And there is also the beauty of the old timer’s familiarity with it, knowing the secret places, the clearings, and the swamps, the paths through the woods. There is a rich beauty in the sheer lushness of it, ferns poking from thatches of pine needles covering the red dirt floor of the forest, an infinity of trees marching like ghosts up and down the rolling hills. When I looked up, I could see the same amount of sky as a New Yorker standing in midtown Manhattan.įor anyone not born in the forest, a love for deep East Texas is, like the craving for cane syrup, an acquired taste.
Fluffy cumulus clouds slowly drifting north from the Gulf were suspended behind tall pines like puffs of smoke from chimneys. I drove past sleeping swamps covered with a baroque intertwining of roots, branches, and vines, past an occasional mobile home (the new log cabin) looking shrunken and frail against the surrounding forest. Long bright shafts of light sifted through the dark trees like a chiaroscuro sketch. Green-and-brown vertical walls stretched along each side of Highway 7, the two-lane road that cuts through the Davy Crockett National Forest. Gone was the big Texas sky, the familiar flat, horizontal junction of earth and cloud, the sense of space that shaped the expansive character of the West. Some of the language in this archival story regarding matters such as race and gender may not meet contemporary standards.ĭriving east to San Augustine, against the grain of the pioneers, I first met the Piney Woods of East Texas at Crockett. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. This story is from Texas Monthly ’s archives.
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