In the book I enjoyed most reading to my own children, Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak celebrates--in the punishment of a naughty and disrespectful boy--the luxuriant thicket that grows in the heart of consciousness of every child. You remember Max who sassed his momma and who was sent to bed with out his supper. He scowled and fumed and "That very night in his room, a wild place grew." It was a very diverse ecosystem of fantasy that Sendak created, complete with a convenient ocean that tumbled by and that wonderful, wonderful island filled with wild things. Remember how he tamed them? By staring into all their yellow eyes and not blinking once? And they pronounced him the wildest thing of all and he took up his life as lord of the wild by commanding, "Let the wild rumpus begin." And they did the wild thing, the jungle dance of boy and beast, right there in his room. I like Sendak because I think he would have liked thickets. Thickets were the wild places of my childhood and they were not an ocean away. Sometimes they were right next door.

Thickets could grow at the edges and backs of yards, on vacant fields, in fenced out pasture, in scraps of forest left behind in the cut and paste geometry of development, in the fields of abandoned farms, and sometimes in the yards of closed houses. Some thickets, like the Wilderness and Motts Run and Hazel Creek, were large, covering hundreds or thousands of acres. These were the special places of hunters and the older boys who could drive and had access to a car. But not all thickets were so large nor needed to be to qualify as a thicket. Nearer home and nearer to the childworld was the feral landscape of abandoned domestic order and failed control where the effort to keep the world in trim was given up. Our neighborhood defned property lines with wire fences--not so much to prevent trespass because we were all cousins of some degree or another--but as a remnant from the days of backyard livestock that had included chickens and turkeys, and also an occasional pig or milk cow needing the fence to keep them in. These fences marked the edge of mowing in the yard, and where the next lot was vacant, the fences became a three-sided enclosure that both defined and protected the thicket growing there.

Thickets were the liveliest places in our town landscape. They were wildlife refuges in the midst of buildings, streets, lawns, and traffic. Birds abounded and I believe most of the songbirds we saw and heard had theirs nests in these rough and unkept places. Thickets were the refuges of rabbits, squirrels, opossums, chipmunks, rats and mice, and snakes. I think I learned to see the wild world by sitting quietly in the thicket on the vacant lot between Uncle Howie's and Mr. Burton's. This was a mature thicket, and in the summer, you could not see from one house to the other. It occupied two "twenty-five foot" lots, so it was about fifty by one hundred feet. It was my first jungle. I don't know why it was never cleaned up, but the city and the local adults left it alone. It was a maze of small animal trails and at the center, the weeds gave way to open ground covered in the soft detritus of the leaves that fell each year from the canopy. It was here that I learned that if you sit and don't move the animals will resume their activities and pretend to ignore you. It was here that I saw close by the first bird feed its young, saw the supple walking ribs of a black racer move it along, saw hornets work without chasing me, saw mice come in go in their small retailing of the busy leaf world; it was here that I learned to see tiny tracks and to notice the droppings mixed with fur and tiny bones. No general science class had ever opened this door for me, but it opened nearly every day after school in this or in another thicket around there.

In the territorial division between the adults and the children, yards, porches, houses, sidewalks, and streets were shared with the grownups and all these places were controlled by them. Grownups never went into the thickets, though, and the thickets were a safe and private world for children and animals. These places, however transient they were in the dynamism of construction and development, were ours. There were at least a dozen of them scattered about the north end of town. Most of them were the fractured remnants of the old edge between forest and cultivated fields when all that area had been rural; it was an edge that had been doubly attacked by the houses spreading into the old fields and by new fields being made as the old woods were cleared ahead of yet newer houses to be built. Sometimes, even a piece of wildness falls through the cracks between the gouging tracks of bulldozers and road graders. These thickets grew where a piece of the old woods was left behind and a skirt of brush and weeds quickly appeared to hide the bared trees.

