By Rawlins Gilliland
Dallas, TX – It has become standard fare these days in social-business conversation to ask, "So, where do you live?," much as one used to say, "So, what do you do?" Actually, I live in Piedmont, a small and peaceful neighborhood on the Northeast escarpment overlooking the Trinity Forest. For 18 years, not once has anyone, whether transplant or native, had a clue where I lived, even as I attempted in detail to pinpoint this part of town in their minds. It's a fatiguing and seemingly futile process.
All this until the buzzwords "Trinity Forest" entered the Dallas lexicon. By 1998, I began to proudly answer, "I live on a hill next to the Great Trinity Forest." Which elicits the invariable response, "Where is the Trinity Forest?" I normally dryly reply, "Where is the Forest? It's a little large to be lost." When they ignore that, and inevitably add, "What is it near?" I have learned to surrender. I mean, how many thousands of inside-Loop 12, wooded acres are we talking about here? "What is the Trinity Forest near?"
Dallas territorial jingoism perpetuates the misinformation that anything on 'that side' of Interstate 30 can only mean Fair Park or Mesquite, unless it's Pleasant Grove, which is actually several miles south. Piedmont is, by definition, an inner-city Southeast Dallas neighborhood. Whereas residents here cover the spectrum demographically, a disproportionate number of our neighbors are 100 year-old trees. The southern summer breezes on my deck, after passing over miles of dense thicket, average five to seven degrees cooler than in nearby urban centers. Still, a friend joked when I asked him and his wife to dinner, "Do you need a passport to get there?" No, a Dallas map will do.
Despite spending $42 million of our bond money, as Mayor Kirk said, to "buy trees" and secure the forest for the future, Dallasites can't locate their largest-in-the-nation, hardwood, old growth, urban forest, with its Audubon Society habitat and Sierra Club hikes. In truth, I admit to myself, as I walk down the hill, that I feel ambivalent about sharing this 'hidden' treasure. On the other hand, how long can I expect this emerging domain to remain a secret? Already, when the Samuell-Tennyson new-greens expansion was cannibalizing that city park, many teed-off golfers drove two miles to tee off in the woods at Grover Keeton, our municipal golf course many pros had long seen as far superior. Since being discovered by these nomadic refugees, when the course gets a bit busy, one can always escape to kayak on the creek beneath 15 miles of leafy branches.
In a city where the flattest land, with the least remarkable topography, gets the top-dollar price tag, I feel blessed to return home all these years through the deep, quiet, unspoiled mystery that is the Great Trinity Forest. With its nocturnal magic and its daytime poise, although closer to Downtown than SMU, I get lost in time in a place that seems to be lost in space, 'somewhere' over there, between Fair Park and Mesquite.
Rawlins Gilliland is a journalist, regular NPR Commentator and former National Endowment Poet. He is a Dallas native.