I’m thinking some of you might not know what the woods in Louisiana are like, so let
me help you:
Take a normal, perfectly good, pleasant forest, add a little bit of poison ivy, a helluva
lot of boars and deer, and then as much mud as you can imagine.
I’m talking metric tons of the stuff.
Every trail.
Every foot.
Everywhere.
If you want to avoid pure foot-blistering hell and the realm of all things mosquito,
wait for a two week dry-spell, and then try hiking (the mud will be gone and the mosquitoes
won’t be bad until dusk), but otherwise, wear jeans, wear a t-shirt, and suffer.
And here's another little fun fact: it loves to rain.
Loves to flood, too.
So much, in fact, that our fifty-seven acre property has a ramshackle levee that borders
a stream to the north of our house.
You normally couldn’t drown in it if you tried, but the little shit gets higher than
a stoner every time the sky so much as dribbles on us..
You might be thinking that I don’t like the rain.
And you’d be right.
For a good reason, trust me.
Let’s get to that in a second.
So, this levee, right?
Seventy years old, as best we can tell.
Already here whenever we bought the property, and it keeps us high and dry.
Without it, we’d basically have the vague outline roof of a house surrounded by an impromptu
lake, followed by whatever piss-poor fish that actually live in the stream.
As best as we can tell, there’s a larger brook further up north that this creek branches
off of, but it’s just a small run-off route, thanks to a logjam.
Except for when it rains, and the water bursts right past the jam, and damn near drowns my
house.
But it doesn’t.
Thanks to one of the only useful pieces of redneck engineering to ever exist.
Our little rinky-dink ass levee.
Since my family is in the business of not choking on swamp-water every time it rains,
we check the levee after every bad storm.
They come once, twice a month or something like that.
Sometimes back to back, sometimes once a year.
Doesn’t really matter.
What does matter is that I’m the one who gets sent out into the muddy hellscape that
is our wood’s trail to check the damned bank whenever a storm passes.
It’s pretty much a routine at this point, but things get a bit weird sometimes.
The woods have a lot of crazy shit in them.
Old sheds in clearings no one’s ever used, car seats miles away from the nearest major
road and hundreds of feet off the trail.
Random piles of sheet metal and tire rims.
Y’all get it.
Redneck coonass shit.
But every now and then, something new turns up.
Or gets uncovered.
Whatever you’d like to call it.
Sometimes, it’s just an old water-well that was covered up, and it turns the concrete
plug of whatever was sealing had just, finally given out, and other times it’s the remains
of some poor family’s stray trampoline, but last time was different.
That’s why I’m writing this.
Consider this whole post a warning to anyone who likes poking around rural properties:
stay away from any drainage or run-off systems.
Flash floods are real after a rain, and sure as hell real enough to bulldoze you into the
nearest tree.
But more specifically, avoid the levees.
If you have to check them, wait until the mud dries up to look them over.
Until the sun beats down and the woods are as bright as can be.
Don’t wait ‘till it’s late, and the sun has a chance of setting.
And don’t do it alone.
Don’t trust the levees.
Last time I went out, it was creepy and quiet, which is pretty much the norm for the woods.
You start to hear the bugs and the birds as time goes on, but they seemed a little slower
to get revved up after this rain.
Nothing to worry about.
It was just a couple fallen trees, I thought.
Unlucky, but expected.
Water turns the dirt into mud, and the wind takes care of the rest, but usually the things
are already half rotten, and blow down during the worst of it.
Which is why it was a little more concerning when I saw one fall down right in front of
me.
Contrary to popular belief, trees that have leaves and branches fall awfully slow, if
you aren’t right next to the base, so I had plenty of time to get clear, but it didn’t
bode well for me.
I couldn’t even imagine the last time a storm had been bad enough to knock down hardwoods
like that, or the last time I had checked to see if our chainsaw worked, but it was
work for another day.
One less muggy and miserable, for damn sure.
That was closer to the entrance of the tail leading to the levee, so I forgot about it
pretty quickly after a few minutes of walking.
You focus more on trying to find solid ground, so you don’t have to spend a few minutes
pulling your feet out of a mudhole.
Or two.
Or ten.
And then, there were the deer rubs.
They’re patches on younger saplings that bucks rub the bark off of, sort of as a claim
to the land.
Or maybe because their antlers itch, hell if I know, my pa was the hunter.
You might see one every now and then, but . . .
Well, everything looked dead.
Or dying.
Deer wander in herds, sure, and you might see quite a few bucks around in hunting season—it
was that time of the year—but it was like every male deer in a fifty mile radius had
saw fit to scrape every inch of bark off of every tree they could reach.
There were even a few broken nubs on the ground, with blood, like they had rammed the older
oaks, or fought each other.
That was another weird thing—it wasn’t even just the saplings.
It was the pines and the water oaks and whatever else, too, with the ground stamped to hell
and back.
If any hunters know anything about this—or, hell, any arborists either—let me know.
I’m just guessing at what happened, but there were tracks leading every which way,
and the trees were more naked than . . .
Well, I’m running out of metaphors anyway.
You get the gist.
Cajun exaggeration only goes so far.
I’ll cut to the chase.
Shit got weird, fast.
It was supposed to be a thirty minute walk after that—it was a bend in the trail I
took every trip, and I knew the way by heart, but I walked for at least a couple of hours,
just plodding through the mud and swatting away the bugs.
