To the west of the house in Ohio where I grew up, beginning at the end of the back yard, was a field. It was, at the time I lived there, overgrown with blackberry briars. In the summer, there were wildflowers ¾ daisies, purple thistles and Queen Anne's lace ¾ and the air was abuzz with flies and bees. Paths and tunnels through the thorny thickets offered passage to secret hideouts and adventures.
    On the near side of the field was The Hill, a mound of Earth perhaps three feet high, of uncertain origin, made bare by the baking sun and the trampling of children's feet. Its heights provided an ideal bastion for toy soldiers. All summer long I labored to dig them forts and trenches, devise stratagems and imagine.
    To the left of The Hill lay a path to a large elderberry bush. Early in the summer this bush offered concealing shade and sported four-inch clusters of white blossoms; later it yielded innumerable purple berries, small and bittersweet, to our delight.
    To the right lay the main path, the one that traversed the whole field. It was probably no more than two hundred feet long, yet to my short legs and big imagination it was an almost endless highway to adventure. In the early spring, the ground midway along its course became boggy, sometimes widening out into puddles that we called "ponds" or "lakes." In these august bodies of water, we fished with stick poles and kite-string lines, catching discarded bottles that for some forgotten reason were designated "English minnows." The fishing was always cut short by cold, wet feet.
    In the summer, the ground became hard and dry. Pushing through the matted tangle of underbrush, we could explore farther. On some sultry mornings we would battle our way to the foundation of a long abandoned farm building near which, it was rumored, a skeleton was buried. We excavated energetically on several occasions, but unearthed only rocks and matted roots.
Beside these ruins stood a gnarled, decaying peach tree, the source of much sticky sap used for entangling hair and soiling clothes and the occasional producer of a few small, sour, scarred fruits that gave pleasure out of all proportion to their quality.
    This part of the field was the haunt of Panhead, an elusive being who wore a kitchen pan turned upside down for a hat. I never met Panhead and was skeptical of his existence, but my sister and some of the other neighborhood children claimed his friendship.  Wading further west through tall grass, we would come to a dangerous region permeated by poison ivy.
      There we walked carefully, sticking to the established trail. If we persisted, we suddenly emerged into an open space, the beginning of the wider world. The field came to an abrupt end at a dirt road, beyond which was a vast lawn, bordered by plantings of asparagus. Across this lawn we could see more fields, streets and houses.
    Beyond my westward vision, my westward imagination took flight; there were more distant fields and hills and fields again, opening out onto the lush farms of the Amish country and opening still further west to vague, wild lands, populated by bears and Indians, to things yet discovered.
    All this is now gone. The dirt road is paved; the field is somebody's neatly manicured yard. Children live in the neighborhood still, but these days in the summer there's not much to do outside and you seldom see them. Maybe they ride bikes or shoot baskets from the pavement or blast rap music from boom boxes by the swimming pools, but more likely they're indoors watching TV or playing video games.
There is no wildness in their world, not even of the imagination. Everything has been tamed, and beyond the neat suburban back yard lie only more identically neat suburban back yards.