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Joseph Dewees

 

 

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A Brief Visit to Umbra Forest, Italy

We had practically finished the war in Europe; our 15th Air Force Flying Fortress, Marauders, etc. were getting ready to fly away homeward – USA, that is – from the air fields clustered around Foggia, eastern Italy, and I was on duty to help the process, from my headquarters station in Bari, Italy, down the coast below Foggia.

So it was that I was in Foggia that weekend, staying at the Sarti Hotel, with some leisure time on my hands and a brilliant idea in my head.  The Sarti, by the way, was the only hotel left in town after the Allied bombing earlier in the war to take the city away from the Nazis.  There was still a lingering smell of death and destruction, so I was glad to borrow a jeep from the motor pool and take to the hills.  In this case, the hills was one massive rocky height beyond the coastal town of Manfredonia on the Adriatic Sea, on a bay of the same name.

Away I went, keeping to the practically deserted country dirt roads that led to a switch-back road up the mountain.  Up I went, switch-back after another, until I was about 860 meters above the Adriatic, according to my map.  This is about 2,800 feet; Brown County Indiana is about 700 and Weed Patch hill 1,000.  It took about half-an-hour to reach the top, which my map indicated Umbra Forest to be the central area of this 30 mile-wide land mass, which further proved to be, as I proceeded, a bumpy, rock-strewn, relatively level plateau, but with minor hills and hollows.  On the rim, as I left the switch-backs, was little San Angelo, practically lifeless on this Sunday afternoon during siesta.

Then 15 miles into brush and shrubby vegetation until, rounding an ascending blind curve, I suddenly plunged into dense forest growth.  Big trees, big trunks, tall trees.  A forest, no less.  This had to be the edge of Umbra Forest!  The tree canopy covered the road like a covered bridge.  I would make a wild guess that the mountain-top forest would extend over several thousand acres.

The road that I had been on seemed to skirt the west or land-ward side of the forest, never penetrating much toward the center, so I kept hoping and watching for a side road that might do just that.  And finally found one.  It ended after probably half-a-dozen miles in a steamy, treeless pasture.  A mile or two ahead was a farm house and the land seemed to have dropped away; I could even make out the mountaintop village of San Angelo to the southwest, which I had just come through an hour ago.

Clouds were piling up over that way: I figured they were due to the Adriatic Sea below.  The day became quiet and damp, so I decided to curtail my visit.  So far, I had seen no one on my trip.  A rather eerie feeling, really, with thousands of my fellow airmen within fifteen miles, lolling about, thinking of home.

The Umbra Forest was like a dream in an otherwise dry, hot, and dusty Italy.  As I turned back in the direction I had come, I stopped to inspect one of the many charcoal mounds that dotted the woods.  Often there was a nearby shack where a woods worker could stay.  Through this section of the forest, a light blue smoke curled up above the mounds to mix with the moisture laden clouds.  A very interesting, pungent aroma was my companion to the conclusion of my visit.  Most of the trees were beech, straight and tall, with upper limbs laced together close enough that even on a sunny day, but with clouds and smoke, almost like twilight.

I drove back the spur road to the main forest road, then three or four miles until I left Umbra Forest behind, down through San Angelo to Manfredonia, thence west to bombed-out Foggia, where I missed supper at the Sarti.  But, I felt well repaid with my visit to Umbra Forest.

--Joseph Dewees