It was 1974 when my folks scraped together every penny they could and put a deposit on a 3- bedroom lake-house in a tiny, unincorporated area of Auburn County called (uninterestingly enough) Federal Way.

It’s only 23 miles south of metropolitan Seattle, but back then it was as far from the city as you could possibly get.

The whole place was a dense ecosystem of marshes and wetlands surrounded by tall, thick bowers of deciduous and fir trees with a verdant wonderland of kudzu, fiddle ferns and a delightful assortment of exotic vegetation.

It was a popular vacation spot for wild cranes and heron as well, who migrated to the area every Spring and camped out by the massive swamp near, what was then considered, the ‘center’ of town.

The swamp was also a popular place for the kids in town to congregate and whack at the tall grass with sticks, like we were explorers on safari.

For some reason, every kid was obligated to pick cattails to bring home to their mothers, and although I followed along, I never quite understood why? It was just an unspoken ritual that one kid started, so the rest of us did it too, without question.

I can only imagine what went through the minds of passing motorists, as they drove by packs of children steering their bikes with one hand as the other held aloft a bouquet of what might appear like corndogs on very long sticks.

Three years after we arrived (1976), they started construction on a new mall, located in the town center. I remember we rode our bikes down, the day they brought in big trucks, and drained it dry. A week later, they filled it in with sand and our safaris came to an abrupt end.

We were only sad for a minute though, because despite our emotional connection to that place, we discovered the mall would be the site of one of the very first “video game” arcades. The swamp became a distant memory in less than a week.

There were several lakes in the area, all within about four miles of each other: Steel Lake, North Lake, Panther Lake and then some smaller fishing lakes like Lake Geneva, Mud Lake…it was almost too many.

We lived on Lake Dolloff, which was private and a popular place to swim when the big parks were crowded. Kids would typically swim there but go to Steel or North Lake to hang out and socialize.
All the local lakes were stocked with fresh water fish and as fishing season…

…approached the Game Commission encouraged everyone to get their license, get on the water and fill their Coleman ice chests full of Rainbow Trout, Small Mouth Bass, Yellow Perch and the occasional Pumpkinseed Sunfish.

Opening day of fishing season was the only time of year we had traffic in town. With so many well stocked lakes to choose from, amateurs would show up early and line up at the park gates for a first shot at the boat ramp.

Our lake always got a little traffic but nothing like the chaos of Steel or North. I imagine it was probably because we had almost no signage and the public boat launch was a well-kept secret.

Townies would usually do their fishing in our lake, in order to avoid the strangers crowding around their waters.

All the kids in my neighborhood had their own fishing pole, and every season they’d be right there on opening day, sitting next to their fathers; lures in the water, forging life-long bonds.

I was always a little jealous of those kids because my stepfather had no interest in forging a bond with me or even his own children, for that matter.

He once told my mother that he liked me more than his own kids and that made him resent me so much that he was determined to make me hate him, so he didn’t feel as conflicted. He was a complicated man, but to his credit: it worked.

My biological father only existed in fragments of early memories. Sometimes I thought I could recall his face and I only had one, very faint, memory of him playing with me on the carpet of his parent’s trailer home.

It’s a fuzzy picture but I somehow remember everything bathed in the dark orange glow of dusk and the sound of his laughter. I really didn’t have much else.

Whenever I would ask her where he was, she would only tell me that “he’s very far away” and that even though he loved me very much, he wasn’t allowed to see me until I was much older. At the time, I often wondered if he was in the same place as my brother Barry...

When I was very little, before I knew about human biology, I innocently asked my mother if I also maybe had a brother or sister? She paused for an uncomfortably long time before nodding ‘yes’.
“You have a brother.”
“Oh…okay. Where is he right now? Is he with daddy?”

She paused again…
Nervously, “um…no. He went into your closet and he uh…never came out.”
“He’s still here? In our apartment?” I replied, shocked.
She then put a hand on my shoulder and guided me towards the middle of my bedroom, across from my closet.

