This story is from Texas Monthly’s archives. We have left the text as it was originally published to maintain a clear historical record. Read more here about our archive digitization project. Driving east to San Augustine, against the grain of the pioneers, I first met the Piney Woods of East Texas at Crockett. Abruptly, a forest curtain fell. Gone was the big Texas sky, the familiar flat, horizontal junction of earth and cloud, the sense of space that shaped the expansive character of the West. Green-and-brown vertical walls stretched along each side of Highway 7, the two-lane road that cuts through the Davy Crockett National Forest. Long bright shafts of light sifted through the dark trees like a chiaroscuro sketch. I drove past sleeping swamps…The post The Petrified Forest appeared first on Texas Monthly.