Terri [laughs]:I’ll be honest, this was a hard case to research. What I did find is pretty wild, so bear with me. Okay, Jamie Tennyson was thirty-four years old when he went missing. He was quiet and kind, he worked in IT, and he was an amateur photographer. Remember the photography bit, it comes up later. So, on June 25, 2001, Jamie drove two hours south from Ohio’s capital, Columbus, to Lawrence County. It’s super rural, tons of hiking trails and camping. I sent you some pictures.
Naomi:It’s pretty. Lots of caves. You know how I feel about caves.
Terri:Not every disappearance can be blamed on heretofore unearthed cave systems.
Naomi:But can this one?
Terri [sighs]:I’ll let you tell me.
Lovely Dark & Deep: Missing in the Woods Podcast
CHAPTER 3
I take the country curves slow despite the rising urge to press on the pedal until I can feel the speed in my chest.
There’s nothing like rushing down a rural road on a summer day with cicadas singing in the trees above you. The whole world is humming. It’s invigorating. Especially after a week spent in the city in an office with people who won’t stop talking about personal development and the powers of herbal tea. Wind whips through the car. It strips the cloying frustration that’s built up in my body. I feel lighter, cleaner, less weighed down than I have in days. Weeks, actually.
Has it really been weeks since I felt this good?
For a brief, intense moment, I’m overcome with the memory of driving through Hocking Hills with my mom. She loved living in the country. She loved the fog that drifted through the trailers in the morning and the deer that wandered through the homes at dusk. Don’t get either of those in the trailer park we moved to the summer before college so I wouldn’t have to pay for campus housing.
Affording tuition even with scholarships and student loans and a million summer jobs was a struggle. Would it have been possible? I’d have to work nonstop, but yeah. My mom insisted that in the end it’d be worth it.
She was right. Her moving out of the country and to Columbus so I could live at home and commute to classes saved me literal thousands. I had to be grateful. Iwasgrateful. That didn’t stop the gratefulness existing hand in hand with guilt that she sacrificed another thing for my sake.
Her love of being outside is the reason I started drawing in the first place. She’d take me to a park—not with swings and slides and Astroturf, but one where the woods were thick, and the creeks ran quick and clear.
Most of the time my eyes were down to look for cool rocks or weird sticks or feathers plucked from a bird’s wing and hidden in the underbrush. By the end my pockets were full and my stomach was squirming in anticipation of giving them to her when we got home.
I was always trying to give my mother something. A report card with all A’s; a rock with a hole through the middle; a clean house for her to come home to after a long shift; a meal she didn’t have to cook; a safe place to talk about the things that hurt her, about the things she never told anyone else.
Eventually, the things I tried to give her after our walks were too much.
“How ’bout you just pick one and draw it when we get home,” she said. The forest debris from that day was laid out on our peeling laminate table. Her hair was slicked back ina tight ponytail that she hadn’t taken down since she got home from work. “One special thing I can keep. Okay?”
I kept it up, and she kept them all. I had the drawings bound into a book for Mother’s Day the year I graduated high school. Having the finished product in my hands inspired the children’s book I’ve been trying to illustrate since my first-semester art class.
One Special Thing, a mother and daughter’s relationship as told through drawings of the objects found on their walks through the woods.
There’d be no more walks in the woods until she was feeling better. Maybe not even then. She’s almost sixty now. Being an STNA had wrecked her body at a pace that none of my cubicle coworkers would ever experience.
I don’t really want to think about that, so I don’t.
The hills open up into a valley pockmarked with one-story ranches. The homes disappear entirely after the directions prompt me to turn onto Harmon Road. It’s a one-lane dirt-and-scattered-gravel excuse for a thoroughfare. Leaves from last year’s fall litter the stormwater ditches along either side. The air smells dark and earthy—the good kind of decomposition. No maggots squirming in eye sockets, no flesh melting off brittle bones, just leaves falling to bits and wood turning dark and tender.
It’s fifteen minutes on Harmon Road before a house appears. It’s tucked into the low point of forested hills. A roof that’s more moss than shingle, and a sagging wood porch that’s been bleached by the sun peek through the trees.
The road goes up a hill tall enough I can’t see who mightbe coming up the other side. I slow and move over as much as I can without sliding into the ditch to my right. Cresting the hill reveals another hill beyond.
A half mile later, there’s another home. This one is newer. Robin’s-egg blue siding, a gleaming dark gray metal roof, a brand-new Jeep in the driveway without a single spot of dirt on it.
We go another mile up soft, nameless hills, bumping through mud puddles, with not a single house in sight. Finally, the road curves to reveal a brilliantly red gate stretching the width of the road.
I park six or so yards away and turn to Ripley. “Ready for a walk?”
She perks up at theWword and presses her nose to the passenger-side window, leaving a cloudy smear. Bringing my dog for an inspection is not allowed. We’re in the middle of nowhere though. Who’s gonna know?
The air is thick with the scent of growing things and sun-warmed earth. For the first time in weeks, I’m not just some shape floating through space, but actually connected to the world.
