June 1, 2013 Andrew Jackson State Park "The Garden of the Waxhaws"

This state park is between Rock Hill and Lancaster near the junction of Hwy 5 and 521.  I take my old route to Rock Hill through Jonesville and Lockhart and then on hwy 5 to the park. On the side of the road now are daisies (called Day's Eye by the Anglo Saxons) and Queen Anne's Lace or wild carrot. The myth about this flower is that Queen Anne nicked herself with the needle while crocheting lace and the drop of blood fell into the center of the white blossom.  Here and there I see new corn fields rising from the earth.

On the radio Deepak Chopra is talking, saying that "matter is not matter, everything is atoms moving, that everything comes from nothing"

This park is beside the birthplace of Andrew Jackson, the 7th president and has a museum dedicated to him and to his time and place.  There are several buildings: a log cabin school house built for the area's centennial, and a Meeting House in the manner of the old Presbyterian Scotch Irish Settler's churches.

There are two short trails of a mile each. One is the Crawford trail which begins by the Meeting House and loops through the pine and hardwood forest. When I step on to the trail, I am engulfed by a woodsy fragrance which I recognize from my childhood.  It haunts me with the aromatic memory of my mother's family who lived in the country of Lancaster County.  I had noticed that the ranger had had the Upcountry twang of my uncles.

The Garden of the Waxhaws Trail circles the blue lake and is named after the Native American tribe, the Waxhaws, who once lived and hunted here.  They had a practice of laying a small bag of sand on their infants' forehead that created a wide flat upper face so that they were called "Flatheads" by the settlers. They had been friendly to the European settlers, but had begun to die from small pox and the other diseases they brought to them by the 1700's. The Yemassee War of 1715 decimated them.  The remaining survivors are thought to have been assimilated by the Catawba.

There are people in rented john boats on the lake, campers nearby in the woods, a young man swimming just out beyond a sign that says:  No Swimming, some sun bathers on the grass over the spillway.

There are boardwalks over the swampy places of the trail where the water is rust colored and cloudy as black tea with milk .  Boofa and I come to a dead box turtle, the size of a football with a long crack in his shell. He is covered with black and yellow carrion beetles who are turning the turtle into beetle.  I hear Deepak Chopra again in my mind:

"Matter is not matter
everything is atoms moving
everything comes from nothing"

On the lake there is a long line of Canadian Geese, a couple with 3 goslings, another couple with 5 goslings.

I am giving Boofa a dish of water at my car when an old red pickup truck comes up beside me.  The driver is a handsome broad faced woman with long straight black hair and burnished coppery skin.  She asks me where there is a place to grill their picnic food.  I point up the hill near the playground. She has a friendly group of young kids and two older people with her. They say "I like your dog".

I believe I have met the conservator of the Garden of the Waxhaws, the one who remains, the one whose ancestors lived and died here.