him but the night air and the darkness. A gray and orange ENO doublenest. I can see the little nylon cradle out my balcony door as I ready for bed. I can’t make out whether it is moving or still, but it hangs full and heavy between the trees. Like the squirrel trap: I got one! A nice fat one. I imagine him sleeping there. The night air, thin and cool, steeped in a lullaby that lacks the shrill din of the morning, he will hear murmurs and cooing that blend and woo him to sleep. When we turn out the lights and go to bed the house and yard will be pitch black on this starless night. And boy swaying ever so gently in his barque bed, suspended in night. Suspended in time. Free.

When he comes in the next morning, it is earlier and the dew still wet. Something so raw about undomesticated sleep. Backyard sounds like a tropic aviary for all the bird racket. Who could sleep in that? Still the bang of the downstairs door and the bounding strides that bring him into the kitchen. I try to hold off on my battery of questions (Sleep well? Warm enough? Back hurt?) till he has poured half an entire box of cereal into a bowl. After all, creatures like Will don’t come inside for fun, but for fuel. He is humming while he scoops up the fallen cheerios and tries to pile them back in the bowl. My hammock sleeping boy. He is tee-heeing in telling me how one uses the lavatory in the middle of the night without leaving the hammock and grossing me out. Then this:

“I’m so happy.”
Well that’s good. Why are you happy, son?
“I dunno. I like looking up at the sky.”

Memorial Day 2020. The ride of glory takes place on the edge between dusk and night. With its new lights, his vehicle will be visible to other cars, and he is excited to be able to signal, to communicate with his fellow motorists. He follows the rules of the road. He goes the speed woman. I don’t bother to explain that going 21 mph in a frameless vehicle 4″ off the ground in total darkness is a problem for me at any speed, not to mention illegal in our neighborhood. I let him go. Twenty minutes later I go outside to the bottom of the driveway, where the air is beautiful and the night is still and cool. No sound, no cars. I listen for the sound of the kart puttering along. I stand in the middle of the empty street, my gaze a half mile in both directions. Look up the street at the wide dark road and then down, where, in the distance, way down in the cul-de-sac I can see a winking light where it would be if he stopped to talk to neighbors. Who lets their kid go out for a ride at night? Come on mom, that’s why I rigged up all the lights! Sure ‘nough. It’s tiny as a firefly and far away, but it grows brighter as it grows closer, until it is aimed right at me and as unmistakable as an oncoming train. Growing with it comes the knocking rattle hum of a HP Briggs Stratton and of metal on road. The chain is loose, the sprocket is spitting out bolts like broken teeth, but he’s made his run. Over the racket I hear another sound. He is singing. And coming home.

Today is Will’s graduation party at our house. That would be Will, the rest of his family, two cats and a dog. Party of five. I’m calling it the “No one Goes inside Party” in honor of our woodland boy. That means no leaking inside to cell phones or bugless world after putting in an obligatory appearance at the dinner table. Instead we do things a boy dreams of. Shall I hand you a shovel or a spark plug? There are so many activities I don’t know how we will fit them in. Croquet. Badminton. Cook outside together. Of course, any party with Will’s name on it will involve fire. It’s Pentecost as well, so an inferno–er, bonfire, is warranted. Will has an annual tradition of burning his school notebooks and papers after every long year. Somehow marshmallows and hot dogs taste better smoked over civics or math. Our final activity? We will re-watch the launch of the SpaceX shuttle which took off Saturday. Seems fitting, to observe in action something whose speed and beauty are so perfectly aligned, symbol of possibility and hope. Brave new world. And tomorrow, out of the blue he will zip up that tent for the last time and find his way home.