Sure, but odds are he lived in some outer suburb that is no longer the outer suburb. That woods might have hung on for a while, but it was always doomed just be the fact that it was near a large growing city where most people live and thus remember. Get out a little farther from the city and the wilderness is going to do just fine, but that isn't what people will remember as a kid just by virtual that they never lived near it.
I don't doubt it's true for him. I'm expressing a doubt that it's indicative of the American landscape broadly, a claim which seems to be implied by his opening "had.".
