Chapter 4

Aside from the road the next thing I noticed reinforced my earlier impressions of animal behavior. There were too many animals just fucking around outside. They weren't getting in my way or anything such thing, but I kept seeing flashes of movement you just don't see in a nature preserve where people are wandering around all the time.

Also, since now I'd been paying more attention to such, I'd noticed the occasional big oak or hickory and actually several other type trees scattered around here and there. I'd seen quite a few squirrels prowling around for acorns or nuts and that just isn't normal nowadays.

Things got curiouser and curiouser when I finished walking to the end of my road because it wasn't really an end. It seemed like my road T'ed into another one. I know it was completely odd, for one non-road to T into another non-road out in a seemingly untouched forest, but it was what it was. My original not really a road road ended in another not really road going nominally north to south from where mine entered, and yet they couldn't possibly be roads because no one had traveled them.

I could see probably two or more miles toward the south and the path was straight, much more so than it could have been in nature. To the north it was same song, northern verse. Since the northern verse was being sung gently up hill I could only see about a mile. Straight ahead was nothing but forest and I could tell the brush and undergrowth thickened considerably, about where I thought the Neches was.

Two roads diverged in a green wood, in this case anyway, and being a lost redneck I took neither. I should probably spend a moment offering my apologies to Robert Frost, but I don't have time.

Still thinking I'd been heading east, I walked north east into the forest across from me, hoping I could find some sanity at the dam. It couldn't be more than a mile or so.

Thirty minutes later I found it could indeed be more than a mile away. In fact it wasn't here at all. The Neches River was still in place but there was no Twin Bluffs Lake to be seen anywhere. The river was pretty wide for a while but a lake and dam were no longer on its agenda. Now I was impressed.

It's one thing to make a café and gas station disappear, but getting rid of a dam and lake is in another league entirely. Something was dreadfully wrong and I didn't even feel a deep burning pain in my side. No doubt I was in even more trouble than Marty Robbins had been in out behind Rosa's Cantina in El Paso. I was fucked, and neither Felina nor anyone else had even kissed me first.

Completely at a loss for what to do, again, I wandered off toward the northwest and maybe a half hour later ran across the road heading north. It was still a road that wasn't really a road, but I worked my way uphill along the edge of the trees, heading for the top of a rise.

At the top it was more of the same. I could see the road trend down into a little swale and then back up another rise. It was probably two miles to the next top point. It hit me then I'd been an idiot striking out on foot. I'd been in my truck and hadn't even turned on the radio. I never listened to it much anyway and that's probably why I didn't think about turning it on.

Now, since I'd finally tumbled to a plan, I walked more purposefully back to my pickup.

I needn't have bothered. The radio came on just like it was supposed to and there was nothing but static. AM or FM was all the same - dead air. I could have turned that tuning knob for days and not found a station, there weren't any. I turned it off and got out.

I wasn't going to find any answers here and that was that. My next trick had to be trying to drive somewhere.

First things first though, I had to get the Zodiac deflated and packed up.

They never bother to mention those things are not as easy to deflate and fold up as they are to inflate to go boating in the first place. It took me two hours to get it back in my camper shell.

The next item on my agenda was changing tires. The ones I had on the truck were of the ground grip persuasion, but they were never meant to do service on roads that were not roads. When I'd first bought this truck, in 1976, it was meant to be nothing but an off road vehicle.

It didn't have five hundred miles on it before I'd had the wheel wells enlarged to accommodate a set of huge Monster Mudders - tires with a thirty-six inch diameter and a twelve-inch tread. I'd also been forced, though it didn't take much forcing, to install air shocks on the back and the front axles so I could raise the body to clear the new rubber.

My enthusiasm for off roading, wet country style, came to an end after I learned every trip down a seriously muddy road required about twelve hours of maintenance to remove the mud, change the oil, transmission grease, differential lube, and repack the front wheel bearings. And particular attention had to be paid to washing out the front disc brakes and the rear drum brakes to make sure no mud remained.

I learned this when I had to replace all the above. I also learned Monster Mudders were for use in mud, or at least on dirt roads. Twelve thousand miles was all they lasted when used everyday, on pavement.

Shortly thereafter I gave up off-roading and resigned my tentative membership in the Queen City Jeep Club, but since then I'd always kept a set of Monster Mudders with me, even though they are a huge pain in the ass to carry around. At the moment they were in their custom built rack on the back of my trailer.

I'm sure you've seen Monster Mudders before, even if you didn't realize what you were seeing at the time. At least you have if you've ever traveled in real redneck country. Monster Mudders are the giant tires you see on pickups which are jacked up so high the redneck needs a ladder to get in. In my particular application, I had a removable step I could hang off the bottom of the cab when I put the big tires on.

An hour later, after changing tires, hooking my trailer, and making sure I had everything packed up - I pulled out of my former parking spot and headed for the T ahead. I stopped after only a few yards and put the transmission into low range. Even though my road was smoother than a path through a forest had any right to be, fourteen miles per hour was not on the program, and that's as slowly as my truck would move idling in low gear while in high range.

I took off again and did well at roughly nine miles per hour, idling in third gear in low range. When I came to the T there was no trouble making the turn north and it looked like I would have been able to turn south almost as easily.

At this low speed I had no trouble just idling along, but I didn't really see anything but forest. Of course this was the Big Thicket, but there was nothing, except trees. I did see a few more different types, but I didn't know what to call most of them. To me trees were pine, oak, hickory, and other.

Twenty-seven minutes later - five point seven miles by my odometer - my road turned left, heading west, or maybe a little south of west. I guess I should have opened the camper shell and looked for my boy scout compass, but I didn't.

I followed the road for twelve point six more miles and then it turned left again, heading due south, as best I could tell. Things got slightly more interesting for a few minutes, as the road made a sweeping curve to the right and swept back left and then made other rambling curves I lost track of. But twenty-eight miles from the turn south, it turned back east again.

Suddenly it dawned on me I'd better try keeping track of all this exploratory information, so I fished around behind the seat for my clipboard which always had a spiral notebook in it. Flipping over a few pages to the first blank one, I tried to sketch out my route so far. It was probably from the close scrutiny I'd given my map lately, deciding which part of the thicket to visit and the best way to get there, but my sketch began to look familiar.