This voice—my dad’s voice—woke me up. I sat straight up in my sleeping bag. My dad was sitting up, too.
Mom snuggled her bag up under her chin. “Let me sleep, please,” she said. “We’ll be up all night tomorrow.”
Dad looked at me through the darkness. “Did you hear them?” he whispered.
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Probably a couple of drunks who couldn’t find their own tent,” he said.
9
I woke up thinking about what my dad had said, “A couple of drunks who couldn’t find their own tent.” Maybe I did hear voices. Real voices. That morning I was hearing real voices. My mom’s, my dad’s and another voice that sounded familiar. I crawled out of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. Our tent was on a slight slope that dropped off toward Open Pond. Down close to the water’s edge was a picnic table, and the morning sun was reflecting off of the water so that all I could see were the silhouettes of three people sitting at the table. I could tell from the voices and the shapes that one of them was my mother, one my dad, and the other was . . . Deputy Shirley Pickens. That shape, that voice. Yep, it was the deputy.
I slipped back into the tent and decked myself out for a day in the forest: heavy nylon olive green pants with zip-off legs, a sandy-colored nylon shirt, synthetic wool hiking socks and waterproof leather boots. Then I joined the group at the table. They were all drinking coffee. They didn’t offer me any.
“I guess you’re right, Professor,” Deputy Shirley Pickens was saying to my dad, “probably some drunks who couldn’t find their way back to their own tent.”
“So, we did hear voices last night?” I said.
“Your mother didn’t, but I did,” said Dad. “Sounded like the Three Stooges coming through the campgrounds. I thought they were about to get into the tent with us.”
I looked around the campgrounds. I counted twenty-five motor homes. I counted one tent.
“Do you notice anything?” I asked.
And then I answered my own question, “There is one tent out here, and it’s ours.”
Mom, Dad and Deputy Pickens looked around to confirm my claim.
“Lot of tents on the other side of the lake,” said the deputy. “The unimproved tent sites are on the other side of the lake.”
“We had to set up our base camp here at the RV sites,” said my mom. “Had to have electricity for my PowerBook.”
“You think those Three Stooges were on the wrong side of the lake?” Dad asked the deputy.
“Yeah,” he answered, “if you ain’t used to the longleaf you can get out there in the forest and it all looks the same, ’specially at night. Come in at night and you wouldn’t know which side of this lake you on.”
Deputy Pickens stood up, finished off his coffee and set the cup on the table. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said to my parents.
He turned to me. “Young man,” he said, “I told your folks that so far I ain’t turned up nothin’, but I’m still lookin’.”
I nodded. “Thanks for letting us know,” I said.
“You think of anything else, you let me know,” he said. “See you folks later.”
Deputy Pickens tipped his hat and walked away. His patrol car was parked on the road up the slope and past our tent. I watched as he paused just above our tent and seemed to study the sandy ground. He squatted down for a closer look. When he stood back up, he took a glimpse back toward me. I don’t know if he could see my face with the sun behind me like it was. I waved. He made a slight wave back and then took his foot and shuffled up the ground where he had been looking.
“Orange juice?” said my dad.
He startled me. I spun around to see him rummaging through the cooler.
I glanced back over my shoulder to catch another peek of 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