Deputy Pickens. He had reached his car and paused to stare out into the longleaf pine forest. As he was turning to look back toward me again, I twisted around to my dad.
“Orange juice would be good,” I said.
10
Covington County Deputy Shirley Pickens was correct: if you’re not used to the longleaf, you can get out in the forest and it all looks the same. That’s another way of saying it’s easy to get lost in a longleaf pine forest. I know it for a fact. After the deputy left that morning, I went right out and got myself lost among the pines. Here’s how it happened.
I sipped my orange juice and listened until I heard the deputy drive away. Even then I waited five minutes or so before I got up and walked over to where I had seen him examining the ground. What had he been looking for? It was kind of hard to tell in the soft sandy soil. Every few feet or so I could see what looked like a footprint. I guessed the deputy had seen the footprints of those guys my dad called the Three Stooges. The deputy had stirred up the ground with his foot and had erased some of the obvious footprints nearest to our tent. I guessed he just didn’t want us to know how close the Three Stooges had come. A few feet up the slope from the tent I was able to pick up a trail of prints that carried up to and across the road and into the forest. The trail of footprints ended where it entered the forest.
Pine needles don’t capture footprints the way sand does. In fact, pine needles don’t seem to capture footprints at all. I thought maybe I could find some evidence of the Three Stooges by looking for pinecones or ferns that had been crushed under the weight of someone’s foot. I stepped from the road and across the threshold of the longleaf forest. I guess I had my head down following what I thought were clues: a broken fern limb here, a flattened pinecone there. Once I spotted a fire ant bed that looked like it had been stepped in. Watching the ground is not the best way to keep oriented to where you are. After a while—it could’ve been ten minutes, could’ve been twenty minutes, could’ve been thirty minutes, I don’t know—I just know that after a while I looked up and everything looked the same. I had been following what I thought were clues, and now I had no clue where I was.
In every direction the tall longleaf pines reached up toward the sky. I had seen this forest from an airplane as we approached Pensacola. I had seen this forest from a car as we drove to Andalusia. Now, here I was right in the middle of it. And in every direction I looked I saw tall, longleaf pines, and that’s it. I didn’t see oaks. I didn’t see beech. I didn’t see poplars or sycamore or hickory or even other species of pine trees. Longleaf pines. That’s all. Each tree seemed to be about twenty feet from the trees around it. This distance between the trees allowed for a line of sight through the forest for about fifty yards or so. It was like looking through a tunnel, well, not so much a tunnel as a corridor—a corridor with straight, tall walls. At the end of the corridor, the tall pines came together, and from where I stood it looked like the end of the line. I took a few steps forward, and the whole corridor moved with me. A step to my right and, yep, the corridor turned with me. In every direction the forest opened up in front of me then closed about fifty yards away . . . at the end of the line.
11
In our tent down at the Open Pond Recreation Area there was a nice Kelty daypack loaded with everything a guy would need for a hike through the longleaf pines of the Conecuh National Forest. A great bag full of great stuff—my stuff—and it wasn’t doing me a bit of good. In that pack was clean water, granola bars, a watch, a signaling mirror, waterproof matches, a space blanket, a first aid kit, a whistle you could blow in case you got lost, and a compass you could use to make sure you didn’t get lost. There are three hundred sixty degrees on that compass; that’s three hundred sixty different directions. One of those directions would take me back to camp, and maybe forty of them would get me close enough that I could find the camp. That still left three hundred twenty wrong directions I could take. No sense taking a step in any direction when for every one right step there could be eight wrong steps. I checked the ground for ants, sat down in the pine straw and leaned my back against a tree.
Maybe if I stay quiet and listen I can hear those motor home air conditioners, I thought. Nope, all I heard were the motors of the forest. That’s what it sounded like. Motors. I’ve read books and stories where they describe the sounds of a forest in musical terms: the song of the whippoorwill, a symphony of crickets, the ballad of bees, things like that. In the longleaf forest at mid-morning, the birds and the bugs didn’t seem to be making music; they were all business. Millions of organic motors were revving up and drowning out any hope I might have of hearing the electric motors back at the campgrounds. I heard one of those living engines fly in over my head while making a rapid-fire chirping sound.
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