Gone to the Woods: Surviving a Lost Childhood

Gary Paulsen's memoir recounts his turbulent childhood and adolescence in the third person as "the boy." Born in 1939, the boy never met his father, a low-level officer on General Patton's staff absent for the entirety of World War II. At age four, his mother moved him to Chicago, where she worked in a munitions plant. Overwhelmed by steady pay in the big city, she fell into heavy drinking and partying, dragging the boy to bars where, dressed in a small army uniform, he sang on tabletops to attract men who rewarded him with Coca-Cola, candy, and fried chicken.

Word of this lifestyle reached relatives in northern Minnesota. The boy's grandmother, who was working as a cook for a road crew, ordered the mother to put the five-year-old on a train north. The mother pinned a note to his jacket, shoved a five-dollar bill in his pocket, and handed him to a conductor who seated him between two unconscious wounded soldiers and disappeared. The boy discovered the train was a moving hospital filled with men bearing burns, missing limbs, and half-body casts. A porter named Sam found him retching in a corner, comforted him, and enlisted him to distribute sandwiches to the soldiers, many of whom had the blank, faraway stare the boy would later recognize from his own army service.

After a transfer in Minneapolis, he boarded a slower northbound train, where he became trapped in an adult-sized toilet and was pulled free by a wounded soldier. As the train crawled into dense forest, the boy saw deer, rabbits, and a black bear by the tracks and felt a deep certainty that the woods were the right place for him. At a remote platform marked CAMP 43, an ancient mail carrier named Orvis drove him partway in a rattling car-truck, then dropped him at a mailbox. Walking down a rutted trail, the boy was attacked by geese before a shaggy dog named Rex intervened, and then his Aunt Edith, called Edy, gathered him in a warm hug. When she asked how his trip was, he answered: "I got stuck in a toilet."

Edy and her husband Sig lived on a fairy-tale homestead: a small white house with red trim nestled among towering oaks. The boy was given his own attic room with a brass bed and goose-down quilt. He cried with happiness, having never had his own place. Edy fed him warm bread with butter and honey, then put him to work gathering eggs and feeding animals. Sig, a quiet, strong man refused by the army due to a leg condition, spoke to the boy as an equal. For the first time, the boy felt part of a family.

Sig took him on a multi-day canoe trip to hunt morel mushrooms, a prized wild fungus. As they glided under overhanging trees, Sig whispered, "See. Look. See." A whitetail doe and fawn stood drinking at the bank, so close the boy could see water droplets on the doe's muzzle. This became the moment when he could no longer separate himself from nature. Sig taught him to fish, build fires, and cook over them. Back at the farm, the boy settled into daily routines: filling the woodbox, weeding the garden, and walking barefoot through dewy pastures with Rex to bring in the cows. Riding on the draft horse Blackie while Sig cultivated corn, the boy fell asleep in Sig's lap and experienced complete safety for the first time.

This life ended when his mother arrived with one of her Chicago companions, a man named Casey, to take the boy to California and then by ship to the Philippine Islands to join his father. Sig protested: "The boy fits here. He belongs to stay here." But Edy gently insisted the boy had to go. He watched the farm disappear through the rear window, crying quietly.

In San Francisco, the boy contracted chicken pox. Desperate not to miss the ship, his mother arranged with the captain to smuggle him aboard at night. He spent 10 days confined to the brig, a tiny steel cell, while a Filipino steward named Ruben tended his sores and told stories of Manila. During the crossing, a military transport plane attempted a water landing near the ship, caught a swell, and broke apart, spilling passengers into the sea. Sharks attacked the survivors, and the boy watched from the rail as people were pulled underwater. His mother, overcoming her seasickness, helped bandage the wounded.

Manila was a war-ruined city of bombed buildings, yet nearly everyone smiled and waved at the boy. Meeting his father proved hollow: The man glanced at him without touching or smiling, ordered a drink, and that night the parents fought. This continued for nearly three years. The house servants took pity on the boy, and he gradually became a street child, exploring the ruins alone. He discovered the nighttime city of machine-gun fire and guerrilla fighters killed on the base perimeter fences, their bodies left for wild chickens to pick at. His spirit hardened. He could never be young again.

The narrative jumps to age 13, when the boy was back in a northern Minnesota town. He survived through hustles: snagging fish below a power dam, setting bowling pins, sweeping a saloon, and sleeping in the basement of his parents' apartment beside a furnace. Both parents had alcohol addictions. The boy hunted with a homemade bow in the woods along the river, his true home, and planned to run away west again, but something held him back.

That something was the public library and its librarian. One frigid evening, he ducked inside the library, a Carnegie brick building, simply to get warm. The librarian noticed him with a brief, warm smile but did not stare or order him to leave. Over time he began browsing magazines, then sat at a table. She offered him a free library card, and when she typed his name on the small card, the boy felt real for the first time, his existence confirmed. She selected books for him, starting with a jungle survival story that unlocked his memories of Manila. His reading accelerated from two weeks per book to two or three a week. One day, the librarian placed a spiral notebook and a yellow pencil in front of him and suggested he try writing. He took them home and wrote "The Deer," the story of a doe he once watched shaking flies in a river, creating a rainbow of spray, and later finding her dead, gut-shot by a drunk hunter. He wrote for the librarian and continued writing about everything, always for her, even after she was gone.

At 16, after the state threatened to send him to a juvenile facility called the Murphy Home for Boys, a counselor offered vocational school as an alternative. His friendship with a ham radio enthusiast named Leo led him to choose television repair, where he thrived. Years of farm labor, carnival work, and lessons from Billy, a tough ex-convict who worked the carnival, had hardened him. When the bully Benny cornered him by the railroad yards, the boy flipped him to the ground and told him quietly, "No more."

At 17, he forged his father's signature and enlisted in the army. At Fort Carson, Colorado, brutal training stripped away civilian identity. His toughness helped him endure, and exceptional technical aptitude scores sent him through advanced weapons schools, from missile guidance to nuclear warhead training. Promoted to sergeant at Fort Bliss, Texas, he trained older career soldiers scarred by World War II and Korea. Seeing their physical and spiritual wounds, he knew he did not want that life. He wanted to keep growing, to see what lay over the next hill.

The memoir closes decades later. Living in a shack in the New Mexico mountains, the boy, now 80 years old, opened a box and found the blue notebook with the story of the deer. The pages after the story were still empty. He picked up a pencil and thought: What the hell. Might as well write something down.