FOR LOVE OF THE OUTDOORS

The pale light of a summer morning crept in between canopies of sweetgum and water oak, casting dappled shadows over the paths of Big Thicket National Preserve. Beyond a shuttered visitor center, the Kirby Nature Trail wound through bay-gall thickets and flooded cypress sloughs, through explosions of ferns and piles of decaying logs. The air pressed in like wet velvet, heavy with pollen and leaf mold.

I’d come to the Big Thicket because, on this August day, American civil society felt like it was splitting at the seams. A viral pandemic had killed 100,000 people; a month later, the number would double. Swaths of the population had spent months cooped up at home, juggling parenting with their jobs, or venturing to workplaces fraught with new dangers. The economy had taken its worst hit since the Great Depression, and the nation’s political discourse was in tatters.

I’d been feeling a restless desire to escape the world—and a contradictory yearning to immerse myself in it. I was also curious about how Texas’ public lands were faring in an unprecedented time of quarantine shutdowns and surging interest in outdoor recreation. So,