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.
I’m not saying that I reached a state of true panic, but I was relieved when, just around the next bend, my wife stopped dead in her tracks and pointed down the trail.
“Of course. The deer knew the way,” she said, as if that explained everything.
When you walk the Thicket, you should put up for the night there. It’s another excuse to get lost. The drive to the nearby resort, the Chain-O-Lakes, is less than as the crow flies—understandable, given that the directions we had were: “It’s just off Farm Road 787, down a piece from Romayor, take a left where there is a left …” Crows know better.
With perseverance, though, we finally found the place. Now, a travel snob might be inclined to call this collection of rustic cabins a bit corny. (They are indeed strung along a chain o’ 15 lakes.) But it’s as beautiful, peaceful, and safe an eco-resort as I’ve ever seen. Each cabin has a balcony that hangs out over what seems to be your own private bayou, where, by the way, you can canoe, swim, or, as I did, dawdle away the afternoon looking for a gator to harass, like that loudmouth Aussie does to crocodiles on Animal Planet. Alas, all I spotted was a family of turtles begging for a portion of the bag of Cheetos that I was, for some reason, devouring as if it were my last meal, and a squirrel who sauntered in as if he owned the place and jumped on the bed like a house cat—neither of which responded to loudmouthed harassment. But I still considered it time well spent. That’s the true measure of a “resort,” after all—someplace where idling is magically transformed into something worthwhile.
The resort’s Hilltop Herb Farm Restaurant wasn’t built with high style in mind, either. Its sturdy blond country furniture and equally sturdy blonde country waitresses, its buffet of gleaming silver service that reminded me of something I saw once at a low-budget wedding reception (was it mine?), gave us pause. But we knew better. The Hilltop, in fact, had a longstanding, albeit underground, reputation in Texas for honest, humble nouvelle food well before a lot of citified places decided that nouvelle was a marketing model.
The gumbo we had one night was spicy and so thick with roux that you could almost chew it; a salad of fresh greens topped with a rich basil buttermilk dressing was a meal in itself. Whipped potatoes with scallions, sour cream, and garlic seemed plush, and complemented a rare roast sirloin that had been rubbed in thyme and oregano straight from the garden out back. Cutting-edge food? Not on your life. But it was fresh and somehow muscular, and that it was served in the middle of nowhere made it even better.
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.
“It’s getting better,” a ranger told me one afternoon. “But you know Texans and their land. If the government owns it, they don’t like it.”
We returned to Chain-O-Lakes weary yet somehow still craving another hit of the swamp. So we took a canoe out into the resort’s necklace of bayous and cruised about as the setting sun spilled over the horizon like a cracked egg. The waters were calm and pea-soup green, and until the late afternoon shadows began to thicken, you could see egrets preening and stretching on the shore, a hawk or two swooping to snatch a fish. And yes, over on the shore of another lake, I did finally spot an alligator. Funny, he didn’t look nearly as menacing as the crocs on Animal Planet. He just looked bored and, like everything else in the Big Thicket, a little lonely.
We decided to head back to the launching point, but suddenly the terrain didn’t look the same. We turned the canoe about—momentarily lost. But for some reason, I didn’t care a bit.
The Details
Staying and Eating There
Chain-O-Lakes Resort. It’s the only game in several towns, but fortunately it doesn’t take advantage of that fact. Thirty-two cabins with full kitchens and porches overlook the bayous and the campgrounds placed strategically along more than a dozen lakes in the middle of a lovely, very quiet swamp. Canoe, kayak, or take to the nature trails on horseback (235 Chain-O-Lakes Resort, Cleveland, Texas; 832-397-4000; from $150). At the resort’s Hilltop Herb Farm Restaurant (832-397-4020), don’t be put off by the too-quaint country décor or the fact that the food is served buffet-style. The view of an apple-green bayou out the huge picture window is all you need to look at, and somehow the chef here has figured out how to keep food like rare sirloin of beef and spicy gumbo hot and fresh. The $16.95 fixed price makes it go down all the easier. The morning breakfast buffet features fluffy scrambled eggs laced with Cheddar cheese, spicy sausages, and blueberry pancakes with just the right tartness.