“Moving in line then you look back in time to the first day.”

– Jeff Lynne

I count backwards from one hundred.

I stop when I get to my age. The counting takes a good deal less time to complete than it used to.

I contemplate that despite adding another tree ring to my own dendrochronology, there remain so many different things that I know little or nothing about.

I think it’s strange to get older, especially once you’ve put a few decades behind you.

Some things I never would have considered remembering, I can recall as though it were yesterday.

I can close my eyes and clear as day hear the noon whistle blowing at the flooring mill, my mom’s voice yelling out to us from the back porch steps to come into the house for lunch and the sound of our feet running up or down the old, narrow flight of stairs between the landing and the upstairs common room.

Counting in my memory, I believe there were exactly 12 steps in that stair flight. I can remember far enough back to when the stairs weren’t carpeted. They were built of wood and painted red with a black, 1-foot-wide, plastic runner down the center.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the house – which was built in 1900 – was getting a remodel by my dad who was working to do it himself, when he wasn’t on his route delivering the U.S. mail, pitching horseshoes, bowling or reading the paper.

During this reimagining of the house, the staircase was covered with carpeting, while orange countertop was installed in the kitchen and decorative French shudders were installed on the inside of the upstairs windows and fitted with various colors of slide-in plastic to simulate the look of glass.

The shudders in my bedroom had blue plastic and later red. When I was in high school, the paneled walls of my room were decorated with posters of some of my rock-n-roll heroes, including Bob Seger, Bob Dylan and the rock band Kiss.

I had dozens and dozens of vinyl albums, 8-track tapes and 45-rpm singles. I had a stereo receiver, 8-track and cassette tape players, a turntable and an AM-FM radio built-into the tuner.

I had big speakers, that I still have, for the stereo gear.

The floor in my room had been covered with tile that resembled marble, but was later covered with a thin pile, blue-green carpeting.

I slept in one of two beds that had once been bunks.

The remodel had provided a built-into-the-wall closet with top and bottom sliding doors on rollers. This was built to try to expand the usefulness of the small room. Beyond the bed, the only other furniture in the room was a dresser.

The house was small for a family with four kids. There was a bathroom and two bedrooms upstairs. A common room we called “the hallway” was used as a makeshift bedroom at the top of the stairs as the family grew.

Downstairs, there was the interior front porch, a living room, dining room, kitchen and “spare room,” which is where the washer and dryer were. This room was going to include a bathroom and laundry chute from upstairs, but those features were never completed after my parents divorced.

There was also a pantry off the kitchen. The original doorway to which was covered over during the remodel and a new doorway was cut through the spare room wall and fitted with a pull-across sliding “door.”

The basement extended over about half the length and width of the house before turning into a crawlspace on one side of the room. There was a drain in the floor with a metal cover and a furnace that burned heating oil when I was a kid, but the house had previously been heated with coal.

There were remnants of the black, combustible substance in one back corner where a chute used to come through a window near the outside water spigot.

The house was small, but it felt big when I was a kid. Big enough anyway.

After my dad died, the home was sold when he would have been 83 and the house was 109 years old. Today’s it’s 123 years old and after being flipped, barely resembles the configuration it had when I was a growing up there.

Despite these creature comforts, like most kids in those days, I was drawn to the outdoors, even if that only somedays meant being out in the backyard.

There was still enough room for us to play whiffleball, kickball and football back there, using the clothesline poles for football goal posts and a silver strip of metal flashing along the bottom of the first story roof to mark a home run, unless a fielder caught the ball when it came off the roof.

My parents bought a swing set from Montgomery Wards and put it up out there. It had two swings, a slide and a glider. My mom had gardens of flowers and vegetables planted out there against the house, around the clothes poles and in raised beds in a single section running north to south.

A big maple tree growing in the neighbor’s yard hung over a very old fence with wooden pickets into our yard, providing plenty of afternoon shade to lay down in to relax in the cool grass on warm summer days.

Like the house itself, the yard felt big when I was a kid. Big enough anyway.

I recall with fondness afternoon summer thunderstorms, twittering chimney swifts, tree swallows and purple martins, along with beeping nighthawks, that all pursued bugs through the skies over our part of the town.

In the wintertime, there were snowbanks to climb where we played “King of the Hill.” We played hockey and football in the snow-covered street and went sledding and tobogganing either in the yard or the neighborhood.

There was a basketball hoop attached to an old wooden ladder on our side of the neighbor’s garage. We played mostly “horse” out there with the ground too grassy and uneven to dribble.

There had also been a horseshoe court and a plastic kids swimming pool when we were younger. And all of this was just in the backyard and the street out in front of the house.

The surrounding neighborhood and walkable or bikeable area included creeks to fish, a lake to explore for garter snakes, painted turtles and leopard frogs, a bluff to climb, sand banks to have jumping contests on, a library for books to take out and read and Saturday afternoon puppet shows, trains to watch with their waving engineers, a fire hall within walking distance to watch the trucks head out to fires and a newsstand or a couple of small “party stores” we could get to for treats like paperback books, comics, ice cream, football and baseball cards, candy bars, pop or chips.

There was a gigantic silver maple tree that grew across the street and hung over us while we played. A streetlight on a pole outside a neighbor’s house extended our outside playing by hours and hours.

This is just a sample of things that are so clear to my mind and senses today, even though they are borne of times long since gone. There are countless other recollections I hold dear that are also clearly vivid to me now.

But ask me what’s happening today all around me or in the larger world we live in, and my understanding diminishes almost immediately. Things seem so intricately and desperately complicated and yet many of our perceived differences so simple as to appear appallingly foolish or stupid.

There’s a numbness and a pain that comes with living now. It’s one that I believe will spread its malignancy. Yet, I will not go quietly.

To break its spell, I find I need to be in places where truth, wisdom and reality abide, like the streambanks, grassy fields, shady groves, and cool and quiet forests I have known since my youth.

There is no greater reality or simplicity for me than those things I can see and otherwise sense or experience in nature. The sight and sound of a wild bird close at hand, the beauty of a fresh, green maple leaf or the elegance of a wild orchid are unmatched in their sincerity in just existing.

When it’s been a long time since I’ve seen the stars, the constellations seem to jump out of the blackness with incredible brilliance as though someone has taken the time to string light bulbs strategically across the heavens.

The fresh air I breathe out there tastes sweet and fills my heart and lungs with hope and life. My mind can think clearer. I can reason again and walk steadier and surer. I regain a sense of purpose and better understand the questions, even if the answers aren’t apparent.

So, again I will go to the forests and the streams to rekindle the fire inside my existence, to hear the beating of my heart and to sense the comforting presence all around me there.

Another ring through my heartwood, another year scratched on the blackboard of time, so be it. I am fortunate. So many others have not had that chance.

Life is for the living.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.