We decided to follow dinner with an exploration of the Ghost Road, a mile or so stretch of Farm Road 787 that follows an old rail line where, legend has it, you can see, in the form of flickering lights, the spirits of the various outlaws, Civil War deserters, and others who frequently chose the Thicket to disappear into.
On spotting a few wisps of blue and white light behind the wall of pines, I concluded that they were probably the reflections of headlights.
“That would be a pretty good theory, except we’re the only car on the road,” my wife observed.
“Well, then, it’s probably swamp gas.”
“Right. Swamp gas. You know the way back?”
We were getting used to the lost-and-found cycle of things in the Thicket. The next day we decided to hike as much as we could of the 17.5-mile Turkey Creek Trail—the Thicket’s longest and most ecologically diverse. We started in a canopied rain forest that made us think of Costa Rica, then wandered into some savannah of huge, sprawling loblolly and longleaf pines that suggested North Carolina, then on into something that seemed like prairie, then just as quickly into a swamp dotted with foggy, brackish, cypress-studded ponds reminiscent of Louisiana—or The Lord of the Rings.
Along the way, we sighted a bullfrog the size of a dinner plate, orchids interspersed with evergreens, a tarantula the size of a salad plate, and what appeared to be a parrot sharing a tree with a mockingbird. I grew to understand what a veteran Thicket ranger meant when he told me that this wilderness was “eloquent.” It’s not so much the sheer drama of it; it’s the serendipity, the way yucca cactus hover beneath the pines, roadrunners share the sky with eagles.
The one species you’re not going to find much of here is Homo sapiens. This is mostly a good thing, as part of the reason this park remains such a valuable museum of nature is that it hasn’t been “Yellowstoned.” It also makes an adventure of a simple picnic, like the one we had at the nearby Martin Dies Jr. State Park, on a tiny peninsula that sits on the shores of the B. A. Steinhagen Reservoir—just us and the hawks and cardinals and the occasional leaping bass. But the manifest loneliness of this place is also a reminder of just how arduous a time the wildlife preservation movement has had—and continues to have. The Big Thicket was the nation’s first such preserve (founded 1974), and few parks have had to fight harder to remain vital and uncorrupted than this big swamp that sits smack in the middle of Texas’s oil and timber countries. Those interests are the reason that the “officially preserved” Thicket is a relatively modest 97,168 acres, even though the true size of this unique ecosystem is probably more like 3 million. And they are probably the reason why even today the locals view Big Thicket with a certain suspicion.
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