I can remember a piece of sage advice given to me by my father. It must have been my introduction to the field, the place I spent my childhood and the setting for many forgotten years. We must have been walking along the main trail that led into the heart of this eighty-acre square of green, [and later in the year, sun-burned tan] tall grass hills, bare, grey clay fields and tan reedy and cattailed swampland. An entire country of unknowns for me, at only (it must have been) 4 or 5 years old, and small, with such short steps that eighty acres was boundless to be sure.

I knew right away that this eminently practical advice from my father was a life saver: "if you ever don’t know which way is home, just keep walking toward the watertower." Silver aluminum with a satin sheen like nothing else, the giant tower stood on a hill three blocks or so west-southwest of my home. A dirigible, heavier than air by a longshot, with a shape less like the Hindenburg than a fat, fat pumpkin, propped up on one big central column with six or eight supporting struts around; somehow they kept that tank from toppling, bursting and flooding away all we had. A ladder, tiny when seen from such a distance, crawled up that central column [I always thought I would climb it someday] and another ladder, oddly placed, seeming to span from the top center of the tank to halfway down along that fat, silver side, hanging there for no apparent reason. An icon of something more deep-seated and feared, I’m sure, but always on the surface a sign of home once I had received that advice. The water tower stood directly opposite these eighty acres, forming a line through three points in space–myself and the watertower at the ends and my home somewhere in between–so I was sure to get there if I didn’t detour from the geometry. That fat-assed tower still stands, gleaming with reflected sunlight, in my mind. It was a menace, always hanging over our heads, and also, through that advice, it became my way home.

It did save me, too. Fearless, I must have led my friend, [it must have been some friend that I have forgotten] or perhaps he led me at first, down the trail that stretched from my house to the creek which separated my field into the open and the deep and dark. Across on the muddy two-by-eight that served as our bridge and along the far bank we must have walked, to where the creek made its gradual transition from rushing water between visible, defined, grey clay banks into stagnant swamp soaked with water everywhere amongst fecund clumps of grasses and cattails.

We didn’t know what was ahead, and turning back the way we came was not an option. It must not have been, since we kept moving deeper into the swamp, linearly, toward the center of the area. Down and deeper we traveled also, into the muck that sucked at our olive green rubber hunting boots [the ones that sprung leaks so quickly and cost only $19.99 at K-mart]. Once fully mired and deep to our knees, we must have decided we were lost, or maybe we had already gone through so much that we told ourselves it couldn’t possibly be any worse ahead than it had been behind. And then I remembered to look for the watertower.

Not only must I have done all these things, but I actually do still remember being able to catch a glimpse of that tower, now and then, flickering between the trees, and I knew we were heading in the generally right direction, even if the water was getting deeper, as we moved from the reeds to the flooded trees, and the muck made movement even slower as we sank into their rootbeds of wet, seeping mud. I think I remember these things. I can see them in my mind. I can smell the stench. [My god, what wasthat stench?] Step after step, up out of the mud with one foot–wedging my toes to keep my boot from being suctioned off by the mud–over a fallen tree and stepping back down into the ooze on the opposite side, losing my balance as my foot sank farther than I had expected, and reaching for the fallen tree with one hand and my friend with the other to keep me up, out of that thick, gritty, stinking water.

That’s it. The memory ends there, what memory remains of that experience. I could fill in more "must haves" to complete the story. I could tell that eventually the water must have become shallower and that we likely had to cross a short area of wet grey clay that had been under water the day before, but had soaked in all the water that had covered it, and how slippery it was there. How we finally emerged from the trees and whipping sticks–those tiny trees that grew straight up into what looked like rounded huts–to the main trail that we could follow, still toward the watertower, and back home. How we dumped out the pints of gritty, grey water that filled our waterproof boots. I could say how my parents must have reacted when they saw me soaked to mid thigh and covered with thick mud from the knees down. I could even mention that I learned to walk out to the road and take the long walk home around the great block that defined my eighty-acre field to keep such ridiculous adventures at bay. I could tell these things, but they would all be only logically deduced details or amalgamations of other events, strung together to provide some sort of narrative cohesion of the same sort as when I told how we got so deep into that mess. I could even guess at the childish thought process that made such "exploring," as we called it, seem a reasonable justification for such trouble and discomfort, though I could never replicate this way of thinking again. And all of these details, even those I have presented as if they were truth, certainly could have been otherwise in reality, in objective history, except, maybe, for that short, sensory image in the middle when I saw the watertower and could feel the water, thick with grains of mud, between my toes and the suction rushing more water in as I tried to step forward. That may be the only real memory here. The truth of that may even be suspect, though it seems as though I remember it. Maybe only the stench was a real memory. Stinking clay mud filled with centuries of organic material, giving off fumes, breeding molds, a noxious rotting. Maybe it is only this that is true. And how many other explorations of the field did this same clay stench define?

I cannot trust my memories. I have no childhood left. Although, I know it must have been.

Memory is a swamp of uncertain footing.