Love Letters to Anne

An adventure:

One day, on a Saturday, my best friend and I decided to go hiking up the mountains outside of the little town named Itri in Italy. Our hike took us about two miles outside the town up the valley to the sports complex. It had several soccer and baseball fields, and they were on different levels that had been carved out of the mountain.

So, we used this as our starting point as we traveled up the path to the top area of the complex. From there, we surveyed where to get into the thick forest that blanketed the mountainside. We got about 50 feet up and had to shift laterally to our left as the trees were so thick we couldn’t even squeeze around them and we were young. About 11 and 12, both kinda scrawny, but full of eagerness to explore our new world.

We found a clearing and stretched. It was summer and it was now late in the morning. I remember it was so humid you could drink the air. But the clearing was shaded and there was a step level from an old farm maybe, but anyway, there was this rock wall and a slab next to it that looked like a small cave, but there was nothing there in it and my friend decided to climb the rock wall since it was just taller than him.

I was standing there a little ways back from him, just watching and taking in the sounds of the forest around us enjoying the view from being so high up. I kept smelling what reminded me of dog shit, and then noticed piles all over the place. I looked under the rock slab that was next to the wall. I instantly recognized this as a den for something, since nobody was home, I was guessing this was where a wolf pack lived sometimes. I was starting to get a sense of danger.

Suddenly, he comes down from the wall and is in a complete panic. He's gibbering something about a pig? I wanted to see it, and he got pretty far from the wall and pleaded with me to just forget about it and let’s go. I had to see why he was so frightened. I started to climb the wall. As I cleared the top, I looked around, and then I heard it: the distinct sound of grunting, and then I saw him.

It was a huge mountain boar. I fell from the wall like a fly. I told my friend about my suspicions of our surroundings. His panic peaked now. He said let’s go! And I was inclined to agree. I had never seen a boar up close before. He was tall even though I was at his ground level. He had tusks and was rooting in the dirt at the base of a tree and didn’t get the chance to see me since I jumped so quickly.

He put my fingers in his back belt loop and we started running down the mountain side where we could find clearance between the trees. We had spent most of the morning climbing up, and we still weren’t really far up the side of the mountain, so as I recall, we reached the winding countryside road below us quickly. Fear drove us down fast, and I remember that since my friend was so much taller than I was, (he was lanky and thin, but tall for his age) I remember he would take a few strides and I would only touch the ground once after he had made two strides.

Anyway, we learned a good lesson that day. The world was full of danger, even in, or maybe especially in, nature. The sight of that large male boar and all the crap around the den woke me up to how this little adventure could have turned out so very much worse.

A few weeks later, we were coming down a path off a closer mountain that he had a villa at the base of, (his dad was an officer so the villa was huge and magical) and there was a fallen tree trunk in the path that we ran to jump over and on the other side of it was the smell of death. I looked back and went white. There was a dead wolf. It had been even bigger than the boar. It looked like it had just laid down there and died, but we didn’t inspect it too carefully, as it was rotting and decomposing.

This just confirmed for us the presence of more danger in these mountains. And then we saw the cave just beyond the wolf, hidden behind a tree. It was large and there was a staircase of sorts made of rocks, but after looking in from the edge I could see the many bones of various creatures on the cave floor. Maybe this was a bigger den, maybe these animals had just fallen to their deaths; whatever it was we left quickly and got ourselves back to the villa.

In retrospect, those lessons taught me about the danger in the world, and fortunately, neither of us got hurt in the process of learning.