Wednesday, November 28, 2012

November 27, 2012 Walking in the Rain

I walked in the rain with a green polka dot umbrella at the Canal Park.  They have opened up another part of the path by building a safe but very slick walking bridge over the spillway between the canal and the Congaree,  just below the old bulwark of the Central Correctional Institution (the first state prison in SC built in 1866).

I read the inscriptions on the statue of Christopher Columbus erected by the DAR which includes a prayer attributed to him from 1492 landing in San Salvador, thanking the Lord for the new world..  Somehow I am suspicious of the origin of that prayer, as Columbus was quite interested in the gold he saw the natives wearing.  He actually enslaved some of them at one point and still believed he had discovered the islands on the coast of China until he went to Venezuela later on.    In that country, the natives refused to give the explorers food and he tricked them into believing he had taken the moon away from them as he knew of an impending eclipse.

Columbia was the first town or city in the US to be named after Columbus.  Now it is said that he opened up the new world to colonization.

500 years before him, Leif Erickson (son of Erik the Red) learned of new land from a trader named Bjarni
Herjolfsson and traveled to Newfoundland and set up a site there.  There is a statue to Erickson in St. Paul, Minnesota.

According to the scientist, Brian Sykes, who has studied the DNA history of Native Americans there well may have been travelors from the Pacific Islands who settled in the Americas long before that.

Five years ago, I went as a volunteer to the archaeological site called "Topper" on the Savannah River not far from the town of Barnwell.  The site is on the property of a Swedish chemical company.  Dr. Al Goodyear of  the University of South Carolina led a group of us in the continuing excavation of an ancient site where stone age tools were made.  Carbon dating has found that people were there many thousands of years before people were previously believed to have come from Asia across the Bering Strait to populate the
Americas.  We worked at the site in the day time and in the evening we learned about the site and others.
Dr. Goodyear made barbeque for us for dinner.  Other archaeologists visited.  A man at my picnic table drank everyone else under the table.  Another from the University of Florida showed us the artifacts he had found during the day diving alone from his boat into the Savannah River.  Some people wrote poetry and a pharmacist made hand cream for us from his own recipe.  Others demonstrated how flint knapping was done.    I became sick with bronchitis and went to see a Russian doctor in Barnwell.  When I got back to the site, I got to sleep in an old cabin instead of on the ground in my tent.  Later after returning home, I found a huge tick on my back in a hard to reach place.

Monday, November 26, 2012

November 25, 2012 Squirrels I Have Known and Loved

And alligators I have not.
Jasmine is blooming out of season on a sunny fence post as Boofa and I head into the woods.  Gray squirrels dart everywhere and Boofa is nearly dislocating my arm as he tries to chase them.

I have seen an occasional white squirrel in these woods and near my home and I have seen some of the famous white squirrels of Brevard, just north of here in the mountains.  These are not albinos but a variant of the gray squirrel.  The story goes that 50 years ago, a circus van turned over in the yard of a Mr. Mull and two white squirrels were left behind, which he gave to his niece, who kept them for a time until they were released into the wild and became the progenitors of a huge tribe of white squirrels.  In 1986, Brevard proclaimed itself a squirrel sanctuary and took the title of The Squirrel Capitol of the World.

There are beautiful Fox Squirrels on the South Carolina coast and low country, particularly on the many golf courses as they like places without undergrowth, such as pine forests. These southern squirrels are large with fluffy long tails and come in a variety of mixed colors such as gray and white and black and white and red and white.(They were described by Linnaeus in 1758, sciurus niger, perhaps Delmarva Fox Squirrel, s.n. cinereus) The Western Fox Squirrels are apparently a reddish brown .  I saw my first Fox Squirrel a few years ago on the DNR site on Highway 17 between Jonesboro and Yemasee when I took my mother and her sister, Elise on a rainy day while we were at Edisto. We visited the office where there was a gigantic alligator skull from Barnwell County displayed on a counter.

