Here are the Woods

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #180. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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Wide but shallow.

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To find porn in the woods, you must live near woods. Near enough to walk or ride through at least, which is to say, access to some communal but still private space. Trees that hide you from god and parents, but where generations before you have come to practice their own secret arts. They will leave the things that they can’t take home, and there they will rot and feed the fungi of the forest floor, or if properly cached, wait months, seasons, years to be discovered anew.

There are some woods in the biggest cities in the world. I remember being dumbfounded that New York, as unnatural a landscape as the moon, could host several parks with trees enough to hide the buildings. These are powerful woods, but perhaps too communal – New York is a place where everyone is always solitary but never alone. Finding porn in the woods is a rite of passage for the young, who have it hard enough in our panoptic cities.

As such it’s the liminal woods between cities and suburbs, suburbs and exurbs, farmhouses and fields that yield the highest chance of finding porn. Obviously going too far leaves one scrambling for the proverbial needle, buried under leaves, pine cones, fallen logs, animal corpses, scat, trash, moss, etc. You cannot stray too far from community, the records of teens rich with time before you, leaving their treasures to rot or inspire. Those before you can include older siblings, cousins, friends of siblings or cousins, random upperclassmen who believe in sharing tradition and rough coordinates. Here are the woods, the porn’s in the stump, the old cooler, the abandoned shack.

I don’t really remember if I ever found porn in the woods, whether it was exurban Wyoming or exurban Northern California, the places I spent my youthful wealth of spare afternoons and early evenings, chasing the streetlights home for dinner. There were rattlesnakes under abandoned mattresses, groundhogs around the grassless yard, avalanches of rusted cans in decommissioned missile silos. But other than rifling through my dad’s poorly secured stash, porn wasn’t really something I encountered in the wild until the weekend my brothers and I spent “helping” my step-grandfather take care of a hunting lodge used by him and his buds.

When Northern California got too hot for the old boys to go hunting, the lodge stood on stilts alone and unloved, until we came to ride the ill-advised motorized tricycles and swing bamboo and get sunburned and hang with gramps. He’d teach the older of us to drive until his patience ran empty, we’d shoot guns at dirt or cram potatoes into a PVC pipe he fashioned with a little chamber to light and fwomp, soaring potatoes. We were also in charge of cleaning the lodge, a stale lightless house built for grilling and sleep, rancid with masculine energy, where baskets of porn waited atop each toilet.

Classic stuff mostly, which isn’t to say classy, but the kind that found room for “letters” and longform cultural essays. But that’s not what we look for in our porn of the woods, it’s the nudity of course, the body barely understood, let alone the connections to our own. Grandpa knew we didn’t suddenly develop tiny bladders or increase our fiber intake, and would cajole and tease us as was his right. But other than that, we never really talked about relationships, how to treat people in our lives, manage our feelings and impulses. He was a good grandfather, as good as can be expected from someone steeped in the hollow promises of masculinity that only the suburbs can provide.

It’s strange to ponder the patchwork of misinformation that makes up one’s sense of gender and sexual identity, that the first whispers often came from bleached and tattered pages left to be thumbed amongst the trees. That hiding porn in the woods was easier than a frank conversation, leaving hormone-fried idiots to patch it all together and laughing as they scramble. Now the woods are online, and online is everywhere, all the time, but luckily for us they’re ruining online. The current crest finds us turning back to limitations, trusting our instincts over corporate algorithmic synergy, we yearn for the collaboration of shared spaces and freedom from an infinite scroll, a return to the woods, always and forever holding our porn.

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Levi Rubeck is a critic and poet currently living in the Boston area. Check his links at levirubeck.com.