Most of the thickets I knew as a child, however, were the ones on vacant lots. Thickets grew quickly when mowing and cutting stopped. Grass went to seed, then tall weeds appeared, then mulberry--which we called "cutpaper" trees--and sassafras, along with locust which sprouted from ancient roots and nubs. Small elms, boxelder, and maples completed the flora. If a place were left alone for a few years, a center canopy, often of mulberry and sassafras, began to form. This would happen even on a small city lot, and the edge would thicken with a barrier of briers, poison ivy, sumac bushes, lush polkweed on the shadier side, and the twisting runners of honey suckle and Virginia creeper. Until the days of the weed enforcement officer, who patrolled with his sidearm in the form of a pedestalled yardstick with projecting wooden arm that looked like a child's version of the one-armed bayonet dummies we saw in the newsreels, these vacant lots grew up year upon year into true thickets between adjacent houses. We would learn that our taunts and ridicule and even thick-hulled green walnuts lobbed from behind bushes as his car passed could not stem nor stop the inexorable flattening order of city council ordinance and street department work crews. Even in my childhood forty years ago, the war on thickets raged, and I have always taken it personally as if they were after me. The distance to the thickets seemed to grow with the length of my legs, and by the time I learned to drive, the thickets in town were all gone, and lawns, pavement, and sidewalks had reduced the wild places to domestic flatland.

A thicket did not have to be very big to be a thicket. It just had to be thick with all kinds of stuff growing in it. So thick, in fact, that it had no clear paths or trails--at least none that could be seen--through it. Thickets were most accessible to children and animals. Adults often think the world owes them access. They want to walk right up to it and step in. Children who have not learned such presumption of access approach the green world another way, like bidden guests who are glad to be invited and who are careful to respect and not offend. Why else did the shadows of the thickets dampen our voices along with the light as we knelt or crept to go under the briars and find the hidden path? We would craws and scoot on the animal paths until away from the thick edge. Where the canopy of the thicket, the mulberry and sassafras trees, rose and opened slightly there was a center, the hidden secret core of the thicket surrounded by a wall of green. I remember crawling there once, ahead of Shelley who lived down the block. She had on her blue skirt, and the twigs hurt her knees, but she crawled behind me anyway. In the quiet center we sat close and whispered. The street world beyond the opaque wall of green leaves seemed far away.

Secret places carry their own mystery; it does not have to be invented for them. And such mystery is always viscerally exciting. It is the excitement not so much of the dangerous or forbidden as of the hidden, the less than public. Thickets always offered a kind of privacy never to be found in the tiny frame houses and on the streets and sidewalk. It was not that the core of the thicket was just unseen although that was part of it. Thickets were places where the inside parts of your mind were given to you outwardly not as thought but as place. It has always been easier for me to find myself by going to the woods than by sitting down to think things through. Perhaps that is why, now, I am the way I am, why I can never be very far away from woods nor go very long until I am in them. From my earliest memories the thickets were there and every entry into one was a journed into my mind rendered to me as place instead of thought. The inner clearing beyond the thickened edge was a place of retreat and discovery. I knew that I could find myself there. My journey into thickets and my maturing journeys into wildness and wilderness have always been double edged. Often I went looking for something, but more often what I found was myself.

Such an approach to wildness has more in common for me with pilgrimage and quest than it does with a trip from one place to another. Thickets are not about going somewhere, especially not in the sense of getting to the other side. The whole point about the edge and core structure of thickets is to go into them, not through them. You are not going anywhere when you go into a thicket any more than you are going anywhere when you go to church. The journey in and back count, but the quiet time alone or next to Shelley at the center counted more. In the quiet of the soft, curled mulberry leaves nothing needed to be said. Sometimes we would sit and wrap our arms around our knees and wonder if parents ever did things like this. We suspected that they didn't because we never knew that their hearts could race except when they were angry. So we sat quietly, temples pounding, as if to speak would startle away the fluttering bird we could not see or name. Then as the street lights came on and mothers one after another began to yell out, "It's suppertime," from the backporches, we would begin to crawl again back to the edge of the sidewalk and home. "See you tomorrow." "Yeah, I guess." I have never stepped off the pavement to go fishing or hunting or hiking but that a rush of shadows did not quicken my step, and sometimes I catch myself with my shoulders stooped and my head bent as if I were about to duck under the wool-prickly leaves of the mulberry. And the smell of sassafras still moves me intolerably. I love thickets.