THAT NATIONAL FOREST WAS a giver, always a giver. On our worst days as kids, we could always retreat into the woods and get away from everything that bugged us – siblings, school bullies, mean teachers, homework, and boredom.

Twenty yards behind our house was the hill my father climbed that freezing night to find his son hunched in a fetal position on stiff wooden boards too far up a Ponderosa pine. Had my mother not had a sixth sense, we would have found him the next morning as stiff as those boards.

The hill was my home as much as my house was. In winter, we’d drag our sleds up the run for thirty yards, our cheap, single knit woolen gloves covering fingers perennially frozen in place. We’d peel our digits off the sled handle, then jump on and use our feet to steer for our lives down to the bottom, going so fast that any unfortunate crash always resulted in body damage. We quickly learned to pack enough clothing and coats around our bodies to cushion most accidents.

I was once speeding down that hill when the rusted barbed wire between two old fenceposts, precariously buried in the snow at the bottom of the slope, suddenly sprang up right in front of me at the end of my run, just before I shot across the finish. Bloodied in multiple places, my coat ripped as in a cougar attack, and crying uncontrollably as I entered the house, I still knew that it was an awesome sled run and was simply the price you had to pay for fun.

Our houses in the neighborhood and the school itself were constructed in a small valley at the base of the gradually sloping hill. This place had known centuries of human habitation. God only knows what historical relics and architectural wonders were destroyed by the bulldozers and backhoes of the day clearing the way for roads and houses.

Pottery shards were strewn everywhere – atop the ground, in the gullies, and on the hillside. Though we’d try our best, we could never find a single piece of pottery that matched the others. It was like dumping every puzzle ever made into a pile and trying to fit at least two pieces together.

The forest floor also issued forth an occasional ‘Mexican corn grinder,’ as we called them, and arrowheads. The latter was prized by us boys, of course. We assumed every arrowhead was created by a Native American who used it to fight off the U.S. Cavalry. Some of the neighbors had collected hundreds of them and showed them off proudly in framed wonders of defensive or offensive technology from those bygone eras.

As for the corn grinders, I assume all are now long gone from the forest floor. Hewn over the years from grinding corn cobs against soft lava stone, this necessary kitchen implement was so prevalent that we didn’t even bother picking them up.

Were we unsupervised? Hell, yes. The woods was our place of unadulterated freedom, meaning that no adult ever set foot there, save for my father to rescue his son from certain death. Since those days preceded all current pastimes for kids – including computers, cell phones, gaming, and social media, we and our friends were always roaming around the woods.

The hill was gradual, indeed. It rose up from the highway for a few hundred yards, and at the top was a large clearing as if someone had overtly cleared a small pasture for farming. ‘The Clearing’ was our place to sit and rest, to take in the fact that we had just achieved a significant objective by climbing the hill.

At that place, the mountains were displayed in regal view, bearing down on us as if they were inches away. They had erupted only centuries prior, and I was always concerned when staring at their blue-green and often snow-capped beauty. When would they erupt again? How would we know? Would we be covered in ash, frying-and-dying-in-place like at Pompeii?

One day at The Clearing, after messing around for a time and discovering nothing new, a dozen of us decided to head back down the hill for lunch. For whatever reason, my sister veered off a bit to the left as we began our descent. After traipsing downhill twenty yards, she screamed with delight.

“Hey, you guys. Over here!”

“What is it?” someone replied.

“Looks like furniture,” she stated.

Furniture? What would furniture be doing in the middle of a forest? There were no roads or trails nearby. Somebody would need to carry it there, across rocks and boulders and around trees and shrubs. It made no sense.

But as we got there, we saw the oddest thing: a large, four drawer, maple clothes dresser. It appeared as if God had dropped the object from the sky to see if it could traverse numerous pine tree branches on its way to the ground, then wedge itself undamaged on the hill between two large boulders.

