Gopher Skull: walled frontier or gateway to adventure?

It was sort of a dare in my tiny circle,  in my small village. Unspoken. But I am sure each of us felt we ought to, at some time, go look for it. On one edge of the village the street ended at a little farm lane, which ran alongside a tree-shaded gully and some fields whose farmers were always far in the distance on a tractor, faceless. We were very young and full of the excitement that comes when you are sure,  so very sure that some kind of adventure is going to happen today, just so long as the adults aren't around. It was a bit like a dream and the presence of adults always made the death-defying challenges of the great outdoors go "poof". Yes, their mere presence deflated any Great Mystery or Great Adventure.

Everyone said it was there, in the field, very close to the path. Someone suggested we look for it.  Not today--too far, grown ups won't like it... but, if we don't, someone might think we're scared. Of course we were, thankfully. Otherwise it wouldn't have been very brave of us to go after all.

I don't remember which day it finally was, nor do I remember exactly which of our handful of friends were with us when we pushed passed the boundaries of the village to look for the Gopher Skull, but I think we had left the mystery until the day when we found out that the township was going to develop the field of mystery and fear into a soccer field for the community. I always find it interesting that something that is meant as a great play space for village kids actually comes at the cost of taking away some wild place that generations of kids have secretly enjoyed. We enjoy those places because we dream of adventure. But since we are also scared out of our wits without grownups in those places, we are also secretly happy that it is not as dangerous as we pretend it to be!

Now that I have "grown up", I see that we adults continue to do the same thing when we travel: exaggerate a little here, a little there so that some little accidental adventure in an otherwise scripted trip makes us seem like a seasoned explorer to other people. In order to achieve the awe, though, we need to exaggerate the danger we are in. So are we really experiencing adventures or are we writing our aventures as we want to experience them?

 I found I was doing this with my children--snapping 'pics' of them as they tobogganed or explored the woods. I was uploading pics to FB as soon as possible. At one point, I realised that I was so busy chronicling their moments that I was no longer sharing experiences WITH them!

Eventually, my little friends, my brother and I never did find the dreaded Gopher Skull. We were extremely disappointed, but it had marked an interesting frontier for me. Always I had had an urge to go beyond my village frontiers to drifting sand dunes and places where you could explore on camelback, places to climb, glaciers, mountains, oceans, lands with unknown words and very different people.

I just had to get past the Gopher Skull.

Was it easier when I couldn't find its scary remains?