"Do you want to see some more alligators?" they asked us.  We said we did and we off in the car down a dirt road into the woods.  We passed over a dirt dam on the edge of a pond and went on to an old abandoned cemetery and turned around.  We stopped on the top of the dam to look more closely for the alligators and suddenly they were everywhere, approaching as if they thought they would be fed.
We were fairly terrified, especially me as I remembered my visit to a pond of sacred alligators in Ghana where the priest would paddle out in a boat daily to feed the creatures live chickens.  One day he fell in and that was the end of the story.

Here is a recipe for SQUIRREL COUNTRY STYLE from the Baton Rouge Jr. League Cookbook, River
Road Recipes, originally published in 1959.

2 squirrels
Salt to taste
Pepper to taste
Flour to dredge
3 tablespoons fat
2 cups water

Cut squirrel into serving pieces and shake in a paper bag containing seasoned flour to dredge well.  Fry in skillet until golden brown.  Remove squirrel from skillet and pour off all grease except 2 teaspoons.  Add water and bring to a boil.  Return squirrel to skillet;  turn to low heat, cover, and cook for about 1 hour, until meat almost leaves bone.  Turn squirrel occasionally and baste often.  Serve with grits, hot biscuits, and honey.
Serves 3 or 4.  Good!
Attributed to Mrs. H.L. Field

DO NOT MAKE THIS IN BREVARD, NC

Sunday, November 25, 2012

November 23, 2012 Over the River and Through the Woods

Yesterday was Thanksgiving in Columbia at the home of John and Colleen and James.  An abundance of food, only three child injuries and not severe.
  I drove home over the river (the Broad) and through the woods (the Sumter      National Forrest) and past the tiny town of Peak where I learn today the body of a woman stabbed to death by her husband was floating even then in the Broad.  Today a body was found burning in a field in Waterloo in Laurens county and another in Asheville.

I am walking in the woods listening to the drumming and tapping of a woodpecker.  I see her as she flies above me to another post.  She is small without a red mark and must be a Downy Woodpecker, who drums and taps messages to her mate.  The drumming and tapping is not the same as the digging for insects.  This message was about the hawk which flew up just moments later.  A single crow also announced the hawk's presence.  A Red Tailed hawk, just like the hero of the book, "Rufus Red Tail" read to us by Miss Sheedy our fourth grade teacher and which she read to generations before and after.  She has been gone long years now and so has the school principal she pined after in vain.

Friday, November 23, 2012

November 18, 2012 The Cottonwood Trail

Another nature walk with Michael, Zack and Shane, 5 years old and 3 years old dressed in yellow and red slickers with hoods.  We saw a hawk and the boys found rocks and sticks and the heart shaped tracks of deer in the mud. We walked the boardwalk over the wetlands, went to see the beaver dam and climbed the ridge trail.

It's a little cooler now.  All the zinnias are brown.  There is a poster proclaiming the Jingle Bell Jog and photos from last year of joggers dressed in Santa Claus gear running the trails.

The Holiday season is on.

November 17, 2012 Glendale Shoals

Michael, Zack and Shane came and we took the boys on a nature walk.  They threw rocks in the Lawson's Fork Creek and along came two big geese, or perhaps they were big ducks floating and flapping down the
water rushing over the rocks.  They thought the boys were feeding them with the rocks.  These were beautiful birds which I cannot find in my two bird books.  One, which I think was the male, was black with red wattles on his beak and the other, a little smaller, but who looked of the same breed, was white with red wattles on her (I think she was a female) on her beak.
After our walk, we came home and drank hot chocolate with marshmallow fluff.

November 11, 2012 Huntersville, NC

A beautiful cool clear early morning in Berkdale where Hanah and Patrick have a new house.  I walked their dog, Zipper (half Cairn and half Yorkie) around their neighborhood.  The next week, Zipper, a previously peace loving creature, bit another dog's ear off.

After my uneventful walk, Hanah, Liza and I took our lives in our hands and went to the Southern Christmas
Show along with about ten thousand other people, mostly insane women.  And we had a good time.

Friday, November 2, 2012

November 1, 2012 Fall in the Wetlands

On the boardwalk, there was a congregation of college students like friendly seals lying on a wharf.  Accompanied by their Environmental Studies professor, they were making notes.  Someone's papers flew into the water.  Several grabbed Boofa by the head or the shoulders and petted him.