I took my family on a road trip--we just had to get out of the house this weekend--so we went up to the Ozarks of Northeastern Oklahoma. We made no plans, just drove with a trunk full of clothes and fishing poles.

My son, River, and I had shared the delightful experience of reading the book "Where the Red Fern Grows" together out loud last year, and if you've ever read it you know how poignant it is to read out loud to a little boy. Just to make it all the more wonderful, we read the last two chapters by lantern light in the treehouse we had built together.

As we were driving up near Tahlequah, we all began to recall how many of the sites in the region were featured in the book, which was written by an Oklahoman (Wilson Rawls) from Scraper, Oklahoma. The story is semi-autobiographical, in that Wilson grew up on the Illinois River hunting raccoons with his hounds as a boy and teen.

We drove up a narrow back road creeping along the Illinois river, and I told my son (and Cedar, my younger son too, although he hasn't read the book) that he was seeing the EXACT site where the book had taken place--notice the trees hanging over the brown river where raccoons could leap and foil hounds. We even found the ORIGINAL building that had been his grandfather's store, which is featured in the book (and movie adaptations), even though the building is secluded at the end of a miles-long winding road with no name. We went inside to see the original wood-burning stove and antique bottles still on the shelves. We were standing in the history of a classic American coming-of-age novel.

As we drove, we came to Scraper, which is not even a town (there are no businesses, no signs, nothing--just the "Scraper fire department" and bunches of farms at the edges of the Ozarks). Mr. Rawl's childhood home is no longer standing, but with some ingenuity we were able to find a fitting possibility...in the book, his house is a log home with a barn at the side of a dirt road. Across from the home is a field and then stands of trees lining the river marking the edge of the mountains. The dirt road passes by a hillside where the hounds, Old Dan and Little Ann, were buried, visible from the road. Rawls describes the family leaving their homestead to move to the city, and how the young boy looked back one last time to his home hillside and saw the red fern over their graves. He also describes the patches of thistles and berries he had picked for two years to buy his dogs.

We found one of the only dirt roads in Scraper that fits the description (Rawls' childhood home is not marked on any registry). Winding down the dirt road, we saw patches of berries and thistles surrounding an old barn set at the base of a hillside. Across was a field leading to the riverbank with stands of sycamore. I got out, and me and River hiked up the hillside and found the remnants of an old house foundation, now overgrown. Since Scraper is but a pinpoint on a map, there are not many other options for roads leading to old homesteads. It is entirely possible that River and I were standing atop the hill looking down over the homestead where as a child Wilson Rawls had buried his hounds, as he later describes in his book.

We waded into the river just outside Scraper, exactly where Rawls had grown up swimming and fishing (and hunting), and precisely where the story takes place.

In the book, there is the tale of how young Billy catches his first raccoon. He drills a hole into a log and places shiny tin into the hole, then creates a funnel of horseshoe nails hammered at angles inward. The raccoon, too curious for its own good, reaches in to seize the tin and his balled fist becomes too large to draw out. If the raccoon were to simply drop the tin, he could withdraw his paw and leave freely. But the coon refuses to do this, so addicted is he to the shiny tin, and he will remain interred there forever.

We were contemplating all of these events from the story as we pulled into a tiny pizza dive at the end of the lake. River and Cedar were playing and gathering dropped coins from behind video games machines and unswept corners, and the pool table captured their attention. Cedar learned to appreciate that dropping the cue into any hole resulted in it rolling through the shafts and emerging below the table again. River, who is a raccoon in human form, began to suspect that greater treasures lay concealed deep within the underbelly of the pool table, beyond view within the tunnels. River decided to explore this possibility by reaching his arm deep into the pool table tunnels, just as Cedar deposited the cue into the corner pocket. Serendipity ensued: the ball lodged itself between River's coon-like curious fingers and the side of the tunnel. Sitting on the bare concrete floor of the restaurant, River realized that he was now trapped: his grasp for treasures unseen had met with the bulk of the cue ball at his fingers, creating a bundle too solid to budge. His hand would not emerge.

"Help me! I'm stuck!" he bawled. We looked and saw River's head held snug against the pool table base, with his arm buried to the shoulder like some proctology nightmare run amok up the depository chute of the pool table. He truly was stuck, and could not withdraw his paw.

With fat tears running down his face, we had to press a poll cue up into the tunnel along his arm to dislodge the cue ball and free his hand. And then we all burst out laughing.