How to Know a Place
Thoughts about writing my Big Thicket hiking guidebook.
A significant portion of writing takes place in ones brain, where ideas foment and shape into the narrative that will eventually find its way onto the “page”. These days the page isn’t usually an actual piece of paper but whatever will be displayed on a phone, computer, or e-reader. This last month has been busy for me, summer is in full force for all the typical (and even some atypical) reasons. I’ve been in my head a lot, writing mental essays, thinking about little tidbits to address in the future. Very little time to sit down and write.
At the end of May I announced that I was writing a trail guide for the Big Thicket. This isn’t the first book I’ve ever written but it is the first book I have an actual contract for. It’s surreal in many aspects. This project came about while I was trying to pitch the one book I have actually written, a book I completed in 2014. That book is a memoir of my and my husband’s Florida Trail thru-hike in the winter of 2011. I wrote it in large chunks beginning in the fall of 2011 and finally put butt-in-seat by early 2014 and finished the first draft because I was newly pregnant and wanted that project done before I had to nurse a newborn and figure that whole mess out. It wasn’t until 2016 that I wrote a book proposal and started pitching it to publishers directly. The types of publishers I was going for were university presses or smaller hiking/outdoor publishers that would accept proposals directly from authors instead of working through an agent.
Hiking memoirs are a difficult genre to publish. Sure, you have books like Wild and A Walk in the Woods but Wild isn’t so much a hiking memoir as a life memoir and AWITW was written by an established author who didn’t even finish the Appalachian Trail and somewhat fictionalized the story. There are a plethora of really great hiking memoirs out there (and some less great ones), but most of them focus on either the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail, and a significant chunk of them are self published through Amazon KDP or, more becoming more common, IngramSpark. There isn’t anything against self publishing and many authors are doing great with it these days but I was still holding out for being traditionally published. Which is where I was at again in Fall 2023 when I decided to update my proposal and make some edits to my book and pitch it again. Seven years had passed and times had changed so I figured I’d give it a whirl!
Getting rejections while being a writer is par for the course. Most of the time it really isn’t you, it’s them. It doesn’t fit their publishing goals for the year or they don’t know how they can market the book, or they just signed someone else with similar content, etc. Authors have to develop thick skin. So, rejections were where I was ending up again with this book but one rejection came with a request that, maybe I could write a Florida hiking guide book for the publisher? I paused for a second as I read the email because omg this would be REALLY GREAT BUT…I personally know the people who write the majority of the hiking guides for Florida/the Florida Trail and there was also this tiny fact that I lived in Texas now and not Florida. I replied with those details and then tossed out something like, “How about a book about east Texas trails instead?”
You know that saying about how you can’t get what you don’t ask for? Well, if I’d just replied back to that email with the info about Florida having guidebook writers already and “Thanks for your time for looking at the proposal”, I would not be writing this essay today.
I took a few months to narrow down the focus and write the proposal to submit, but honestly, within days I knew I really wanted to write a guidebook for the Big Thicket. I’ve been wanting someone to write one for the Big Thicket and really all of east Texas for years. Too many people have no idea what is even available in the Big Thicket or east Texas to hike or recreate. That region is written off all of the time as being backwards and well, there are definitely some historically appropriate reasons to perhaps give side eye to some of it, but it is home to such a rich and biodiverse ecosystem, and a lot of people are missing out on what it has to offer. 2020 and the pandemic thrust into the spotlight how much our outdoor spaces really mean to us and with overcrowding at parks and trails within an easy drive from major metropolitan areas, it became apparent these other places just a bit further away needed to be highlighted in some way to spread out the crowds.
I’ve been actively hiking the trails and taking GPS tracks of these places since December and I still have a lot of work ahead of me. My TBR pile of previously written Big Thicket and Texas ecology books grows as I comb through places like Thrift Books and Abe Books to find out of print copies to read through. Several years ago I was in search of natural history writers for Texas and kept coming up mostly empty except for one or two more well-known people like John Graves and Roy Bedichek. But it turns out, we once had a thriving group of nature writers here in the state and they have all since mostly passed away. Their books are still out there in various used book shops or collector’s backrooms, listed on these websites as they wait to find new homes.
It kills me when I read these books, particularly the ones about the Big Thicket. Sentences and paragraphs written in the 60s and 70s still ring true today about Texas’ (lack of) environmental ethos. I currently have a pile of books written by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas about Texas and the environment and he must be rolling over in his grave at the Chevron deference being overturned last week.
