The woods of my childhood: a rambling memory (or, why I love winter)

This memory of childhood answers the question that many have for me, “Why do you like winter?” It’s true, I do love winter, and look forward to getting more snow this afternoon. That said, should I admit that I’ll be heading to Central America in two weeks?
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I was blessed to be raised where there was plenty of elbow room. When I was nine, we moved back to North Carolina, outside of Wilmington. It was 1966 and the urban sprawl that has ruined the South and much of the rest of the country hadn’t yet reared its ugly head. I suppose we were the first wave of that sprawl. We were in a new subdivision, but the development hadn’t really taken off. In all, there might have been 15 houses in the whole area. The downside was that there were no friends that lived close-by. But that was counter-acted by the vast woods that stood behind our home. It was years after I’d left home before roads dissected those woods and houses replaced the forts and hideouts my brother and I built.

The woods were divided into two types of habitat. The high ground was sandy soil and quite open, with longleaf pines and wiregrass and an occasional scrub oak. Traveling through this area was rather easy as there was not much undergrowth and there were old two-track trails running through the woods we could follow when we wanted to make good time. Separating the woods were the low, swampy areas. Elevation was rather relative and one wouldn’t need the full length of a yardstick to measure the difference between the high and low ground. A large swamp separated, maybe a hundred yards behind our house, separated the woods and to get further back into them, one had to walk around it. Later, my brother and I, along with friends, would cut a path through the swamps that we could use during dry spells, but that would be a few years off.

My first memory of exploring the great woods was in the first fall we lived there. I expect it was December, just after my baby brother was born, and I was out in the woods with my dad and my mother’s father. My grandfather only got to visit us once after we got to Wilmington. He was impressed with our house, telling us the second bathroom was for a maid. Although our house was nothing grand, it must have seemed that way to him. I later learned that he didn’t have indoor plumbing until my mother was in high school and dating my father. My father, who worked after school with his dad in the plumbing and heating business, installed the bathroom in my mother’s home. That afternoon, our house got stuffy with everyone gathering around the newborn and we menfolk took a walk in the great woods. Out there, along a two track road that ran behind the great swamp, while smoking a Camel, Granddaddy told us about deer hunting in this area during the war. There were no longer deer in this part of the county, but it was nice to know that the woods in which I explored had also been explored by my granddad, twenty-some years earlier when he’d left the farm and moved his family to Wilmington to work in the shipyards. It was early that first January we were in Wilmington, just a month after the birth of my baby brother and a week before my tenth birthday, my granddaddy died.

At first, we were not allowed to go back behind the great swamp without by ourselves, but this gave us plenty of area to roam. But we could only roam in the woods when the temperature was below 60 degrees. Our mamma lived in fear of snakes. She hated the slithery reptiles. Mom wasn’t the type of woman to hate and was quick to get on us if we spoke about hating anything, especially someone else. The exception to this rule was snakes and she would have loved for us to have shared her hate for the slithery creatures, but that wasn’t in the cards. Mamma’s fear of snakes caused her to set the 60 degree threshold, a temperature when snakes, which are cold-blooded and have no means of keeping their body core warm, hibernate. Those slithery beasts drew out a primordial fear out of my mom. It was as if she took the Biblical curse personally. She insisted the men in her life, her husband and later her sons, stomp on the heads of serpents before they had a chance to strike at her heel. As far as I know, she never personally harmed a snake, except for one, but that’s another story. It wasn’t the woman’s job to do in snakes, that’s what men and garden hoes were for. It says so in the Good Book: the woman’s male offspring will strike the head of the serpent. (Genesis 3:14-15). Somewhere along the way, as scribes wrote and rewrote scripture, one of them left out the part about the hoe, the preferred implement for striking a snake’s head.

The woods were prime habitat for snakes. The sandy high ground, under the longleaf pines and wire grass, were ideal for the Eastern Diamondbacks and Pigmy Rattlers along with Copperheads. In the years I lived there, I never saw a diamondback, but pigmy rattlers and copperheads were frequently seen in our yard. Once, when using clippers along the edge of the house (this was before weedwackers were ubiquitous), I clipped into a 10 inch pigmy rattler. The snake was caught in the jaws of the clippers and I held it up in fascination as it withered around, its fangs exposed and striking at the metal clippers. Luckily, my hands were out of the reach of the pissed-off serpent. The watery bays of the woods were the perfect habitat for the dread Cottonmouth or water moccasins, an ugly and mean snake that stinks (they actually do give off a foul scent when threatened). These snakes were frequently seen in the drainage ditch at the back of my parent’s property, their location often pointed out to us with Sheba, an English setter that my dad had gotten as a bird dog.

Sheba was gun-shy and never flushed out a covey of quail, but she could distinguish between a poisonous and non-poisonous snake. For some reason, she only bothered the Cottonmouths, cornering the snake and keeping it a bay while dancing around it and barking until my dad came out and took care of it. Once, a snake bit Sheba in the nose and her snout swelled up at least twice his normal size. The vet drained the snout and gave her an antivenin and, in a few days, the dog was back flushing out snakes.

With so many slithery reptiles living behind our house, and my mom’s rule about temperature, my brother and I lived for winter, when we could explore the great woods. Wearing rubber boots, we’d walk around the shallow oval lake, dotted with Spanish moss draped cypress, which stood to one end of the great swamp. Later, I’d learn these were geologically known as a Carolina Bay, but as a boy it was just a swamp. When it dried up, you could walk out on the spongy peat moss. Even when the bay was filled will water, there was no place deeper than a foot or so, which meant Mom didn’t have to worry too much about us drowning. Occasionally, when the temperature dropped below freezing at night and you were out in the early morning, a thin sheet of ice would surround the edge. Wearing our rubber boots, we’d step on the ice and watch and listen as it cracked and splintered under our weight.

One winter, we saw in Boy’s Life an article on making an ice rescue tool, a pick of sorts that you have on you in case you broke through and fell into the water and needed a way to get out. The pick was made of a large nail secured in a piece of wood, with another piece of wood serving as a sheaf. The idea was that if you fell through the ice, you could pull out the pick and drive it in the ice and pull yourself to safety. Of course, we never had ice that thick nor did we have water so deep that we couldn’t walk out of (and it never got cold enough for the salt water in the Sound to freeze), but we made them anyway, just in case another ice age descended. Besides, they were easy to make and we could use them to fight off snakes and wild animals and, more likely, older boys. I don’t know what happened to our ice rescue picks, but having lived for years in country where it’s feasible that one might actually employ such a tool, I’ve yet to feel the need to make another.

As we got older, the Bays had less and less water in them as a series of drainage ditches had slowly been lowering the water table. I was in college before the first road was build through the great woods and it was after I’d left North Carolina that the woods behind my parents house had complete succumbed to development. I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I was home visiting and look out into the backyard and noticed that the woods were gone and another row of houses stood behind my parents. The giant woods had been consumed by the great the Southeastern Sprawl.