THAT WAS ONE BRIEF recollection of my elementary school and forest that surrounded it. More than anything, the forest was the magical place for all the fun and trouble kids could imagine.

The wind was always blowing at the tree tops. If you’ve ever heard the wind through the pines, Ponderosas in this case, nothing else on Earth makes that sound. At once it is both a comforting familiarity and a constant reminder of danger. That same wind can be warm during the day but bring snow that night.

“Where’s Colt?” my mother inquired.

Having fallen asleep hours before, I peered up at her, squinting at the two overhead bulbs burning brightly through the thin, frosted ceiling shade. My head spun sideways to my brother’s empty bed. Mom had thrown back the covers, exposing his pillow and bunched-up clothes in a classic kid’s attempt to emulate a sleeping body. It was not the first time she encountered such trickery.

I had no idea. “Bathroom, maybe?” I grumbled.

“No, he’s not there either, and he’s not in the other bedrooms.”

I peered at the closet with some hesitancy. He may have been hiding there, assuming he could find any room in that mess. However, entering the closet would have required chucking onto the bedroom floor an assortment of board games, jackets, and snow boots that normally inhabited its dark recesses.

And inhabited the closet was, in my young mind. The two doors barely held back the avalanche of belongings inside. They were comprised of the cheapest lightweight wood available, veneered in even cheaper wood that was rich with knotholes. And after dark, those ominous, round spots became as sinister as one might imagine.

Two of them equal in size were paired beside each other, and anyone at a moment’s glance could easily discern the outline of an angry owl starting at you. I often wondered, ‘How could any adult have placed such a terrifying section of wood at the foot of a kid’s bed, except to be intentionally mean?’ Even my friends didn’t like the owl, and they backed away whenever I opened the closet door, suspecting something dark and foreboding would emerge.

Worse yet, the closet doors hung onto their rails like sheets flapping on a clothesline in the wind. They perennially veered off track, often wickedly flying outward from the bottom when closing and injuring my shins dozens of times. In her frantic search for Colt, my mom had left a closet door open, and my gut turned at such a baleful sign.

Earlier that evening, Colt had gotten into trouble once again with our parents, a result of hiding his sister’s doll clothes in some senseless argument with his sibling. After a long string of these near daily perturbations, my parents had heard enough of his denials and, for punishment, sent him to bed at my earlier bedtime hour.

But when you’re nine and the male alpha dog, being forced to go to bed at the same time as your seven-year-old brother is the ultimate ignominy. In a sign of his anger, Colt didn’t even want to listen to the radio, an old 1940s, tube-burning Philco console. We both loved and appreciated that console for what it brought us, including the Cassius Clay fight with Sonny Liston.

That first fight was 1964, but this was two years’ prior to that event. It was November, 1962, and snow had fallen regularly in town since September. Our forest floor, typically sheltered by the pines from getting too much deep snow, had just been blanketed with two additional feet of fresh powder.

We exerted substantial effort and energy to trudge through that muck to our elementary school, even though it was only a few hundred yards away. One leg high up, and crunch. Then the next leg. And on and on until the usual five minute walk took fifteen arduous, sweat-laced minutes.

Due to the heavy snow, the two-lane behind the house was closed for the night until the plows could come by to allow school buses to run. Nobody in their right mind would have considered leaving their house that night unless they were in a high-clearance vehicle with chains.

Given the scarecrow body occupying his bed, my mom and I needed to say nothing more. We nodded in mutual understanding, both knowing that when angered, Colt was not in his right mind.

Since I was of little assistance to her, she did what any mother would do in a last ditch effort to avoid an uncomfortable conclusive step. She called the kids out of bed and forced us to gather in the living room.

My father was giving that stern look, like somebody was about to get a butt-whacking. “When did any of you last see him?”

A dark-skinned man, Dad’s five o’clock shadow always seemed to grow back completely by 7:30 a.m., minutes after he had just shaved. Nixon in his debates with Kennedy had nothing on him. Though he was often a jokester with us boys, he was especially hard on my older sister where jokes turned into teasing more often than not. His temper was renowned among our neighbors, and in some cruel joke of genetics, Colt picked up his quick-to-anger, slow-to-rationality Y-chromosome peculiarities.