My sister was the first to pull out a drawer and extract some contents. And what, to our surprise, did she uncover first? A massive, white brassiere that she swung around her head for all to see, as if she was lassoing a rodeo bull.

I had no idea they made them so big.

Most of us kids were very familiar with the odd garb that women wore beneath their clothes. Pointy brassieres had thick straps ingeniously criss-crossed at the back to hold the frontal contents at full mast. Coupled together by a complex hook system, these elastic wonders pressed relentlessly upon a woman’s delicate backside and underarm skin, leaving red marks to endure a lifetime or beyond. My poor mom would often rummage about with her fingers among the mixed fat and skin folds protruding from the edges. ‘Am I really that fat?’ she’d ask us, as if she actually cared how we answered.

Then there was the girdle, another body management garment. I don’t know how many times I saw my mother walking around the house in her bra and girdle. Given their massive steel, cotton, and elastic infrastructures, you could discern nothing beneath them. In fact, women’s bathing suits displayed far more flesh than these formidable constructs, armored and buttressed like the Bay Bridge.

They could withstand any act of nature, even an earthquake or devastating flood. You might lose the person inside, but inevitably, the lost soul’s undergarments were always photographed hanging on a branch somewhere, having been discovered by some sheepishly grinning deputy sheriff.

The girdles melded and pressed flesh and elastic together in a conflagration so painful that no child wanted to set eyes on it for more than a second. You couldn’t stand to think that your mom’s adult life needed to be so painful.

Then there were the ubiquitous stockings. Every girdle assumed the presence of stockings, with small clips at their half-leg bottoms. Unattached, the clips appeared like a raiment of jingly bells hanging from a reindeer’s hairy legs.

Women’s stockings had a limited, predictable shelf life. My mother’s legs were so regularly wooly, and her leg hair was so resistantly stiff, that few stockings ever survived their first journey up her legs. I imagine three or four college tuitions were wasted on those brown-hued wisps of nylon, the epitome of designed obsolescence that always found fast retirement into an overstuffed bathroom trash can.

Back to my sister, smiling as if she had discovered a pirate’s treasure. The gaggle of kids surveyed the booty, a complete dresser with drawers intact, save for the one my sister had opened. We could have cared less whose dresser it was or how such a thing, clothing and all, could be carried to this place hundreds of yards from any road. What mattered was that we were gifted with some large woman’s clothing to rummage through.

We each selected our chosen booty to display, then screamed and laughed, bounding joyfully down the hill while partially draped in them. We had no awareness of voyeurs or any other similar sordid criminals or crimes at the time. This was free stuff from the forest, no different than any other unexplained and unaccounted for trash dumped there for our taking. So took we did.

My best friend had donned one of the brassieres, and it dangled across his body from right shoulder to left hip, snapped together in the front. A leg appreciator at the time, I grabbed a pair of stockings and tied them around my head as if I was hunting for elk with my bow and arrow.

When we arrived at the bottom of the hill, tiring of the screaming and uncontested elation, we stopped and peered across the two-lane at our houses. What would our parents think of our discovery? ‘Why are you wearing somebody’s undergarments? How do you know they’re clean? You can get diseases from stuff like that. Where did you get these? They’re not mine, are they? You didn’t find them in one of the neighbors’ houses, did you? You’d be grounded if you did.’

Each of us was thinking exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. Our downhill elation was tremendous, but fleeting. An old Chevy sedan passed by, and the passengers marveled at the sight, likely wondering what juvie hall so many kids had just escaped from.

Without speaking a word to each other, we discarded all the undergarments in the dry creek bed, the one that carried so many shards of pottery downstream during rains and snow melt. But it’s not like we forgot about the memorable event. We talked about it for months afterward, that unusual, spectacular, and unsupervised day in the forest.

I’m certain that hill still holds evidence of that eventful day, hiding under volcanic boulders and laying low until the next intrepid explorers discover the garments fully intact and just as useful as the day they were manufactured.