One of the things you get used to living in the deep South is kudzu. The stuff’s everywhere; it’s probably the hardiest plant in existence, surviving periods of intense heat and cold, all manner of chewing bug and animal, and it creeps up to three feet a day. I imagine if there were a camera in space over a long enough period of time, you could string together a time-lapse video of the stuff actually expanding outward.
Not that the South doesn’t deserve it; there are some people there I’d genuinely love to see strangled and then devoured by creeping vines, Evil Dead style. Well, maybe not so much on the molesting end, but you know what I mean. Then again, maybe some of them.
Anyway, the kudzu rewrites the maps every spring when it comes back to life; the never ending woods out there are covered completely over again with the stuff within a matter of weeks and it looks like a rolling sea of vegetation.
My step dad was a hunter, regularly making excursions into the deep woods after deer and turkey. Even though we had only lived in the house for about a year, he knew each and every inch of the woods and never got lost. He was a contractor and a realtor, setting his own hours, so he had time to go hunt whenever he wanted. The back wood porch would often smell like urine, as he would soak his camouflage clothes in doe piss for the night before going out.
Even though he was a step dad, and not a very good one, I still wanted to be something like him; I would also go into the deep woods behind our house, spending hours playing with my knock-off GI Joes or just exploring. The house sat on a ten acre plot of land, with a large field immediately behind it, leading down to two old and rusted school buses at the edge of the woods, and then sharply downhill into the trees. Beyond that was just mile after mile of forest, covered in deep patches of kudzu and here and there broken by the line of someone’s home-carved ATV track, leading all the way to the distant Blue Ridge mountains.
The buses became a sort of home away from home for me; when things got to be too much at home, I’d walk down to the buses with a book or some GI Joes or just by myself. I would spend hours in those rusted-out hulks, just reading or thinking. Often I would go walking in the woods behind them, following the creek down to a small cliff with an overhanging tree that made a natural waterfall.
I would line up my GI Joes, the good guys on one side of the creek, led by the fearless (and legless) Outback Bob, an Aussie-flavored piece of plastic that could fly and also had laser eyes. I didn’t subscribe to the description of the characters on the boxes, preferring instead to make up my own elaborate back stories for them.
I’d line up the bad guys on the other side of the creek, led by the foul Thugee cult leader, Rhazim, who could also fly and who had super strength. Each figure had its counterpart, good for evil, and at $3 a pop in the knock-off bin at the local Wal-Mart, I had built up quite an army of them.
One day Outback Bob, my most prized figure, went missing. I looked everywhere for him, but eventually came to the conclusion that I must have left him somewhere in the woods. I was inconsolable. It was the middle of summer, so I despaired ever finding him again, as it rained almost every afternoon and he’d be long washed away by now. After a while, I moved on and wrote Bob off as missing in action, and his second in command, Sergeant Jakes, took over.
Time rolled on.
I met my best friend, Leroy, and we started riding our bikes all over the countryside every Saturday. It was good to have a friend; too much time alone isn’t good for anyone, and I had no social skills to speak of. I practically moved in with Leroy and his family, eating supper with them almost every night, sleeping over on his living room couch about six nights a week, and riding in to school with him most mornings. I believe my folks were secretly grateful for my friendship with him, as it meant they could be gone even more on their evangelical trips, so at that point they pretty much abandoned me completely.
I began to reach out to other kids in school, building up a social life slowly, and Leroy and I formed our own little clique of about ten or so kids, kids who in a larger school would be outcasts and losers, but in the tiny population of 250 or so kids in our school, quickly became one of the most popular groups, our eccentricities and quirky behavior making us one of the most fun groups to hang out with. The seniors never looked down on us, the younger teens all thought we were the most hilarious thing ever, and over time we all climbed higher and higher up the social ladder. Leroy and I were forever fighting over a girl, but it was always good-natured. Life was good.
One afternoon the following summer, I asked Leroy if he wanted to go traipsing through the woods behind my house, as I hadn’t been back there in a while and the kudzu had probably grown back over all of my paths. He agreed and we set out.
We passed the buses, which had weathered the winter and spring fairly well; a few more patches of rust dotted the sides here and there, but at least the door pull still worked, so we had some fun opening and shutting the door for a few minutes before ambling downhill into the woods.
