Be Nice to the Trees, Or Else

My short story “A Taste of Robins” won the 2025 Winter Hauntings competition, earning me a creepy doll and a hundred dollar award. Autumn Ware, the competition’s creator (popping out behind me in the photo), claimed the hundred dollar bill was sewed up inside the doll. I am happy to announce that was not true. If it had been true, the money would still be inside that doll, as no curse is worth a hundred dollars. Where is the doll now, you ask? Well, after a hurried and amateurish exorcism, she went to doll heaven. May she rest in peace.

Despite my aversion to the doll itself, I was, of course, elated to win the competition, and it was good times watching actors read the finalists’ work aloud for a crowd. Wearing extremely and unnecessarily high heels, I drank good beer and ate fancy cookies in the company of artsy folks (and my husband), all caught up in the thrill of the macabre. Autumn has such a passion and flair for these things, and even if I’d lost, I would’ve had fun.

“Taste of Robins” follows a group of four teenagers as they teen-age around in Wardens Woods, a threatened maritime forest. The bad guy in the story is a greedy developer who wants to raze the woods and build more condos. This theme connected well with the local audience, who knew about such things.

Wardens Woods is a real place, or it was, once upon a time. It was located in Atlantic Beach, NC, where I grew up in the 1990s. I lived near the “Circle,” an ironically named triangular boardwalk with a ferris wheel, music venues, bumper boats, bars, and arcade games. And the beach. The Circle had seen its heydey in decades past but was still an interesting place to live in the 90s, though it left little in the way of natural attractions.

The whole town was short on nature, other than the beach itself, so to access wild spaces, my brother and step-sister and I rode our bikes to Millionaire’s Lane (aka Ocean Ridge), to one of the last remaining stands of undeveloped maritime forest.

These woods were located between a condo complex and a grocery store – not public space, exactly, but not blocked by fences or guards. Were there “No Trespassing” signs? Probably, but who reads those?

My brother, sister, and I would cut from Millionaire’s Lane into the condo parking lot, then coast our bikes through the sand, into the woods and to the big dune. The island used to be dotted with these tall dunes, but most have been leveled and lost. This one still remains, though, and you can access it if you’re willing to ignore a few fences. Lots of people do it, the town is always fixing those fences. Not that I would.

We called the big dune “Howdy-Doody Hill” (I think my brother came up with the name) and called the woods Watcher’s Woods. I got the name from a TV show, Are You Afraid of the Dark. You remember that show? It was pretty scary, and the name fit the forest. Its shady understory, combined with the illicit trespassing, gave the woods a dangerous aura. They stuck out in my memory as a place where kids could get away and experience the untamed.

I wanted to set my story there, and I wanted the woods to be threatened, as they were threatened then, by developers. By the time I left for college, Watchers Woods was gone, replaced by more condos. It happens so often, so fast. I’ve seen it in my neighborhood and all across the coast. It’s hard to watch. The loss of our old forests haunts me.

I needed my characters to be kids like we were, playing in the woods, feeling like those woods belonged to them, as so few things belong to children. I wanted the kids to be irreverent and young and free. As a high school teacher, I think teens get a bad rap. I wanted the teens to be the good guys.

Now the robins in the story, they come from further back in local history. I wrote a novel a few years ago set in the 1920s. It starts in Salter Path, with a seventeen-year-old girl whose father returns home from menhaden fishing and takes her hunting for robins. I read about this practice in Kay Holt Roberts Stephens’ book Judgement Land: The Story of Salter Path. Judgement Land gives a good picture of this island a century ago, when it was little more than spotty settlements. The islanders ate what was available, including robins.

This makes me happy, as I hate robins. Right now, they’re swarming my house and pooping on everything. Their dark droppings stain because they eat the berries of hollies, yaupons, and junipers. The poop sticks to my shoes and tracks into the house. Also, I don’t like robins’ white-rimmed eyes and scowling faces. Malevolent birds.

However, in “A Taste of Robins,” the birds redeem themselves. They stop the destruction of an ancient and perhaps magical maritime forest, protect the teens, and halt the condo development. How, you ask? You’ll have to read the story to find out. Catch your copy of the event program (with my story and others) at EPIC Carteret: https://epic-carteret.com/product/2025-winter-hauntings-souvenir-program/

And be nice to the trees, or else.

– Jessi Waugh