Bewilderment

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THE NEXT DAY, WE TOOK to the woods. Robin was wired. Nine, Dad. I get to ride in front! The law finally freed him from his safety seat in back. He’d waited for the front-seat view his whole life. Geez. Tons nicer, up here.

Fog clotted in the mountain folds. We drove through the little town that spread two buildings deep along both sides of the parkway: hardware store, grocery, three barbeque pits, inner tube rentals, outfitters. Then we entered half a million acres of recovering forest.

Before us, the remnant of a range once much higher than the Himalayas endured as rounded foothills. Lemon, amber, and cinnamon—the whole run of deciduous colors—flowed down the watersheds. Sourwoods and sweet gums covered the ridge in crimson. We rounded the bend into the park. Robin breathed out a long, astonished vowel.

We left the car at the trailhead. I carried a frame pack with our tent, sleeping bags, and stove. Slender Robin humped a day pack full of bread, bean soup, utensils, and marshmallows. He hunched forward under its weight. We headed over a ridge and back down toward a backcountry campsite that would be all ours tonight, a spot by the side of a stream that had once been all the planet I needed.

Fall’s extravagance ran through the Southern Appalachians. Rhododendrons plunged down ravines and crowded up rises in thickets that made Robin claustrophobic. Above that manic shrub layer rose a canopy of hickories, hemlocks, and tulip poplars just as lush.

Robin stopped every hundred yards to sketch a patch of moss or swarming ant nest. That was fine by me. He found an eastern box turtle feeding on a mass of ocher-colored pulp. It stood defiant, neck stretched, as we bent near. Fleeing wasn’t an option. Only when Robin dropped to his knees alongside it did the creature retract. Robin traced the Martian cuneiform letters spelling out unreadable messages on the dome of the creature’s shell.

We climbed up into the cove hardwood along a CCC path laid by unemployed boys not much older than Robin, back in the days before communal enterprise became the enemy. I crushed the star-shaped leaf of a sweet gum, half August jade, half October brick, and told him to sniff. He shouted in surprise. The scratched husk of a hickory nut shocked him even more. I let him chew the tip of a burgundy leaf and taste how sourwood got its name.

Humus tainted the air. For more than a mile, the trail ascended as steeply as a set of stairs. Spectral shadows followed us as we passed through the shedding broadleaves. We rounded an outcrop of mossy boulders, and the world changed from damp cove hardwood into drier pine and oak. It was a mast year. Acorns piled up across the trail. With each step, we scattered them.

Rising from the leaf duff in a bowl-shaped opening off the path was the most elaborate mushroom I’d ever seen. It mounded up in a cream-colored hemisphere bigger than my two hands. A fluted ribbon of fungus rippled through itself to form a surface as convoluted as an Elizabethan ruff.

Whoa! Whaaat…?

I had no answer.

Farther down the trail he almost stepped on a black and yellow millipede. The animal writhed into a ball in my hand. I fanned the air above it toward Robin’s nose.

Holy crow!

“What does it smell like?”

Like Mom!

I laughed. “Well, yes. Almond extract. Which Mom sometimes smelled like when she was baking.”

He pressed my palm to his nose, traveling. That is so wild.

“That’s the word for it.”

He wanted more, but I laid the creature back in a patch of sedge and we carried on down the trail. I didn’t tell my son that the delicious smell was a cyanide, toxic in large doses. I should have. Honesty was very important to him.