It was like swimming into a green sea; the kudzu sprouted everywhere, softening the outlines of trees, stumps, and rocks, turning everything into a muted, rolling landscape of coarse, richly scented leaves. We made our way down the hill to the creek and to the waterfall, and Leroy asked if we were going to go any farther. I had rarely ever gone much farther into the woods than that; there was a turkey farm nearby and the owner got cranky if he caught you on his land… and somehow, he ALWAYS knew.
I looked in the direction of his land, and then back along the creek in the other direction, downstream.
“Why don’t we try the other way? I’ve never been that way before.” I had, of course, been down that way, but only about a quarter of a mile. Beyond that there was a dense dead fall, choking the creek and making passage impossible. Leroy thought it was a fine idea, so we set off towards the dead fall.
It took us about forty-five minutes to make our way over there, and when we did, we were surprised to see that the blizzard that had blown in the previous winter had actually caused part of the dead fall to collapse, leaving a large, boy-sized hole through to the creek beyond. Ecstatic, we clambered through and set off down the new creek bed.
It was a beautiful afternoon; the water trickled musically along the rocks in the sandy bed, and we kept a sharp eye out for toads and crawdads near the weedy creek walls. After a while, we came to a fork in the creek and Leroy asked me if we wanted to go any further. I did some mental calculation and figured that the right-hand fork would lead us out to the road at some point. Now, I have absolutely no head for directions; Even as I’m writing this, I couldn’t tell you what direction I’m actually facing. I live three minutes from the ocean, and I have no idea which way is which without the thing in visual range to tell me.
We struck off up the fork and were soon wandering through a fairy landscape; it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Soft, earthy moss covered large rocks jutting up from the ground, and the ground itself was giving way to more and more rocks and even a few boulders. The creek, meanwhile, had narrowed and narrowed further until there was little more than a trickle of dirty water, bending ever so slightly to the left, taking us deeper into the woods. By the time we realized that we had wandered away from the now dry creek bed, we had passed through three dense curtains of kudzu and were completely surrounded with the stuff on all sides, as if in a large room constructed of leaves. Leroy looked around.
“Where are we?” he asked, his voice a little shaky.
“We’re on the right path; we should be hitting the road any second now,” I assured him, pushing through another curtain of kudzu. The stuff was starting to get a little suffocating, draping all over everything, its aroma cloying and thick.
We walked on in silence for another ten minutes before Leroy spoke up again.
“You have no idea where we are, do you?”
I stopped and looked around. Distantly, I could hear water running, but whichever way I turned, it seemed to be coming from that direction. I couldn’t see the road, I couldn’t see the creek, I couldn’t see anything but trees draped with green foliage. Every inch of the forest looked like every other inch. I started to panic then. We both started to panic.
There was a hazy period where we ran about, yelling, screaming at the top of our lungs for someone, anyone to find us, help us, help us please. At some point I sat down in the dirt and started praying, please God, just get us out of here, I’ll never say another cuss again, just find us the road.
The sun was starting to slip out of the sky; the forest was turning from a deep green to a deeper purple, and every sound was starting to magnify in the twilight. Then we heard the water gushing over rocks. We scrambled up onto a bank, and there was a creek, flowing quickly past us. Which way was the right way, though? Which way would take us out of the forest?
I sat down and thought for a minute, and then something caught my eye. Among the sand and the stones, something hard and plastic glittered and clung to a small twig above the creek bed. I reached down and, incredulously, pulled Outback Bob off of the twig. I held him up and started shaking uncontrollably. This action figure, this toy I had lost a solid year ago, had fallen into the creek, been washed downstream with the rain, and then had tangled on a twig and held on for who knows how long, acting as a marker for me.
I looked up at Leroy.
“We go this way.”
Two hours later we stumbled out of the woods, dirty, wet, and bleeding from innumerable scratches, but we were no longer lost. We fell into the bus, lying down on the rusty floor, and just stared up at the ceiling, too exhausted to do anything else for the next thirty minutes.
Leroy’s mother made us hot chocolate, made sure we both had a shower, and then bundled us up on the couch and let us stay up late watching wrestling.
Years later, after my parents disowned me and I made my way out west, I kept only one thing to remind me of my childhood. Outback Bob sits on the desk next to me right now, his broken-off legs replaced two years back, a reminder that, whenever I’m lost, whenever life is tangled with suffocating problems, I just have to look for the marker to tell me the right way home.
Time rolls on.
