Hector and I camp at ‘The Memphis Goatee’ despite warnings about the sickly, disoriented birds that nest there. It doesn’t seem like a mistake until the mistake is obvious. The birds return to roost around sunset and, because the forest has warped their sense of direction, they aren’t at all prepared for our tent being in the way.
Most of them zip by, well above us, but the flock arrives so thickly that the low-flyers whip into the tent fabric and bounce back onto the ground, chirping angrily. It happens a couple times before I grab Hector and huddle down against the opposite side of the tent, which works until the fallen birds realize we’re there and attack us, taking little pin-prick bites of our clothes and skin as retribution. The tent goes down but, by then, we’ve ducked and dodged our way behind a tree- far enough away that the birds aren’t willing to chase us. It’s over in five minutes but it feels like much longer and then it’s dark and the tent is torn to shreds.
There are no clouds but the world never passes up a chance to rain on an unprotected camper.
‘Looking for a frivolous use of money and land? Already seen Mt. Rushmore? Try, then, ‘The Memphis Goatee,’ a massive swirl of transplanted woodland an hour east of the city itself. It’s a Seussian forest, by design, made up by trees that have been taken far from their lands of origin and twisted by inbreeding and, some say, genetic or chemical interference. The altered trees grow taller and thinner the nearer they are to the center and, in order to maintain form, they’ve begun to curl and spiral and entwine, each relying on another for support.
A goatee was the literal intended result of this project- a goatee that could be seen from space. Archives suggest a rogue committee at the county level reached out to equally deranged politicians in Australia and South Africa (antipodes to either side) and came to some sort of clandestine agreement that each would create a forest to simulate the hairstyle of a balding man with a goatee on the earth itself. The pieces of the project that made it onto paper are heavy with phrases like ‘global unity’ and ‘shared sense of human delight’ and ‘breaking down borders (figurative only).’ Needless to say, only Memphis kept up their end of this deal.
The author hesitates to argue against any project that promotes or preserves nature, but ‘The World’s Goatee’ is not a healthy place. It is bloated on water that is needed elsewhere and crawling with invasive species. Its brittle trees break unpredictably and those animals that choose to live there behave just as erratically, torn between what evolutionary instinct tells them should be true, and what Memphis has made the truth.’
Trees have collapsed over the road we came in on. Signs suggest this happens all the time and encourage visitors to enter the woods with several days of food. Luckily, the forest floor is so starved for light that little grows there and I’m able to maneuver the bike around the blockage. Night is darker inside ‘The Memphis Goatee.’ Leaving it early is a relief.
-traveler
