Colleen and I drove down yesterday from Columbia, 378 to Sumter, 521 to catch 17 in Georgetown, over the great Wacamaw River Bridge. The weather is fine. The sky is blue with huge cumulous clouds above us. Queen Ann's lace, Philadelphia day lilies, prickly pear with yellow blossoms, a strange spindly tree with bright red flowers, daisies along the way. Hobcaw is just over the bridge on the right where Colleen is to teach a photography class on Saturday and I am going to explore the marshes, creeks and maritime forests of long leaf, lobloly pine and oak. There are 90 miles of dirt roads here, a part of which was the original Kings Highway down the coast.
Belle Baruch, six foot two world traveler, pilot and lover of the land, daughter of Bernard Baruch, Camden native, wall street banker and financial advisor to U.S. presidents and world leaders (who he invited to Hobcaw), bequeathed this land to the State of South Carolina in 1969 (after her death in 1964) with special conditions that it be preserved in its wild state and studied. USC has a Marine Sciences Lab here and Clemson has a center for forestry study.
At 6:30 a.m., I am on a bird walk with 6 others and guide and oceanographer, Dennis A. We visited the feeding site for endangered painted buntings and watched them flying to the feeder and perching in trees. We saw indigo buntings, blue birds, red winged black birds, mocking birds, Carolina wrens, little green herons, little blue herons, white egrets and cardinals. We heard the voice of the mud hen who hides in the tall grasses.
After breakfast, we go out to the ancient shell midden and launch into the creeks and inlets. Bernard Baruch once said that the sky was black with the hundreds of ducks flushed out of the spartina grasses. No more.
We net a bucket of fish and shrimp (there are at least 185 fish species here), name them and throw them back. On the sand bar, there is a huge living horse welk. At a station called Oyster Landing of Crab Haul Creek, there is a webcam on a pier observing the marshes and the sky. Jay P., a marine biologist, tells me that you can go to Baruch.SC.Edu and through the webcam, watch the inlet, marsh and creek, the storms that come up over the horizon, the spartina grasses waving in the breezes and turning green to gold.
That night, Tim M., Ph.D, tells us that at Chernobyl and Fukushima, the barn swallows have white spots now. Some have tumors. The African Mask beetles have distorted markings. Where they once had the markings that looked like two dark eyes, painted features of nose and mouth, they may have one eye, a nose that wrapped around their head, mouth spots fading into a chin.
John and James meet us the next day and we spend the day on the beach, making a sand castle, celebrating James' 6th birthday and picnicing.
Driving home, through curtains of great black and white clouds of sun and rain, I spot a rainbow, resplendent over the changing world.
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