My Uncle Trip's truck smelled like dirt and chain-saw oil and pine straw mingled with cigarette smoke. I smell it when I think of him. The truck was a two-tone Jeep, a rust-dusted white cab over a faded copper body. I sat in his lap as we cruised the rolling back roads of the Georgia Piedmont, my hands on the wheel at ten and two, his at six as he worked gears and pedals. There were seat belts, but I understood them to be something we might only consider far beyond potholed asphalt or root-choked red dirt. No matter, his arm around my waist felt safer than any nylon and buckle Detroit could offer us. There was an AM radio, but reception was poor in Whistleville, so we sang duets of "Luckenbach, Texas" backed by the music of Old Milwaukee empties, crushed cans rattling like tambourine accompaniment to the steel guitar growl of bottles rolling in the truck bed.

We rarely traveled with purpose. Maybe a trip to Big Star for my grandmother or a run to the Happy Hooker for Louisiana Pinks or Red Wigglers. Probably a stop at the package store either way. Mostly we went to the woods.

There may have been concrete motivations for those trips--the recovery of an ax or a shovel set aside and momentarily forgotten. But generally, Trip went for the simple pleasure of time spent under leaf and limb and the desire to impart that subtle joy to me. He neither directed nor demanded, but spoke to me as if I had agency, as if it were plausible that at age six, I might have already made plans. "You want to go down to the pond?" or "You got time to help me find a pickax?" or "I'm going hunting arrowheads--come on if you want." And with a loyalty born of absolute worship, I followed him. The truck took us only so far, so Trip and I took to foot.

We never moved fast in the woods. He taught me how to cross barbed wire by spreading two strands to carefully step high over one while bending low beneath another. Through verdant confusions of kudzu that would otherwise have swallowed me, I sat high upon shoulders my mother says I share. It's a persistence of genetics that pleases me. Once we were afield, anything was worth a stop and a lesson--an animal's footprint, last spring's bird nest, the creek where water coursing over granite sounds so much like a cacophony of voices that we called it the Talking Place.

I don't hold many memories of Trip under a roof, fewer still without something in his hand: a rod, a gun, posthole diggers. We fished a family pond deep in the woods, spinning line from Zebco 202s in pursuit of the bass and bream silently wending through green water shining with rippled images of Georgia pine and blue sky. There, he taught me what made a rock right for skipping. How to nail a catfish to a board and strip the skin from its flesh with pliers. How to shoot a .22 loaded with rat shot at a water moccasin challenging us over a stringer of fish.

I don't know how many days my uncle Trip had been missing when my mother told me he was gone.