An Unexpected Portal
Saturday 04/23/2005 7:16 AM
 There is a door in the middle of the woods behind The Asylum. (2005) File Under: Asylum, The; Cemeteries; I Took This Photo! |
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Years ago, I spent a lot of time traipsing around the woods behind The Asylum, which I later realized in a "well, duh" moment are actually the former grounds of the hospital. I'll never forget the time I first stopped in my tracks, jaw dropped, as I stared at a perfectly good door standing in the middle of the woods. You couldn't help but be reminded of the ape men in 2001 and their distraught and angst at finding a large stone monolith right outside their cave one morning.
What do you do when you find a closed door, complete with door frame and all, in the midst of a clump of trees?
I flashed back to Scooby-Doo cartoons, Afterschool Specials and the countless books, stories, movies and tv shows about the ordinary child who found the magic key, the secret door or that special way of seeing the world that no one else does (or will at least admit to). For the briefest of moments, it seemed maybe this was going to be one of those "fact is stranger than fiction" experiences I looked for in my own life as a child and eventually discarded to the part of my brain labeled NOT POSSIBLE.
Perhaps if I made my way over to the door and managed to get it open, the trees on the other side of the door would be a slightly different shade of green. Maybe I'd catch the whiff honeysuckle on the soft breeze slipping past me while I held it open. Then there'd be that sound, familiar that I can't quite place that encourages me (and The Boys, of course, close behind) to step past the jamb only to discover ourselves in an entirely different set of woods.
In this other place, children run wild through the grounds, enjoying their free time. The Asylum is a children's center filled with things for them to do. Me and The Boys wander up towards the old building, but the vines and fence and graffitti are gone. It looks, well, not new, but reburfished quite nicely.
There is a woman in a white jacket here with a clipboard and she smiles when she sees me. "We've been expecting you, Mr. Lakanen. It's almost time for class." And she leads me into the building and upstairs to a quaint, beautiful little music classroom when I can teach and talk about music and electronics and computers and life as I see it and there are children here who have been anxiously waiting for me to arrive ever since they heard there was a new, cool teacher coming. A teacher who let the children choose new names for themselves. A teacher who let the children name him.
There is no problem with the dogs — all the children and the adults love them. We spend several minutes getting everyone acquainted and then The Boys are led to their own beds in the corners of the room at the front of the class. They promptly go to sleep, while I start surveying my room.
After looking around the room in silence while the children sit in their desks watching me without saying a word, I make a single declaration:
"These chairs and desks have got to go."
The children erupt with applause, laughter and glee, and we spend the next hour moving the desks and the chairs around the room until we have big open space in the middle. We all sit on the floor in a cricle and start introducing ourselves. Then I tell them the rules. Then I talk about music for a few minutes and what we'll be discussing over the next however many weeks or months or years.
The it's time to go outside again. The children surround me and The Boys and I head out to the grounds. Maybe this afternoon, we'll go all the way down the hill to the pond. I want to cut through the woods — they seem so familiar — but the children encourage me to the right so I can take the path to the pond. As we all walk together, the children tell me there are scary things in the woods. Broken parts of buildings and bodies buried in the ground.
"Really?" I ask, somewhat incredulous. "Sounds scary."
"It is," this beautiful fair-haired girl tells me as she takes my hand. She says, "The scariest part is the door. There is a door in the middle of the woods. It looks like it could take you somewhere else, but everyone knows that doors don't work like that." She tugs at my hand and the two of us watch Chaunce run across the parking lot and down the hill through the trees, heading for the water to look for geese. A few minutes later there is vociferous honking coming from afar, about where you'd expect to find the pond.
There is an unexpected ping of sadness deep within me, like a submarine, lost in my own briny depths, trying to communicate from the void, trying to find its way home. Something about that door seems familiar. Though I'm sure I've never been in those woods before, there is an image in my mind of an old cinderblock thoroughfare and a vine-covered awkward door painted in a long faded shade of institutional aquamarine.
The little girl stares up at me and asks, "Are you OK, Mr. Lakanen?"
I look down at her, crack a smile and say, "I'm fine. We don't need to see that door. Let's go see what Chaunce is doing."
"Alright!" she yells and runs back to get a couple more kids as I start catching up with The Red Dog.
If only I had turned around, maybe I would have been suspicious. Maybe I would have figured out a way to remember better. But I didn't. Lost on me at that moement were the knowing smiles and winks being quickly passed between the children. Like the morse code clicks shooting back and forth through a dirty, tangled nest of hundred year old telegraph cables.
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