Road into Big Woods (Location Key)

The road into the big woods presumably branches off the northwest road. "The Old People" vividly describes the spot at which it enters the wilderness: the hunters cross a "line as sharp as the demarcation of a doored wall" (168). On one side of this door, the "skeleton cotton- and corn-fields," "houses, barns, fences" of Yoknapatawpha - on the other, the "wilderness," "tremendous and still and seemingly impenetrable" (168, 206). There's a nice equivocation in the word "skeleton" here - it's November, so only the cotton- and corn-stalks remain in the fields, but metaphorically, at least for Ike McCaslin and his mentor Sam Fathers, there's the suggestion that the familiar social world is death to the spirit, whereas this door opens to its true home.