Pitcher Plants, Kisatchie National Forest

by WES JAMISON

What I expected was a small and low body of water cocooned by flowers like cattails or irises—so tall and so dense that any approach would be difficult, but that I’d approach nonetheless. I quested for pitcher plants; whether or not I found them did not matter. I doubted my ability to find them anyway. The yellow trumpets, the Sarracenia alata, as they are properly named, were not marked on any map. Their location was indexed in only two sentences, neither of which clarified where they were: past the screen of pines could be in any direction, when nothing but screens of pines butted up against the only cracked and puddled clay road. I knew nothing of bogs or carnivorous plants or this forest, so we had nothing but intuition to guide us.

My intuition, because the pitcher plants were mine to find. Because I had only just recently moved here to the South, and I hated it; but, for you, I wanted to find something that could show me how important and beautiful this land could be, that could make me miss the Midwest less.

I assumed that carnivorous plants, pitcher plants, would grow beside that only mapped body of water. Because I knew enough to know that they grow in wet land and wetlands. Maps know nothing of this though, not here: it turned out that the entire ground was wet, covered with a quarter-inch of water, or, if not, the ground was soft enough so that our socks would find it regardless. Our hike curved toward that pond. Up to the bog proper, where the plants grew, everything was either very high or very low, and everything repeating, except for a single endangered bird species sign.

Between pines, over a floor of ferns, so thick and so tall that each of both our steps were made blind. Then brush. Then pines, and then those ferns. The stick I picked up, following your example, to push aside the vegetation, did not serve. The foot I used to peel back the shrub layer to peek at the ground did not help. Going slowly and listening after each step did not help, and trying to see the ground and watch the leaves and be loud—none of it helped.

What I couldn’t tell you—when you were always somewhere behind me (I was always looking back and losing sight of you, always a flicker of panic stuttering out from between the narrow trunks of these pines, because I couldn’t see you)—was that I was afraid. What I could tell you, instead, was that running, I thought, would be easier, quicker. That moving quickly would let us know that we went in the wrong direction that much sooner. That it would somehow keep our feet dry, even though I knew it would not. I couldn’t tell you that I was afraid of coming across a snake, of being bitten by a snake, of stepping on a snake, because I could see nothing beyond the shrub layer, and snakes camouflage so well anyway.

I couldn’t tell you that this fear developed only a week ago, in the exact moment I heard flies buzzing at the exact moment you yelled watch out at the exact moment you pulled me back up the trail from which we came at the exact moment I looked down at the sound of the flies, and saw the snake, immediately to the right of the trail, your foot almost kicking it.

I couldn’t tell you that I had never given thought to being bitten by rattlesnakes before, or that I associated them with dry land, dry lands, like Nevada, and parking lots. That, despite its permanence in our pop cultural imagination, the rattlesnake does not exist in Midwestern cognition (we have tornadoes, instead—a fear that was not taught to you by your Southern mother), and that I could have been bitten by one, deep in the swamp, with no cell phone reception, up and down countless hills, and I wonder if you could have carried me all the way back to the car, and I never would have anticipated it.

What I couldn’t tell you is that, now, here, in the bog, I could anticipate it.

I haven’t been able to tell you that I have dreamt about snakes every night since. Usually en masse. Usually not rattlesnakes. But the disturbance is always the same: you knew them to be there, and I never did, but, now that I do, I can see them everywhere—everywhere I’d never thought they’d be, that’s where they are. They are in my kitchen cabinets when I cook; and when you say to look out for snakes in the grass, I look down to discover a blanket of them so thick that no grass is even visible; they live like pets in the apartment; and they are always already in my shoes when I am getting dressed.

After our encounter with that rattlesnake, you told me that cutting open a snake bite and sucking out the venom doesn’t work. We confirmed, later, that no one can cut deep enough fast enough, that no one can suck enough or hard enough to do any good against the venom. That if either of us were bitten by a rattlesnake, there is nothing to do but get back to the car.

Instead, what I told you—what I could afford to tell you was that I could see the rooting marks of a hog, the blistered earth from their rooting. I wanted to demonstrate that I am becoming fluent in this world of yours—the one canopied by pines and bedded with ferns, the one in which we always find bees if we look for them, and in which all bodies of water have a skin of hyacinth. Announcing the index of the hogs, which you would not have missed anyway, was my showing pride at being able to recognize them after only discovering them a week ago in another state park. We have a different type of ungulate where I’m from, and I wanted to be a quick study of your land. And of you.

Our destination was the pitcher plants, but the entire trip was to show you that I no longer confuse the leaves of the southern magnolia with those of a rubber tree, that it’s the bald cypress that grows out of the water, and those roots that buckle up above the surface are called knees. That alligators aren’t as threatening as my mother would have me believe (and the bayou is all threat, according to her), that the leaves of a water oak look like duck feet and that pelicans look like dinosaurs. I wanted you to remember that I had intentionally reached out to feel if I could feel a lichen, and I could, and I remember its smoothness now, still. That your deer, here, are different from my deer, our deer, and I don’t know that I can explain why. That there are nutria here, that nutria are not a myth. You try to convince me that they eat other animals, but that is only your way of teasing my adoration of them. Or maybe your way of teasing my foreignness.

