My wife, who is a good deal less anxiety prone than I about such things, shot me a tired glance and consulted her map. “Well,” she said, “temporarily. We’re in the Big Thicket, remember?”
She had a point. As you might guess from its name, Texas’s Big Thicket National Preserve is a place where it’s easy for your sense of direction to vanish—97,168 acres of hardwood forest, misty swamp, and undergrowth so thick, legend has it, that even the snakes can’t get through it. More experienced ecotourists than we had lost their way in this vast swamp, and some, further legend has it, had never returned.
“You know they have gators here,” I said as we took a different turn and promptly got more confused.
“Hmm,” my wife replied.
“And it’s one of the few places in the nation that has all five varieties of poisonous snakes.”
“Yeah.”
“And four types of carnivorous plants.”
“Huh.”
“I read where there have been bears spotted here, jaguars, panthers …”
“How about Bigfoot?” she interrupted with a sarcastic smile. “I think I read he’s been here, too.”
Well, true—there has always been more rumor and outright fabrication about Big Thicket than firsthand knowledge. Though it is considered Texas’s—perhaps the nation’s—rarest ecological gem, the biological crossroads of the continent where the great eastern forests collide with the southern swamps and the western prairie and desert in a spectacular big bang of flora and fauna, only about 100,000 visitors a year venture into this pristine wilderness 50 miles north of Houston. Even most of our fellow Texans haven’t been to the Thicket, which is precisely why we decided to visit. For some strange reason, after years of fearing snakes and loathing humidity I have grown fond of rain forests and jungles and swamps. To be sure, some of this has to do with the severe drought that’s afflicted most of Texas for much of the past decade. But there is also something in their reckless aliveness, the musky smell of all that raw biology, the almost cartoonish vividness and size of their inhabitants, that I find energizing and even therapeutic. And in this case, we figured we needed to see this most especial swamp sooner rather than later, lest it become, say, targeted for oil exploration.
As we rounded a hairpin curve in the trail, two deer whooshed in front of us in that particularly dainty way of theirs, and we watched them until they disappeared into the brush. But just as quickly as the deer leaped out of view, my heart began to beat fast and hard as the prospect of being lost out here sank in. Swamps are therapeutic until you can’t find your way back. I was thinking The Blair Witch Project—where getting lost starts benignly, even laughably; then it becomes irritating; and finally, when you realize that you’ve somehow circled back to the same tree you passed an hour ago, low-grade paranoia sets in.
Pinterest