Since we had gone to bed at the same time, all eyes turned to me. Finally waking up, I decided to fess-up what I knew.

“He was sleeping with his back to me when we turned the lights out. He didn’t say anything and was just mad. I can never tell if he’s angry at me or someone else since his face looks the same either way.”

“George,” my mother pleaded, “can you check the garage again?”

He stormed out while all of us kids sat in our pajamas on the well-worn, blandly beige living room carpet, shivering from cold that fell like ice from our single-paned windows. We shook our heads, disgusted that we had to suffer such inconvenience at Colt’s convenience. Dad quickly returned from the garage with a fearful look on his face, even angrier that he was forced to check it a second time.

“Not there,” he grumbled. “I even got the ladder this time and opened the attic cover to catch a blast of frosty air. He wasn’t there, either.”

Not only was that November particularly snowy, but it was a long-staying Arctic cold front where daytime temperatures only reached into the teens. The ripe vegetables in our large backyard garden, used in part to cheaply feed our ravenous brood, had long since frozen over, leaving some of the vegetable leaves on the vine. I envisioned my poor brother being discovered outside somewhere, his limbs appearing just like those zucchini plants – dark green, stiff, and smelly when they finally thawed and rotted.

“I called his friends’ houses and talked to the parents. Nothing there. Besides, George, you don’t think he’d go far in this weather, do you?”

“How would I know with that kid?” he spat back. Then he paused for a moment, staring at the frayed carpet.

“Tracks,” he uttered.

“What?” she replied.

“Tracks. I didn’t see tracks out back. Since the driveway is shoveled, he might have taken off down the street.”

“But George!” she pleaded. “How could you determine his tracks from any other kid’s shoes?”

“Did he take his snow shoes?” he inquired.

My older sister ran to check the closet. She was hoping, I believe, that he’d left them there. She was hoping he had run away without shoes or a coat to freeze miserably on the street, which would have been a just recompense for the grief and harassment he constantly inflicted upon her. It’s not that she was incapable of defending herself. It’s just that she was getting teased from both sides of the familial coin – her father and brother, sometimes simultaneously.

She turned with hands raised in question and a barely perceptible grin. “Still in the closet. His shoes are there, too.”

My dad rose quickly and threw open the utility drawer. As was typical, various items in its overfilled belly spilled out onto the kitchen floor as he fumbled around in the innards of the overstressed wooden beast.

“Where’s the doggone flashlight?” he yelled.

“The fort,” I blurted out in response, not even thinking such a reply might be met with bad consequences.

He turned to stare at me, the kid who’d do all he could to avoid confrontations of any kind. “The fort?”

When it came to his tools, my father was easily angered. He was a mechanic, after all, and also a do-everything handyman around the house, constantly working to keep things in repair to bolster the scrimping and saving. “Why have you kids taken my flashlight to the fort?” he yelled.

My grogginess subsiding, I finally started thinking like a kid. What would I do when running away at night? Well, I’d first prepare for the weather. Coat, snow boots, warm stuff. Then I’d walk into the kitchen, quietly slide open the utility drawer, and steal the flashlight. Knowing my parents would alarmingly call all the neighbors, as they did in this case, I’d avoid their houses entirely. Instead, I’d go to the fort. Our secret place. Our proof to other kids that we owned everything in the woods within sight of the massive stronghold.

In retrospect, it was anything but massive and certainly no stronghold. Arguably, it was a tree fort. Two-by-fours were nailed into soft pine branches, twenty feet above the ground. More wood was clumsily criss-crossed atop those flooring beams to secure a floor you wouldn’t fall completely through, if careful. Small sections of plywood comprised the walls. Pine branches above in the sixty-foot pine served adequately as a roof.

