Blog 3397 – 02.20.2025

The Woods

Well, though I was indeed chosen for a jury panel of forty-eight for a Civil Case yesterday at the Harris County Courthouse in Houston, Texas, I had the good fortune to be number 41. Unless they shuffled those number or reversed them, I figured it was highly unlikely that I would be picked to be one of the twelve jurors and one alternate to decide the verdict in a case that the judge warned us would probably take three days to conclude. Had I been picked I would have had to miss my weekly trip to Jay’s Hundred Acre Wood just a mile outside the small East Texas town of Bon Wier.

Since I purchased 15.5 acres last November to add to my son Jay’s sixty acres and thereby help him realize his dream of a hundred acre spread I have tried to drive over from Houston at least one day a week to spend a few hours in these wonderful woods. Why would anyone drive three hours here and three hours back just to get to spend four hours in the woods you might ask? Well let me try to explain the appeal to me.

I was born and raised a city boy and except for a couple of years that my family lived in Detroit, Michigan when I was just a few years old my childhood memories mostly are about growing up in the city, Chattanooga, Tennessee. Dad took me and my brother fishing a few times, and to visit Aunt Maude’s farm in north Georgia even fewer times. Our main experience with woods was a small wooded lot in our neighborhood, just a few blocks from our house. Actually it was in yelling distance, which was the outer limit that we were allowed to roam as boys. Only with special permission were we permitted to go beyond those boundaries. Those special circumstances were to walk to and from our schools which were several block out of ear-shot from mom’s loudest yell, to take a city bus downtown to the movie theater or to ride our bikes to the Chicamauga Battlefield near Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia which was about nine miles from our house in East Lake, a block off of Rossville Boulevard. There were lots of woods in the Chicamauga Battlefield where boys in blue and gray bleed and died a hundred years before.

Later when I was a teen my dad took me hunting in the woods around Chattanooga mainly in state parks and game preserves (my brother was not much interested in hunting, me I just loved being out with my dad.) Dad’s love of the woods rubbed off on me. Playing Robin Hood and War in the nearby wooded lot as a boy, one year as a Boy Scout, hunting and fishing with dad, and Basic Training in the U.S. Army cemented my fondness for the outdoors and walks in the woods.

The trees call to me: “Come dance with me, come sing with me, come walk with me, come talk with me, come ride with me, come fly with me. Come.” And my reply is always a word one of the Three Stooges, Curly, used to say with panache: “Certainly!”

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David White