The trail never ended, and the sky never got dark.
I even started marking trees to see if I was going crazy, but I never passed the same tree
twice.
The sky was starting to get dark—I had put the walk off until after an early supper—but
I kept going.
There wasn’t much else to do, since I had no idea where the hell I was, and I didn’t
have another two hours to spend going the same way back.
I figured I’d run into the levee eventually—it ran across the entire northern property line,
a few hundred feet before our land actually ended—and I could orient myself then, and
cut back across the property properly.
But I never did.
Another thirty minutes later, with me trying not to piss myself at every sound I was hearing
in the trees, the trunks around me started to look different.
Blacker, darker than they should have been, even given the setting sun.
Diseased, almost.
Like they had rot, but the air smelled fine, still like it does after a rainstorm.
I’d like to say I was a cool, calm, and collected son of a bitch, but I wasn’t.
I kept throwing glances over my shoulder, and up at the sky, and glancing at my phone
occasionally.
It was telling me it was 4:30.
That gave me a little bit of a pause.
It got dark around 5:30 or 5:40 at this time of year, and I must have left the house at
4:00, given that I ate supper and had to wash the dishes afterwards.
But I was more worried about getting out than my phone bugging out, so I kept going.
Running, even, and that’s when I heard it.
It was a low rumble, at first, like an earthquake, or a train, but it just kept getting louder,
and louder, growing from behind me.
When I turned around, I was facing directly down the length of the levee, the side to
my left sloping away at a steep slant, the right just a mud plain going on for miles.
And, just around a bend about a mile down the glorified ditch, I could see something
getting closer.
Here, I think my words are going to fail me.
Maybe my fingers too, with the way they’re shaking right now.
Imagine staring down at a speeding train, with your feet glued to the tracks.
Or a bull charging you while your shoelaces are tied together.
Or something big, black, watery, and beady-eyed tearing down a concrete and mud trench, that
hurts to look at in a way you can’t comprehend, stretching from right in front of you to the
rightmost edge of the horizon..
Yeah.
It was mostly that last one.
But I can’t do it justice.
It felt . . .
Evil.
I don’t say this lightly.
I grew up vaguely Christian, and if there was one thing Pa taught me, it’s that evil
is real, and rare.
It was his reason for being religious.
He said he had stared down true evil in this world, and could only cope by believing in
true good.
And that’s the feeling that hit me.
True evil.
Rolling off of the damned thing like an oily smoke.
It looked like a hunk of flotsam one moment, riding on a giant wave, and in another it
was something long, and muddy, with pincers and black eyes, like a crawfish ready to bite
back.
My feet were moving before I wanted them to, already bringing me towards the edge of the
levee.
It was impossible to climb up the thing normally, but one of the dark trees had bunches of ivy
trailing down its trunk, and one of these vines had continued on down the side of the
levee.
The other direction wasn’t even a choice—there’d be no running in that, just tripping and slipping
in the gunk.
I don’t know how fast that beast was going, but it covered the mile between us in less
than a minute.
I was barely on the bank when it blew past, sucking the air along with it and nearly sending
me tumbling back down into the dip.
It stunk like death, where it had passed.
Not sickly sweet, but rancid, and rotting, like seafood baking under the sun for a week.
It’s hard to say what happened after that.
I didn’t stick around to find out if that thing could scale the banks of the levee,
if it’d flood over like a rising tide and continue on its merry way, I just sprinted.
For how long I was running, and stumbling, and cussing, I can’t tell you, but eventually
my foot snagged on something good, and sent me tumbling down to the ground.
I thought it was the pincer-branch of the thing that nearly got me earlier, back to
finish the job, but it was just a pile of sticks.
Or, rather, it was a pile of sticks now.
It was hard to tell in the gloom, but it had definitely been something deliberately made
before I smashed it.
There were two halves of a square twig base, crudely tied together, with a wooden figure
of something laying on the ground next to me that must’ve been on some sort of platform.
Or altar.
Now, I don’t know what you know about Cajun culture.
But there’s something called voodoo, that we joke about.
Black magic is what we mean, really, and I know that this probably wasn’t real voodoo,
that it was something else, by a more prim and proper name, but there’s some superstitions,
some hates that you just can’t throw off.
Voodoo was the first thing that popped into my head.
Fake enough when we’re joking around, but less so when you’re staring at a witch’s
doll.
And then I crushed the damn thing beneath my heel as soon as I got up.
Some things just feel right, and I didn’t have any tinder with me to give the figure
the proper scorching it deserved.
After that, a relatively uneventful trip back to my house.
It must have only taken fifteen minutes to make it home, and the sky had even lightened
a bit once I was out from the trees, even after I had stopped running after my fall,
when the black beast didn’t come after me when I crushed the figurine.
The talisman?
Whatever it was.
I’m inside right now, in front of the fire I‘ve built.
I don’t feel like being in the dark at the moment, and the heat helps me relax.
But I can’t help but wonder . . .
The woods were never like that before.
The levee never bordered a mudflat like that.
It should’ve been more woods.
Calmer woods.
Something was different.
Or, rather, something had changed it.
My mind keeps going to that talisman, or idol, and witches, and black magic.
Tales about things lurking in the swamps and the bayous.
Bedtime stories I wasn’t supposed to hear as a kid.
And I’m starting to wonder if me and my family are the only ones living on this land.
One thing for damn certain, though . . .
I’m not checking the levee next time.