You couldn’t take the fort’s looming dangers for granted, however. It was a long way down to the ground, and every kid in the neighborhood had experienced at least one nasty fall from a tree fort, hopefully hitting a pine needle cushion but often slamming a body part into a boulder cast off centuries earlier by the nearby volcano.

“I don’t know,” I replied meekly. “He likes the fort. I would go to the fort.”

What I meant to say was that I would go to the fort if I was him. I wasn’t suggesting my dad should go there.

“He can’t be so stupid as to run away to that rickety fort on a ten-degree night. I’ve seen that thing, and it’s as dangerous as they come.”

“George!” my mother screamed, imagining her eldest son slipping from a frozen branch and being impaled by a jagged boulder, later discovered frozen stiff in the night air by his hapless father. “You have to go up there. I’m sure he’s at the fort.”

My father was silent, calculating whether his son was actually that idiotic. He was pondering the hassle of tromping through the frigid nighttime snow and across frozen puddles without a flashlight, trudging across the desolate highway in heavy snow and up the hill toward the fort.

In a moonless Northern Arizona forest night, you can hardly see your hand in front of your face. The only luminous source to provide any guidance was a dim street light at our fighting corner, which was quickly obscured twenty paces into the forest. Knowing he could easily get lost, my dad had the foresight to place a thick blanket over the layers of cold weather clothing he had just donned.

“If I’m not back in a half hour, assume I’m lost in the woods, so call the police,” he commanded gruffly, staring a hole through my mom and clearly not pleased with anything in the world. It was not the kind of evening he had planned on enjoying after working beneath cars most of the day in his poorly heated garage.

Dad left on his journey, slamming the door to remind us of his anger. My mother immediately began pacing back and forth, hoping for a quick and safe return of her child. To our benefit, and probably to take her mind off that imagined visual of her son’s frozen body, she let us turn on the television.

In the 1960s, any television after 8 p.m. was considered ‘adult.’ Littered with detective stories, Westerns, and mild horror, it was apparently too impure for children. I’ll spare you the tirade of insults about today’s tawdry, gory, thoughtless and expletive strewn crap content puked out of today’s broadcast and cable media. Bypassing questionable fare, my mother clicked the channel to a musical variety show, and we quickly forgot about our brother’s tenuous survival status.

“Colt? Are you out there?” Dad trudged uphill, a not insignificant climb for an overweight guy in his late thirties, and a two-pack a day smoker to boot. After slogging through snow past his knees in the pale moonlight sifting through the pines, he spotted a few recent leg prints and began tracking them, following their meandering, upward ascent.

“Colt!” he continued yelling.

Unwilling to wait, my mom was out on the back porch peering helplessly into the forest darkness. “George? George? Do you see him?”

No response. He was far enough away to be well out of yelling range.

Dad kept following the tracks. They did not appear to be human boot prints per se, but flat, definitionless indentations, the kind that slippers make. Colt was obviously wearing his birthday slippers with leather bottoms and woolen sides, as if that was sufficient to walk through in the dangerously high snow.

We kids weren’t worried, of course. Running away was something every child simply did in those days, regardless of the season. Such delinquent activities were amplified and even made light of in the family shows on TV. In fact, if you hadn’t run away at least one time in the last few years, your standing as a normal kid could be somewhat impaired.

After hearing no response from her husband, my mother hustled inside, shivering after the long, cold wait out back. She immediately went to the rotary phone that hung on our kitchen wall. Its cord was stretched beyond any phone installer’s nightmare, dangling helplessly in a coiled mess across the asbestos-infused, vinyl floor tiles.

I glanced away from the variety show for a moment and noticed her holding the switch hook down. She was staring out the kitchen window toward the street, counting the seconds before she called the police.

Our post-war four bedroom was not constructed to withstand Northern Arizona winters, or necessarily any weather at all. Its windows were sheer single panes that froze up every night, particularly the north-facing kitchen window that opened out to a six-by-six foot porch.

