“Tell me a story, before I go to bed.”

I’ve told a few bedtime stories, and I’ve read a few tales to children at bedtime. I’ve read a lot of books before I turned out the light next to my own bed. I hunger for narrative.

Lately I have been falling asleep with audio books playing while I drift off to the land of nod. Sometimes I listen on Librivox where the chapter ends and the device turns off, other times I am listening to an audio book on Youtube where the narration keeps going and I wake up after drifting off and must turn off the device.

On Youtube a suggested video on my homepage was ‘A Walk in the Woods’ by Bill Bryson. Actually the work was simply listed as ‘A Walk in the Woods’ in big green letters against a white background. I had never heard of the work; I immediately thought of ‘In the Maine Woods’ by Thoreau. I tried to evaluate the previous videos that I had watched that made the algorithm on Youtube suggest this unknown work to me. I have no idea. But, I do frequently simply type in ‘audio book’ to see what comes up. I hunger for narrative.

After seeing the title a number of times on my homepage I finally took the bait and clicked on the video. Almost immediately I liked the language and style of the writing. The author was witty and informative.

I wondered who the writer was. The video only had the title. When I looked at the information beneath the video – there was none. Why? I guess the poster realized that the audio tapes uploaded to Youtube were still under copyright for this 1996 work. The video had parts that said, “This is the end of side two” indicating that the poster had gotten the audio from an old fashioned cassette tape.

The use of the audio could be considered ‘Fair Use’ under US copyright laws. The Youtube poster is not getting any money from the post – the work is offered for educational value – one could argue.

For the last two or three days I have been listening to the book. I think back to the times when I was a young teenager in the Boy Scouts with many walks in the woods and a climbing in the Blue Hills just south of Boston. Not very big hills compared to the rest of the Appalachian Mountains, but, we work with what we have.

When I was eleven or twelve I used to ride my bike up through Mattapan and down Blue Hill Parkway to the Blue Hills reservation with my friend Sandy. We could disappear into the woods with no adult supervision. We camped at the official Boy Scout camp in the hills, but after we learned how to get to the reservation we returned on our own.

The woods were lovely, dark and deep. I felt a kind of freedom from society while we made our way over rocks and fallen trees down paths unknown to us. In my urban neighborhood there seemed to be a group of hostile kids on every street we road our bikes down. But, in the woods Sandy and I rarely met up with anyone. The public land seemed to be our land.

Television at that time was filled with Westerns – Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Sugarfoot, Palladin, I watched them all. I especially liked the Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone stories. I wanted to be an explorer and get out of the city with crowds of hostile people.

There it was, a half hour bike ride away. I thought I was out in the wilderness.

Of course when I made it to the top of the hill we could see the city and the suburbs all around us. I guess the Eastern part of Massachusetts is one of the most densely populated places in the US. But, it was a good enough escape for me. As a famous US vice president once said, “If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all.”

I found the Boy Scout manual a useful guide to everyday life in a way that I simply did not find the Catholic catechism I studied in school to be useful. One of the dangers of the woods that the Boy Scout manual warned of was tick bites. Of all the terrors of the woods one thing not present in the Blue Hills Reservation was bears. But the little tick could actually affect more people with the diseases they might carry like Lyme disease.

As I looked up picture for this post I saw that the reservation managers had arranged to allow hunting of deer on the Blue Hills Reservation. People who think ticks and deer have a right to life protested against the culling of the herd.

When I talk with people who really, really love animals I detect a distinct notion that they think there are not enough animals in the world, and that there are too many people. I used to go to the Blue Hills to get away from people, but I never went as far as the animal rights people who seem to want to take the anti-people idea to the logical conclusion.

After listening to Bill Bryson’s tales of the woods and hiking up hills I am tempted to drive to the Blue Hills Reservation and climb up to the top once again to the stone lookout post.

I don’t think I’ll ride my bike. Or, I could just watch the movie that was made from the book with Robert Redford and Nick Nolte. It looks like the movie is on Amazon Prime for $2.99. I’ll save up to watch.