The footprint for my book is rather large and spread out. Defining where exactly the Big Thicket resides can be difficult as some interpret it more widely and than others. I’ve chosen a wider stance because keeping it narrow to the Big Thicket National Preserve itself would make for a very thin book. This means I’m having to plan in advance where I want to hike and visit, and trying to combine multiple trails into a day or weekend trip so I can see as much as possible. Because I often have my husband and son with me, I also have to keep in mind their own goals and capabilities for the weekend. My husband and I can tough out wet trails and the heat of summer a lot easier than my son before he starts complaining too much.
All of this means that I may be in a place in the (greater) Thicket, taking photos, soaking in the trails, but I often leave wishing I could sit there and experience it deeper. To see it season to season. Instead, I have to capture what I can in the instance that I am there and hope I can accurately portray it in the book. Two weekends ago I went to a nearby trail that I’ve been to several times before. It’s a bottomland habitat near a scenic creek and I figured I’d hike the trail, get a few photos to cover the ones I already have from previous visits so I could have a few more photos to chose from, and be done rather quickly. But then I saw they’d opened a new section of trail and of course had to add that to my hike that day. I’d started out quite late in the afternoon and still had groceries to get after the hike. As I hiked this new section I kept telling myself I wish I could walk slower and look more closely at the flora and fauna. The late June humidity and heat were dripping down my body and the cloud of mosquitoes were adding speed to my hike, so meandering along the trail to look in nooks and crannies wasn’t going to be happening that day.
That’s how it goes for this book. Straddling the “get it done” mentality with “know the place” mentality. And it isn’t like I won’t be revisiting some of these places over and over again in the future—I just can’t visit each place during each season multiple times as I write the book as I’d like to! I know other guidebook writers have an even tighter time crunch than I do and are also in a “get it done” mentality so I feel glad I am able to have the time I proposed to begin with.
I don’t know that I could ever really know the entire Big Thicket region to the extent that I would like to. I read about how Lance Rosier would be able to walk out of the hotel his aunt owned, where he lived, and how he would be gone for days just wandering various part of the Big Thicket—before it was a preserve. He’d take out of town visitors who came in wanting to know about or write an article about the Thicket, and they’d go off in search of bears or bird rookeries or rare plants, out in the “wilds”, though even then (20s-60s) the Thicket was becoming increasingly less and less wild.
I’m sure I’ll write more about the book writing process here as time goes on. But this thought about really knowing a place came to me while walking in the Hickory Creek Savanna Unit of the BTNP a few weeks ago. We were short on time because we had to drive several hours north that same day to be in place to pick up my son from my parents and so I was left feeling sad about not getting to explore a creek in that unit, or hike further back into the unit along some firebreaks. I’ll have to return another time to finish that section.
As for knowing a place, I feel this pull to be writing about Florida here, too. But I’m going to try to keep that separate and make that another project (a book, haha—you don’t want to see my book idea list!). But there are places in Florida I really know—or knew, at least. Time marches on and all of that.
I’ll leave you with a few paragraphs from a newspaper article in the Houston Chronicle from 1963 that was reprinted in a hard to find book called Thicket Explorer that curates articles written about Lance Rosier during his life.
Rosier had often made his way along the logging trail to show friends the swampy heron rookery. Countless occasions he had guided naturalists, Boy Scouts, nature lovers, bird watchers, and civic leaders deep in the heart of the wooded land to view the hundreds of nesting, mating, feeding, and fighting birds.
This day, though, Rosier was puzzled because he heard no raucous bird cries warn other birds of approaching man. The silence was broken only by the squish of the mud, the soft splash of water.
One dead bird after another lay lifeless along the silent path. Piles of sticks, placed carefully in the building of nests, had become a sunbaked resting place for birds that once rode wings of flight. The mysterious death had come swiftly, struck them before they could flee.
Was it a deadly spray from airplanes in nearby fields? Was it poison they had picked up in feeding nearby? Was the swift death carried into the area by the winds?
“I don’t know what it was,” Rosier said, “and can’t find anybody that might tell me. All I know is that another part of the heart of the Big Thicket is dead. And it makes my heart sad.”
Only the frogs know for sure, and they’re just croaking mournfully.
-Chester Rogers, Houston Chronicle, June 30, 1963.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.
Misti, congratulations on the book! I'm so glad you're doing this. It's a much-needed resource and you're offering a big gift to the world. Thank you!
So fascinating to read about the writing process and the many ideas you have and want to accomplish.