Lake George Warren State Park is diagonally all the way across the state of South Carolina and nearly to Savannah. It is a fine, cool dawn with a low sky like a folded white blanket, as if a white sky were painted by water color pushing the brush along the seams with a transparent gray paint.
I take Hwy 56 past the South Carolina School for the Deaf and Blind where horses in a green pasture behind a white fence are munching their breakfast.
I get gas at Pauline General Store ($1.79.9 the cheapest in 11 years). There are porch rockers with little cypress knee tables between them. Farmers are going in and out with steaming cups of coffee in one hand, a newspaper in the other shaking off sleep from their eyes. Inside is a tub filled with iced soft drinks, tables, a bar and grill with a variety of homemade warm flakey biscuits filled with sausage, ham, eggs, cheese and bacon. For me, it's a sausage with grape jelly which I eat in the car.
Along the way, the deep green trees stand silently with the expectation of the fall to come, an inner knowing of the beginning of the autumnal equinox to be, that will change them.
Near Bobo's Taxidermy, there is a fluffy tailed fox in the road which vanishes into the bushes. Beside the road there is yellow mullen, black eyed susans, wild yellow indigo. On the radio a haunting voice is singing Ave Maria from the 9-11 Memorial of last night in New York.
I pass by Belfast Plantation in Newberry County and just afterwards the Little River-Dominick Presbyterian Church established in 1761. The building is red brick with blue stained glass windows. Little River flows nearby.
I get Hwy 39 at Chapells where the Fire and Rescue is having a Barbeque today, drive over the Saluda, past the Centro Cristiano Pentecostes Vida Abundante Church (pastor: Jose Gonzales) in Saluda, listening to country music on the radio:
"He's a Heartache Waiting to Happen"
I am on the Uncle Bill Eargle Memorial Highway. A Farm has Brahmins. Tall purple ironweed grows on the side of mowed down corn fields. The morning glories everywhere are pink. In the Upstate, they are usually purple, rose and sky blue. At Ridge Springs the Derrick John Deere Store has dozens of bright shining green tractors. There is a sidewalk sale today in town. There are antique stores, The Nut House pecan store, Dixie Belle Peaches. This and the next towns are set in pecan groves, cotton fields and peach orchards. Over I-20 I am on the Old Ninety Six Indian Trail. There is the New Holland Memonite Church and I am going through Salley, "Home of the Chitlin Strut". After Springfield there are four or five bridges; the middle one goes over the South Fork of the Edisto River.
I hear on the radio, that people were walking on the Haje to Mecca when a crane collapsed, killing many.
On the Camino de Santiago, a young American woman is missing from her pilgrimage, leaving behind her belongings in a back pack. Across Europe, thousands of refuges are walking, floating on rubber rafts, running, jumping on trains, suffocating in trucks, drowning, searching for freedom for themselves and a future for their children, escaping from wars in the Middle East and North Africa.
On the radio, Judy Collins is singing the Leonard Cohen "Hallelujah".
I have finally come to Denmark where the Nelson's have the best bakery in South Carolinna, maybe in the world and I buy donuts which melt in your mouth. Besides this world class Memonite bakery, Denmark has the Dane Theater converted to a Cultural Center and Voorhis College and Denmark Tech.
Soon, I think I lose Hwy 39 and stop at Bulldog Cycles where they are having an open house. I ask directions from a group of tatooed, black leather vested senior citizens who kindly show me the way and soon past Gifford, turning onto Hwy 363, I find Warren Lake and the entrance to the State Park.
The Williams Family, wearing bright red Tee shirts which declare "Family is Everything" and "Williams", are having a cookout and even putting up a big inflated bouncy house on the athletic field for the kids.
Coming up from the children's play ground and leaving the Nature Trail which goes down near the lake, is a group of people, four young men and two women, who startle me by looking like apparitions of the Syrian and Iranian refugees who are fleeing into Europe. One woman wears a long traditional subtlely flowered dress with yazma head scarf. But they are smiling and well fed. They give me directions to both trails. They are from Lebanon and will soon be U.S. citizens.
I take first the little Nature trail, only .3 mile and then the Fit Trail. All along the way, there are exercise stations-- "A good walk ruined" as Mark Twain once said of the sport of golf.
Then I take 1.5 mile trail which is extremely well kept and marked. Growing there are pink Butterfly Pea vines with little flowers and floating through the forest air is a beautiful brown butterfly (could this be the Wild Indigo Dusky Wing?). On a pond float Fragrant White Water Lillies ( Nymphaea adorata).
Going home, I take 321 up to Columbia. On the way in the crossroads of Neeses is the gargantuan Piggly Wiggly, which has a pharmacy, a florist and even a large restaurant inside.
Nearing home, there is a swath of blue peaking out over gigantic cumulus clouds piled on the horizon, the kind of clouds that have a silver lining, at least that is the way I see them.
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