That same porch was the best place for us and the neighbor kids to shoot flies with rubber bands whenever it rained during summer. Those thin green rubber bands used to wrap up the rolled daily newspapers were the worst kind by far for such intensive hunting activity for a number of reasons. Being the alpha male, Colt always got first choice of the thicker, tan rubber bands, so his fingers rarely encountered the various mashed fly body parts you had to shake off the green bands. I was wondering whether the stash of larger rubber bands might now accrue to me, assuming my dad discovered Colt frozen in the woods.

“Oh, God!” my mom screamed.

We kids stared at each other. What kind of scream was that? Dead, or alive? Stiff as a board? What might that look like?

Although she ran to the front door, we were not as concerned about the outcome, good or bad. Television after 8 p.m. was an exceedingly rare luxury, one you bragged about to your friends, and even our brother’s stiffened corpse could not have pulled us away.

“Get over here!” my father demanded. “Come look at your brother.”

We shook our heads in sadness and disgust. Not that he might be dead, but that our special treat ended so quickly.

There was Colt. Pale white, which was unusual for him. He was lucky enough to inherit my father’s dark skin, but it was anything but dark now.

He was wavering precariously at the front door in snow covered slippers, unable to stand without assistance. I had been cold before, many times, but I’d never seen someone’s face close-to-dead cold. His body shook uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered like a snare drum, echoing through his skull in the cold, open doorway.

My dad yanked the blanket from the boy’s half-frozen body, and we knew what was coming next.

“Do you see what he was wearing when he decided to run away to his fort? Look at this! Pajamas. Pajamas and slippers. Not even a coat. What kind of idiot does that in the middle of winter?”

My dad, his jeans covered with sticky, wet snow up to his thighs, was as riled as I’d ever seen him, at least not since the time my oldest brother yelled ‘Spic’ out the car window at some dark-skinned passerby. On that occasion, my dad stopped the car right beside the kid and dared my brother to repeat it to his face. He didn’t.

“That crappy fort,” he began, “is coming down immediately. No more forts. I’m not climbing some damn tree to pull my kid from a fort, dead or alive, ever again. Did you call the police?”

By this time, my mother had somewhat come to Colt’s rescue physically, to no appreciation by my father. As far as he was concerned, the frozen boy could stand at the frigid entry way all night, shivering to his death of cold in wet pajamas and slippers.

“No,” she replied, attempting to put her arms around him while she discretely closed the door.

“Too bad you waited,” he grumbled. “I would have told the officer to cart him away as is, straight to juvie with the other JDs.”

By that reference, he was not referring to any law school designation. No, this ‘JD’ was short for the notorious ‘juvenile delinquent’ moniker. My dazed brother, half conscious and in hypothermic shock, heard none of the conversation.

“Oh, George, you wouldn’t send him to juvie, would you? Not tonight!”

Per our understanding, juvie was the worst place for a kid. We’d only ever heard of guys who went there, and only knew somebody who knew somebody who had been committed. That we knew, you emerged from juvie with only one pathway – a life of nonstop, Bonnie and Clyde-type crime. I doubt my dad was serious about the threat since Colt was a rowdy but overall good kid, though my mom never knew when to take him seriously.

He started to brush the snow from his jeans, right in the entry way that my mom was always cleaning. “We’ll see how he does after this utterly stupidest event of a lifetime.”

Colt’s frosty brain was finally coming to, so he did what all bodies long to do when adapting to the cold. He peed in his frozen pajama pants, right in front of his siblings.

“Go!” my mother urged, shooing us away and not wanting the poor guy to suffer further embarrassment. “Go to bed. Now!” she demanded.

We ignored Colt’s minor inconvenience and moaned, “Can’t we finish watching our show?”

Her hand was raised, pointing to the bedrooms, and her face had ‘that look,’ so we hung our heads and reluctantly slumped toward our rooms. What seemed to be hours later, I heard Colt and my mom enter the bedroom. I have no idea what words were exchanged, but he was sobbing, and she was quietly consoling him. I peeked to see if she left our bedroom door open and was relieved to find she had the foresight to close it, a strategic move to avoid the fatherly ‘give him no quarter’ World War II Army discipline.