As I slowly made my way up a small hill positioned by the expressway whose sounds I had heard throughout my entire life, I looked at what stood before me: a wooded path. While the roar of engines drowned out any sounds of nature, there were actual trees that arched over a wooded path. It was a very narrow strip of nature; a little to the left, and one would be looking at the streets of suburbia, and if one went to the right, there was a field that opened and eventually emptied into peoples’ backyards.

For a small moment, however, one could trudge through the path and have the feeling of being somewhere more natural than the ant-like conformity of suburbia or the rumblings and roar of the expressway. It was a place slightly more lawless than the rest of suburbia: it was out of the view of police officers, and when marijuana was still illegal people would come to these woods to smoke their bowls, furtively glancing about as they applied a flame to the resin-covered buds. I assume for those kids who want to hide their pot-smoking from their parents that this is perhaps still the case.

I began to trudge down the wooded path. It seemed like a beautiful illusion of being somewhere else. Perhaps it was not truly an illusion so much as an actual patch of the wild, an aberration that was never paved over or occupied by human residences. I never saw deer, it was not big enough of an ecosystem and it was too isolated from the rest of nature for deer to make their way to. But there were plenty of smaller animals, especially the squirrels that were ubiquitous throughout suburbia. There were o’possums and raccoons, and other creatures that made their home in greater numbers here than in peoples’ tiny backyards.

I trudged along. There were many footprints as it was a popular destination, and it was not uncommon to see people. I walked along until I came across a steep incline to my left that went down into a narrow clearing. I knew this clearing well: it was surrounded on two sides by trees. It was a length of grass that was occasionally flooded by water when it rained. There were various plants native to the prairie along its sides: Queen Anne’s lace, burdock, mandrake, and others.

I walked up to a patch of Queen Anne’s lace and decapitated one of the plants, holding the many small white flowers in my hand. Why did I do this to the plant? I couldn’t think of a good reason other than that I felt like I wanted to, to hold the many tiny white flowers in my hand and toss them into the air one by one, watching them slowly drift to the ground in the breeze. I walked through the clearing occasionally tossing a flower into the air, not really thinking about what I was doing. I saw in the woods to my left a small man-made stairway that led up to a paved walking path that emptied into suburbia, and decided not to look at it. I walked up another steep incline to my right and made my way through the narrow patch of woods that eventually opened into what amounted to a field.

The field was pure grass, surrounded on all sides by woods except for a small part that emptied into the long backyards of a few homes. One could walk near the homes and it would be ambiguous whether one was on public lands or if one was trespassing. It was an area of territorial ambiguity in a town known very much for its oppressive delineation of what was socially acceptable, legal, and moral, with children who gleefully transgressed these boundaries. It was a suburb of church-goers with rebellious children who filled the high school with drugs grown in peoples’ basements and garages, obtained from the nearby city, or from other more distant places. Teenagers using birth control avoided unwanted pregnancies, or if they occurred there was plenty of money for secret abortions.

It seemed to my mind for a time that the suburbs would collapse under the weight of their own hypocrisy, that the illusion of the suburban dream would dissolve and society would collapse. I waited many years for it to happen, yet it never did: life kept trudging along in its beer and pot-filled misery, with its rebellious color-haired teenage witches, its unnecessary SUVs and trucks, college-educated parents, barely-awake church-goers, and police who stringently enforced the law. I fantasized of a day when the woods would overgrow peoples’ unattended backyards as they gorged themselves on Vicodin, that society would collapse and people would turn on each other and themselves, that the freeway would remain silent and trees, bushes, and grass would slowly creep its way into peoples' rotting houses, that humans would occupy this place no more.

But though I lived in an adjacent suburb with more of the “minorities” dreaded by the deluded residents of this town, I knew that I was part of the system, that though I was toxic and dangerous in some ways, I had my place in this mess. And to see nature grow out from this patch, over the backyards and gas grills of suburbanites was just a dream, perhaps one I didn’t really want to see come to fruition. I walked along the field and then turned and made my way back into the maze of conformity, back to where I mostly remained out of sight, out of mind in the dystopian dream of the suburbs.