A picture's worth a thousand words--and often a picture is better than a thousand words with what it can evoke. All at once we 'know' something, we 'see' or 'understand' or 'remember' almost at a gulp.
Melba tells me the places where these stumps remain are called 'bone yards.' These two words are pretty evocative too.
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It just happens that a family vacation on Hunting Island is one of my earliest memories, part of my bone yard.
Two families went. I was the youngest of the five kids.Hunting Island is part 'jungle' (at least the south end is undeveloped and seems very jungly to little boys used to temperate forests). We were told than panthers were sometimes spotted on the island. And, worse than panthers, cane-breaker rattlesnakes. Sheesh, what a name for a kid to wrap his head around.
One evening after supper, the older kids took off to walk down to the south end of the island. "Not unless you take your younger brother," my mother insisted.
I slowed them down. Before we reached the channel it was near dark. A stray storm broke over us. We turned around and long before we got home it was genuinely night. Worse, the tide was at the flood, it was 'high,' right up to the very edge of the jungle. Not a smooth edge between see and land, but a right-angle drop of a couple of feet from where the roots of the dense plants held the sand. The choice was either to walk with the small waves or in the jungle. And though my small legs didn't work very well in the water, NOBODY wanted to walk in the jungle.
The big kids took turns carrying me, but I was a load (the oldest was only 13 or 14). Sometimes they just plopped me down, telling me "Keep up!"
We heard lots of animal sounds coming from deep in the tangled vegetation. Mosquitoes tormented us. As we finally reached the developed side of the island, there was flat, open sand, and the others began to run for the cabins. Of course, I was last to get there.
Our parents were really mad. They'd been looking for us. They sent us all to bed.
Later, I heard scraping noises downstairs. My brothers told me that Dad had gone out to get a spanking machine. It was heavy and he was dragging in. I believed them.
I heard somebody walking up the stairs, and then my door opened. It was Mom. She turned the light on. "Look at you," she said. "Those mosquitoes have eaten you up. Let me go get some lotion."
Our experiences are formative enough. We don't need imagination to make them scarier than they are, do we?
