Chapter 8: What the Kudzu Covers

The kudzu had eaten the fence line so thoroughly that Gordon almost missed the turnoff entirely, and he had been looking for it.

He stopped his bike at the place where the county road's gravel shoulder gave way to a wall of green so dense it looked painted — kudzu over scrub pine, kudzu over what had been a surveying road, kudzu over whatever the surveying road had been built to reach — and stood with one foot on the ground and his map in his other hand, comparing the paper's careful pencil lines to the reality of summer vegetation, which had no interest in being legible.

"This is it," he said.