There were things you couldn’t tell me too, it seems. Your fear of hogs (and sometimes you call them boar, and I am still not sure if they are different animals or what the connotations are) wasn’t immediately obvious when we first encountered them a week ago in Chicot, which was perhaps less wild and damp but certainly shadier because of broadleaves instead of Cooter’s Bog’s conifers. We had been crossing a bridge, and I saw, and maybe you saw too, movement to our left, almost immediately past the deep gouge in the land where water had run. In the wake of the large movement were three piglets (and I don’t think you like when I call them that—too domestic and familiar for what I think you thought they really were, and I think the word is actually choat, but that might be exclusively for livestock), each a different color, like a litter of kittens (and you’d certainly hate that analogy), wriggling overtop one another.

You stood behind me, then, the way I had stood behind you moments before and placed my head on your shoulder and pointed out in front of us at the snake that flicked its tongue to smell at us. This time, you placed yourself behind me, I thought so that you could better gauge where I was looking, unable, at first, to find the piglets, the hoglets through the brush. But the truth is—and you did not tell me then, but I am telling you now that I have figured it out—that you were scared of them.

You told me, later, that you had been chased by a boar. Somewhere in Texas. Later still, and after some pressing, you told me that the boar chased you and your ex, the mean one with the lisp, the one to whom your mother endearingly exclaimed, Oh, you have a lisp. That boar stood waist-high, and though it was far off, you ran, and it chased you, and you ended up in a tree—because that, you have taught me, is how to escape a boar. (And now I also know to pick a comfortable one, one with a branch on which to sit, because the boar will be more resilient than I am and will stay at the trunk longer than I could hold on to it.)

We heard the leaves rustle and the floor crunch as at least one piglet ran off. You ran too, but ahead, up the path, and I stayed behind, I even walked back and ducked down to see if I could see it.

I said, I want to see it, and, immediately after, you asked, Did you hear it. Whatever there was to hear, I did not, because I had been speaking.

You said, The boar. Do you hear that. Listen to the growl.

Then I did. And it rolled low and deep across the ground like something mechanical and familiar, but somehow wetter and able to be felt vibrating in and through my femurs. And I could not imagine how large the lungs of a boar must be, or how loud it must sound in better proximity, because it was loud the way a low-flying plane is loud, loud like traffic is loud when you are in the middle of the street. A sound that comes from all sides but sits so low to the ground that it seems as if vibration has weight.

You were always behind me (I was on a mission for the pitcher plant), and when I looked back for you (and I was always looking back for you), you were always looking out through the pines or over the small expanse of vegetation—sometimes ferns, sometimes the pitcher plants we were after, a whole field of them, more than either of us had imagined, and with flowers attached that made the pitfalls less threatening.

You looked out over the forest. Because of your fear that the hogs were there, in the bog, and they had rooted recently (you could tell from how wet, how recently ruptured, the scars of the earth were). Your fear was that the land was completely flat and we could not outrun, that the pines all lacked comfortable limbs on which to sit, should we be chased—because pine trees do not have branches low enough to which we could climb.

I told you that I was going to walk ahead through the pitcher plants, the part denser than that in which we already stood, the part that stretched out in a clearing of the pines, a forest floor of yellow and pitfalls. I stepped in, two long steps. I stopped and asked if you wanted to come. You said that you would not, that you would stay there.

What I didn’t tell you in that moment was that I didn’t want to go alone. Because I was scared.

So I took the two steps back out of the field of pitcher plants, and I walked over to sit on a tree limb previously felled by a storm. I wrote about the wind being a solid thing, about how we can hear and see it before we feel it, and that it comes like a sheet over us, like a large four-legged ghost bending the trees with its undercarriage. I wrote about the wind, because I didn’t want to write my thoughts about the pitcher plants.

I wanted pitcher plants to be threatening and dangerous. I wanted to tip one, two, any number of them to find mice decaying inside. I wanted their stems to be thick and skeletal and menacing. I wanted them to be abject in their size and in all that mud. The trip was supposed to be more difficult—I wanted it to be more difficult—so that I could say that I had achieved something, that I had braved something. And I did brave that forest. But the reality is that there were more of these plants than I had expected, and they were small, and they were a pleasant yellow—like any flower that grows in my mother’s yard.

I sat writing about the wind indexed in these trees because I couldn't admit, while you stood with your stick at my right and the pitcher plants lay in front of me for maybe a mile, that while these plants are so threatening in legend, they are of no consequence in reality—or that the rattlesnake is perhaps more threatening in reality than it is in Midwestern myth.