“He went in there and never came out. You have so much stuff in there…he got lost and never came out.”
I began to sob as I ran over, slid open the closet door and plunged my head inside. To my horror, it was a mess: clothes and toys tumbled onto the floor at my feet.

With tears rolling down my cheeks, I began furiously stepping over stuffed animals and dirty clothes to inspect the space; it didn’t seem that deep, but there was so much junk…it seemed very possible. I looked back to my mother.
“What is his name?” I cried, shaking.

I could taste the hot salt of my tears as they streamed down my cheeks.
“Barry” she answered quickly.
I then climbed into the closet and called out “Barry! BARRY!??”

I shouted over garbage bags and into boxes and all the things mom couldn’t find a place for in our two bedroom, one-closet apartment.
“Barry! It’s your brother! Come out!” I called to him as I tumbled over junk.
“Derek! Honey, stop! Come out of there.”

She reached in to help pull me out and I reemerged from underneath a box of Lincoln Logs, checking over my shoulder in case I caught sight of Barry. I didn’t know what he looked like, but I figured if I saw anybody in the closet, it would most likely be Barry.

Mom placed a hand on either of my shoulders and looked me sternly in the eyes.
“Honey…listen to me…” she began. “You’re going to have to pull everything out of that closet, if you want to find him.

And separate it all into piles, like toys and clothes you want to keep and things you don’t play with anymore.”
“Okay…” I was sniffling now as I tried to stifle my crying and focus now on finding Barry.
I looked back to the closet.

“We should open all the bags in case he’s hiding inside” I suggested. Besides all the loose toys and clothing, there were quite a lot of overstuffed, green plastic garbage bags stacked on top of one another. I deduced they might be a potential hiding spot for Barry.

Mom instead recommended that I leave the bags closed and stack them in the corner of my room, by my bed.
“But what if Barry is IN one the bags?” I protested excitedly. I was agitated: this was my brother we were talking about.

He was somewhere in that closet and I felt partially responsible, having crammed all my stuff in there. We had to open every one of those bags, I reasoned, and inspect their contents for evidence of Barry’s whereabouts.
“He not in the bags, Derek” she stated with confidence.

“But how do you know that!?” I pleaded.
“Because I used a special magic knot to tie all the bags closed and there’s no way he could get into them so just stack them by the bed.”
Now I was both confused and astonished.
“Wait…you know magic?! Can’t you undo the spell??”

She suddenly became frustrated with me. “It’s against the magic rules. Just do what I asked and come get me when you’re done” she said, turning and leaving me alone in my room.
“But…” I called to her as she left, but she didn’t even turn around to respond.

“Derek…I don’t want to lose another kid.” She turned the corner and disappeared into the living room. Needless to say, I cleaned out my closet, calling for Barry the whole time to no avail.

I braced every time I lifted up a bag or a box, expecting to find a little pile of bones inside empty clothes. For the rest of our time there, I was convinced Barry must’ve somehow gotten lost in the walls.

Occasionally my mother would walk in on me talking loudly into the closet, to him. When she decided to move us in with Bob, I was devastated that we still hadn’t found Barry and I was heartbroken to leave him behind.

Occasionally I would lay in bed and think about what Barry might be doing right then.
Was he still trying to find a way out of the walls and back into our apartment?
What if he comes out of the closet and a whole new family is there?

Would they keep him, or would they try to track us down? I hoped they would call us, so I can finally apologize to him for leaving the closet such a mess and getting him lost in the first place.

I was eleven years old when mom finally levelled with me that she was just joking and she only wanted me to clean out the closet, but then it got out of hand because she didn’t expect me to take it seriously.

Before she knew what hit her, her imaginary son had a name, a backstory and she was also a secret witch who knew magic but couldn’t show me because it was against the rules.

Frankly, the whole thing got away from her pretty fast and the last thing she expected was for me to still feel guilty about my imaginary brother, Barry, lost in the walls of the Burien Gardens apartment complex forever and ever.

So, it wasn’t that hard for me to imagine that maybe my dad had gotten lost in there too and she just didn’t want to tell me.