As kids, my friends and I spent a lot of time out in the woods. “The woods” was our part-time address, destination, purpose, and excuse. If I went to a friend’s house and found him not at home, his mother might say, “Oh, he’s out in the woods,” with a tone of airy acceptance. It’s similar to the tone people sometimes use nowadays to tell me that someone I’m looking for is on the golf course or at the gym, or even “away from his desk.” For us ten-year-olds, “being out in the woods” was just an excuse to do whatever we feel like for a while.
小时候，我和我的朋友们在树林里度过了很多时间。“森林”是我们的业务住址、目的地、目标和借口。如果我去一个朋友家，发现他不在家，他妈妈可能会说，“哦，他在树林里，”一种让人轻松接受的语气。这与现在人们有时用的语气相似，他们告诉我，我要找的人正在高尔夫球场或健身房，甚至“远离他的办公桌”。对我们这些十岁的孩子来说，“在树林里”只是一个借口，可以暂时随心所欲。

We sometimes told ourselves that what we were doing in the woods was exploring. Exploring was a more popular idea back then than it is today. History seemed to be mostly about explorers. Our explorations, though, seemed to have less system than the historic kind: something usually came up along the way. Say we stayed in the woods, throwing rocks, shooting frogs, picking blackberries, digging in what we were briefly persuaded was an Italian burial mound.
我们有时告诉自己，我们在树林里做的是探索。那时候探索比今天更受欢迎。历史似乎主要是关于探险家的。然而，我们的探索似乎没有历史上的探索那么系统：沿途通常会出现一些东西。而我们呆在树林里，则是扔石头，打青蛙，摘黑莓，挖一个我们一度相信的意大利古墓。

Often we got “lost” and had to climb a tree to find out where we were. If you read a story in which someone does that successfully, be skeptical: the topmost branches are usually too skinny to hold weight, and we could never climb high enough to see anything except other trees. There were four or five trees that we visited regularly----tall beeches, easy to climb and comfortable to sit in.
我们经常“迷路”，不得不爬上一棵树才能找到我们在哪里。如果你读到有人成功地做到了这一点的故事，请持怀疑态度：最顶端的树枝通常太细，无法承受重量，我们永远爬不到足够高的地方，只能看到其他树木。有四到五棵树是我们经常去的——高大的山毛榉，容易攀爬，坐着也很舒服。

It was in a tree, too, that our days of fooling around in the woods came to an end. By then some of us has reached seventh grade and had begun the rough ride of adolescence. In March, the month when we usually took to the woods again after winter, two friends and I set out to go exploring. We climbed a tree, and all of a sudden it occurred to all three of us at the same time that were really were rather big to be up in a tree. Soon there would be the spring dances on Friday evenings in the high school cafeteria.
我们在树林里鬼混，爬树的日子结束了。那时我们中的一些人已经上了七年级，开始了青春期的艰苦生活。三月，也就是我们通常在冬天过后再次去森林的那个月，我和两个朋友出发去探险。我们爬上了一棵树，突然，我们三个人同时想到，我们待在树上实在是太大了。很快，周五晚上将在高中食堂举行春季舞会。