Tree of life.

An ancient beech bridges the widening gulf between boyhood and mandreams.

I grew up in the woods behind the house of my childhood, a 50-acre sprawl of wildness firmly situated within the city limits of High Point, North Carolina. Anyone could tell you where "the woods" were, for there the neighborhood kids converged each day after school and all day long in the summer. We built leaf forts and log forts, underground forts and tree forts. We caught snakes and frogs and terrible colds. We swore alliances and broke our trusts. We learned to love and to lie while we defended our allies, attacked our enemies, and wrought--or so we thought--pure havoc on the free world.

A creek trickled between our yard and the edge of the woods and formed a sort of border between a world of parents and grades and acne cream and a world we had all to our own. We lent it the same cartographical significance as we did the woods: "The creek," it was.

In our woods grew an ancient-old beech tree with a trunk squat and fat like the belly of an old man. Its once-smooth bark was gnarled and pocked and scarred with carved dates and slashed initials. The names of lovers and loners were there, the names of kids who walked to the elementary school up the hill or to the high schools on the other side of Lexington Avenue. There were the initials of little boys who prowled the woods before little girls and driver's licenses stole their attention, and--who knows--the initials of fugitives on the lam, the last wild Indians, a bogeyman or two, or any of the myriad creatures that populate the imaginations of young boys in the woods.

Some carvings are difficult to read, for the years have misshapen the knife blade's route, the trunk bulging and stretching and cracking with age. I remember, though, the oldest date we could discern: "1918," carved deep into the bark alongside indecipherable initials, a date that, to adolescent boys, seemed inconceivably long ago.

There are other initials on the old beech tree, signs and wonders whose import, like the very carving, is incomprehensible. And high on that trunk--or as high as we could reach--are the chiseled letters: WW.

There are, we still are fond of saying, only two "Wolverine Warriors" in the world. From second grade through 12th, Timmy Lassiter and I walked to school on the knobby, rooted paths of the woods--and the Wolverine Warriors knew those paths better than any of the other neighborhood kids. We knew which part of the woods held more rabbits and where most of the squirrels lived. We knew which trees to climb for the best view of enemy territory, which paths provided the best escape routes when under attack. We used bird calls to communicate; we hid our love letters in hollow stumps. We knew where the best Christmas trees grew, and where a small Confederate camp was attacked by a band of marauding Yankees. Yankees! we thought, in our own backyard!

Timmy and I could hardly have known that those simple letters would brand us for life. They've given us a tangible symbol of commitment, one that we feel in the rough bark of memory now that years and miles keep us apart. We'd sworn to be blood brothers, but neither of us could bear to slash a palm or even prick a finger. Instead, we each dug a single "W" into the tree. Just as Timmy was finishing, the knife slipped and sliced through the tip of a finger. Blood poured from the gash, and he smeared it in the freshly carved initials, turning to solemn brown the fresh cream-colored cuts in the tree.

For years I told my friends that we bravely slit our fingers to seal our pact. This is the first time I've told anyone the truth.

It's a crazy sort of thing to remember, I suppose, and an unlikely symbol of one's childhood. But from that day to this, Tim Lassiter and I (only his mother calls him Timmy now) have never turned our backs on the friendship we swore to on the old beech tree.

And my love affair with woods has never faded.

Most of us remember the woodlots of our childhood, places of respite from a world that seemed too quick to cancel our dreams. Vacant lots where the robins nested, granddaddy's farm, the backyard tree-house, a corner in the attic--all these were woodlots of one sort or another. They were places of respite, of renewal, or of outright escape from Mama after you'd sassed her from across the street.

As the accompanying photo shows, that old tree in my woodlot still stands, though the surrounding woods have largely been reduced to fake colonial homes and cul-de-sacs. There still are paths through the remaining trees, but you can see clear through the thickets now, from border to shrinking border. No longer could a little boy hide in those woods, press himself deep enough into the brambles that the world on the other side of the creek disappears. But the tree still stands. Some little boys might stare up at the letters "WW" and wonder what they mean, run their fingers across the date "1973" and think that seems inconceivably long ago.

As for Tim and me, fax machines and WATS lines keep us posted weekly. We have followed different paths from our common woodlot, trails at times rough with differences, trails that now lead much closer than ever before. We still use the lessons we learned from the woods. When crossing streams, we choose our steps carefully. When choosing sides, we look long across the stream. We love whenever we can, and we lie when we must. And we still wreak havoc on the world, or so we think.

I've found other woods now, larger woods, where the deer aren't imagined and the borders aren't near. It seems I've made a life of looking for woodlots--searching for places and people passed over by the rest of the world. I hunt for untold stories, tales like forests untouched by saw or backhoe, for lands and lives grown old with years and vision. Only in woods large enough to lose your way can you truly find it.

But in all my wanderings, there is only one ancient-old beech tree, trunk fat and squat in the woods of reminiscence. I return to that stone-strewn ground on occasion, either to leave behind bits of my boyhood--another chunk of innocence lost, one more dream tarnished and bent--or to try to find the boyhood I left behind. The paths through the woods don't seem nearly as wide as they did when I was a child; the trees aren't as tall as I remember.

Except for the beech. It is still there, large as it is in my daydreams. Carved on its face are the initials of little boys, but from its roots spring the souls of men.

Eddie Nickens, a freelance writer, searches for stories from his home in Raleigh, North Carolina.