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my dad grew up in a poor city ghetto full of aging Quebecois immigrants having gang battles with encroaching Italian and Puerto Rican migrants. he always adored Westerns, Lassie, the country life. after he got out of Vietnam he was able to use the G.I. Bill to get a college degree, and a good job, and a few years later him and my mom bought a huge plot of forested land and built a log cabin on it, the house I grew up in. he had two horses on the property, a collie like Lassie, and blazed a logging road out into the forest to harvest heating and cooking wood in autumn and winter.
his pride horse was named Briarwood Jem, a retired racing horse, which he'd ride through the forest paths and fields like lightning. when i was little he'd let me ride Jem, and I would stand on the back of his rusty pickup while he drove back into the woods to cut and split wood, gripping on for deal life while we bounded over boulders and mud pits with limbs smacking into the truck the whole way.
i literally grew up in those woods, we didn't do other things or have family outings so much, every day all day i was in those woods. as a teen i began to campout there and have my own adventures, and still do as an adult. the horses and paddock are long gone and overgrown now of course, as is the logging road unless you know how to spot it, but whenever i'm in town or whenever i've had to move back into the cabin between things i spend all my time in the woods.
pic is about 5 years old, last time i was living with the folks for a short stint, brought the camera out and this is actually a pic looking right up the forgotten logging road now, some 30 years later
