A Walk in the Woods

Today I took a walk in the woods.

It was a splendid tonic.

I drove sixty miles to my boyhood home in East Texas, parked the car near a clump of tickle-tongue trees, and moseyed down the long country lane from where our barn used to be to our patch of woods. Those woods are situated in the northwest corner of the property my parents bought for $100 per acre about 80 years ago. That price included the two-story, four bedroom house where I was born, a big barn, an ample shed for a car, a wagon, tools and farm implements, a henhouse, a smokehouse, a cistern, a well, and several remarkably fine neighbors.

But woods themselves on this pleasant early spring day, were the locus of my ecstasy. There were black jack oaks, post oaks, pin oaks, elms, persimmons, cedars, hickories, ash, and a big thicket of huckleberries. The land itself was partly sandy knolls and partly flat little glades given to retaining rainfall and domiciling crawfish.

The best thing about this walk in the woods was not the walk, of course, but rather:

• sitting a spell on a fallen log encrusted with old shelf lichen, inhabited desultorily by some unaggressive, big wood ants, mutilated by woodpeckers in search of luscious grubs, and still partially clad by decaying slabs of bark ready, in the fullness of time, to fall to the ground at the slightest provocation of a scampering squirrel or a raucous bluejay;

• kneeling on a bed of dry leaves to brush away the winter’s accumulated detritus to find nestled under the protecting cover a marvelous little sprig of fern sending out tentative but hopeful little fronds in search of sunlight to activate its astoundingly complex and, to me, miraculous chlorophyll;

• stopping dead-still to marvel at the cottontail rabbit brought to a timorous freeze by my long, low whistle, an un-rabbitlike sound that required it to be still and take inventory of this unexpected presence with this unnatural sound;

• looking up to see a lone buzzard leisurely riding the thermals that neither he nor I could see but that we both could accept with such wonder and gratitude as either of us could muster;

• walking up on some scattered bones, bleached white as cotton by winter wind and summer sun, the final resting place of some cow who had bellied down in the grass never again to summon the strength to get up, on her hind legs first and then on her front legs, for a continuation of her lifelong quest for more grass to put away in one of her many-chambered stomachs before regurgitating it as a cud on which she might placidly chew, as such ruminants are wont to do; or it could have been a small horse unable for that last time to get up, first on its front legs and then on its hind legs, as such creatures do who neither part the hoof nor chew the cud-there was no skull to enable me to make a positive identification of this corpus delicti; but pondered long there in sober reflection on the fleeting nature of life for all creatures great and small which, as James says, is “a vapor that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away” (James 4:14);

• spying a not unfriendly brown thrush which, although it is rather secretive by nature, in this instance hopped around in a bush apparently oblivious to my intrusion about which it, at the moment, seemed to be perfectly unconcerned;

• marveling at a squirrel’s nest situated precariously on a smallish limb far up in a great old post oak tree which, in the south side of the main trunk, boasted a smoothly worn hole about as big as a hen egg, a hole which no doubt had been stocked by the resident fox squirrel with a goodly supply of acorns;

• a mysterious small patch of recently excavated holes whose builders and makers I could not identify but who, I mused, might be foxes, armadillos, civet cats, or some critter totally unknown to me when I first started walking those woods 75 years ago;

• a patch of second-growth timber, several acres in all, which brought vivid recollections of the winter when my father decided to clear that land with a sharp double-bit axe, which clearing he did single-handedly, and which virgin land he then broke with two mules and turning plow before planting a crop of corn and then in due time gathering in the new produce, but this new-ground has now, after sixty-five or seventy years, reverted to its original status without so much as a remaining furrow to mark my father’s prodigious labors-which must be something of a parable of all human endeavors from the hanging gardens of Semiramis to the Colossus of Rhodes; and

• coming up on an old snake skin shed when some fearsome, though non-poisonous, black racer had come to its seasonal change of clothing, a mute reminder that the cycles of nature, ordained by the Creator, are moving right along, thank you, no matter who is in the State House, the White House, or the Glass House on the East River and totally oblivious to genomes, space stations, spy planes, or Wall Street gyrations. Hm-m-m-m.

In due time I ambled back to my car by the tickle-tongue trees and relished a peaceful drive back home, braking the journey only briefly for a Dairy Queen Blizzard dutifully held upside down by the pleasant young woman who had created this luscious concoction before she passed it to me for appropriate disposition, a fitting finale for a wonderful walk in the woods