Читать книгу Longleaf - Roger Reid - Страница 17

In our tent down at the Open Pond Recreation Area there was a nice Kelty daypack loaded with everything a guy would need for a hike through the longleaf pines of the Conecuh National Forest. A great bag full of great stuff—my stuff—and it wasn’t doing me a bit of good. In that pack was clean water, granola bars, a watch, a signaling mirror, waterproof matches, a space blanket, a first aid kit, a whistle you could blow in case you got lost, and a compass you could use to make sure you didn’t get lost. There are three hundred sixty degrees on that compass; that’s three hundred sixty different directions. One of those directions would take me back to camp, and maybe forty of them would get me close enough that I could find the camp. That still left three hundred twenty wrong directions I could take. No sense taking a step in any direction when for every one right step there could be eight wrong steps. I checked the ground for ants, sat down in the pine straw and leaned my back against a tree.

Maybe if I stay quiet and listen I can hear those motor home air conditioners, I thought. Nope, all I heard were the motors of the forest. That’s what it sounded like. Motors. I’ve read books and stories where they describe the sounds of a forest in musical terms: the song of the whippoorwill, a symphony of crickets, the ballad of bees, things like that. In the longleaf forest at mid-morning, the birds and the bugs didn’t seem to be making music; they were all business. Millions of organic motors were revving up and drowning out any hope I might have of hearing the electric motors back at the campgrounds. I heard one of those living engines fly in over my head while making a rapid-fire chirping sound.