Because our charting had accelerated once we had begun running to the flagged stake, we hadn’t realized that the impasse was actually quite a ways away. With each venture, we would be confident in our imminent arrival at the blockade, but the raft moved so slowly that it was taking much longer than expected. So we would sail for as long as we could and then dock the raft.
Each time we pulled it onto the shore, Josh would ask me how much farther it was, and I would take the map out of my pocket and count the dots from where I thought we were to where the map ended. “We are, I think, twenty-six dots from the end,” I’d say. And Josh would nod thoughtfully. The next trip, we’d run through the woods directly to the raft, climb aboard, and go a little farther, and there would hopefully, but not always, be fewer dots.
We continued this well into first grade. Josh and I were assigned to different Groups that year, so since we didn’t really see one another during the school day, our parents were more willing to let us play together all weekend each week. Because Josh’s dad had taken on a lengthy construction job that required him to work over the weekends while his wife was on-call, staying at Josh’s house would have been difficult. However, the fact that the telephone at my house had been shut off due to delinquent payments made staying at Josh’s house impossible since my mom would have been unable to check on me. For Josh and me, my house became the nexus of our time together, and as much of that time as was possible was spent on the raft.
The intensity of the exploration had died down, but it was still fun, so we kept at it. The farther we made it into the woods, the shorter each trip had to be so that we could make it back to my house on time, but this made it more of a game to us. Our movement toward our destination was slow, but finally, at the very beginning of winter, the game became more serious once again.
We had made it to the impasse.
We wanted to proceed past it right away, but it was nearly time to be back to my house, so we dragged the raft onto the shore and rested it right next to the wooden marker, which we hadn’t seen in weeks. We ran back to my house.
The next day, we hustled through the woods and made it back to the raft. It was so far into the woods that we had very little time to make adjustments to our plan on-scene, so we quickly pushed the vessel into the water and climbed aboard, oars in hand. As we negotiated our way past the woodland obstacle, we found that there was a bend in the water’s trajectory that we hadn’t been able to perceive before.
Scanning our eyes over the edge of the forest, we saw how vast and dense the woods really were in this spot. We realized that we wouldn’t be able to overtake this stretch of woods after all, and so we simply stopped paddling. While we sat there on our raft, gently rocking on the calm water, I carefully looked ahead and slowly added to the map, stopping only when I had no more points to plot because the rest lay out of sight, obscured by the curving of the tributary. This felt like cheating, since we hadn’t actually traveled to the dots that I was making, but we had waited so long to reach this point that I felt that I had to take advantage of it.
Before too long, we had to push back in the other direction. The woods were simply too thick, and the nearly two foot rise of earth over the tributary that exposed the twisting and damp roots of the trees above meant that there was no place to dock our vessel. Disappointed, we left the raft at the same thick of trees that prompted us to build it in the first place.
Over the course of the next week, we formulated a plan. The phone at my house had been disconnected again that week for missed payments, so the scheming was done piecemeal while waiting for the bus to pull up after school. By the time Josh got to my house the following weekend, I had already completed my part of the mission; I looked at him and attempted to discern if he had come prepared as well. My mother told us that if we were going to go outside, we needed to hurry up; she was cooking dinner, and by the time we got done eating, it would be too late to go back out. We left straight away.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
“Yeah, are you ready?”
“Yeah.”
We disappeared into the trees.
Just two days before, I had gone outside to play. Rather than running into the woods, I grabbed the shark float and stealthily carried it to the side of the house. As quickly as I could, I deflated it and rolled it up. Having not considered what I would actually do with it once it had been transformed, I snuck my way to the crawlspace and pried the gateway open just enough to push the now tubular float inside. A little while later, I retrieved it, and as fast as I could, ran into the woods and to the blockade. I tried to inflate the float as I moved, but after tripping over it twice, I abandoned the multitasking and waited until I had reached my destination to finish the job.
When Josh and I reached the site, however, our plan seemed to unravel.
“I thought you said you brought the float!”
“I did… I—”
“Then where is it?!” Josh roared. He was already disrobing, revealing the bathing suit that he had put on under his shorts.
“I wedged it between the raft and the tree! I even tied it to the tree with a triple-knot.”
“Well it must have blown away!”
That didn’t make sense. I had kicked the float hard just before I ran back to my house, because I wanted to make sure it was secure; it hadn’t budged even an inch. As I looked around the area hoping to see the float, a strange feeling began to grow inside me. Something was off, but I wasn’t immediately sure what it was. The realization struck me hard and fast.
“What about the towel though?”
“What towel?” Josh returned.
“I brought a towel for you, just like we planned. I set it right under the corner of the raft… do you think it blew away too?”
“It doesn’t matter now anyway. Let’s just go back.”
And so we did. We had planned for Josh to use the float to help him swim out past the blockade. It was getting too cold for us to leave the house in our swimsuits with my mother’s approval, so he had to sneak the suit, just as I had snuck the float. He wouldn’t have been able to chart his journey on the map, but if he made it to the end, then at least we would have had some idea of how far it extended. This was our trump card, so to speak; it was our last way of making any real progress, and it had been ruined. It started to seem as if we would never finish the map.
But then, finally, we caught a break.
On a Saturday evening, around seven o’clock, Josh and I were eating microwave dinners when one of my mom’s coworkers knocked on our door. Her name was Samantha, and I remember her vividly now because, employing what I had learned from watching movies, I would propose to her a couple of years later when my mother brought me to work with her to pick up her paycheck; Samantha would tell me that I was sweet, but maybe we should wait until I was a bit older.
Samantha began talking to my mother, and as she did, her gaze became fixed upon Josh and me. She paused for a moment, laughed, and said, “Wow! They really do look alike! You weren’t kidding.” I had heard my mother say this about us before, but I didn’t see it.
My mother corralled her coworker’s attention and listened to the rest of what Samantha had to say. After a moment, my mom told Josh and me that we had to go to work with her so she could fix a problem that had arisen. She said that it would take about two hours, and I gathered that the problem was Samantha’s fault and discussing it in the car was why it wouldn’t take more time.
We all walked out of the house. My mom seemed apprehensive about bringing us to where she worked; once, when she couldn’t find a babysitter, her boss had formally reprimanded her for bringing me in with her for the day. I opened the rear door of my mother’s car and was just about to climb in when I heard her yell.