July 25, 26, 27 28, 2014 A Snake Skin on the Banks of the Creek

Everyday, it is so hot, that the thunder storms that sometimes crack the darkening sky in the afternoons seem like the monsoons of the Rajasthan desert.  Everyday at dawn, I go to the Cottonwood Trail before the intense heat.  The storms have done little to fill the wetlands back up.  The reeds are turning brown reaching up from the mud.  One morning I can see not one but two Great Blue Herons perched high up in the tops of the dead trees in the wetlands.  There are deer tracks in the mud.  There is a flock of goldfinches careening around in the damp warm air. A doe picks her way through the bending grasses.

One day, I hear the deep and distant chanting of a large group of human beings.  They are coming closer, breaking the orchestral music of the cicadas, the crickets and the birds with their "sound off".  A group of ROTC students with their leaders are marching through the forest, calling out their sound off.

As children, we had a sound off that went like this:

I left my wife and 49 kids,
the old gray mare
and the peanut shells.
All because I thought it was right,
Right,
Right through the cornfield
Right by jingo (skip into the air and change feet)
Left
Left
Left
I left my wife and 49 kids
the old gray mare
and the peanut shells
Without any hamburgers
Left
left

Another day, I found a snake skin curled on the bank high over the creek.  I took it home.
The skin can mean, change, rebirth, the sloughing off of the old ways that are no longer viable.

July 13, 2015 Great White Swamp Flowers

At dawn, the wetlands are dry as a bone, still as the grave.  Hardly a bird sings, too early  now for the cicadas.  It  is overcast with white clouds, windless, airless without a leaf stirring, already  70 degrees.

All of the worshipers at the Emanual Church have been laid to rest.  The Confederate battle flag has been taken down from the statehouse grounds.  The people sang: Na, na, na na...Na na na naaaa...goodbye.

All across the drying wetlands, swamp flowers are in glorious bloom. Giant white blossoms, deep dark red at the base of the stamens.

July 7, 2015 From the Harbor River to Johnson's Creek

We have rented a house on Harbor Island in the woody section with a big porch over an alligator pond.  On the first night there was thunder and lightening and heavy rain. We stayed on the porch.

 This island lies where the Harbor River empties into St. Helena Sound.  In the morning I have walked along the beach from the Harbor River, south to Johnson's Creek.  An old draw bridge spans the river. Along the water's edge is the black sticky pluff mud of the wide marshes.  There are many conch shells scattered in the sand. Each one is inhabited by a hermit crab.  There are fishermen along the shore and shrimp boats on the horizon.  There are many sea birds, ibis, herons, gulls.  Here it is a bird sanctuary.  Great flocks fly out into the sky in the early morning and at sunset they return  to roost in the trees and bushes along the inlets.

There are few people swimming in the ocean. There have been seven shark attacks along the North Carolina beaches and one here beside us at Hunting Island.  The children have splashed and played in the tidal pools.

Fran, the Turtle Lady, has told us there are 47 sea turtle nests this year.  None have opened yet.  The first one at Fripp opened this week.  Hunting Island has 79.  Near Johnson's creek, there is a large roped off area where there are several nests.  Here when the tide is out and the beach is very very wide, there are many stranded horse shoe crabs.  I can see the light house across the creek beyond the trees.

June 20, 2015 "All That's Beautiful"

Waking from sleep, I remember that something bad has happened, something that can't be undone.
I hit the trail in the wetlands with my dog.

The sun still shines. The birds still sing.  The dark leaves of summer are still on the trees.

Soon, the funerals will begin.

A child-man with the bowl haircut of a toddler, has taken down the devout, who were praying in the Mother Church in the Holy City.  It was not a toy gun, it was a birthday present.

There has been a heat wave. The water in the wetlands is low, full of minnows, the sky full of  birds.

The fluffy white cottonwood seeds are falling on the shards of river birch bark on the floor of the trail.  They drift floating down the creek into the dark wood.

"I heard the old old men say:
All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters."

W.B. Yeats

June 14, 2015 Atlanta's Fourth Ward Park

Built in 2011, the park joins the extended trail of the Atlanta Beltway and on Father's Day, next Sunday, June 21, there will be a Family Walk through this park and further on.  This scorching hot evening, after an outdoor supper nearby in the              Grill, I walk with Eleanor, Ryan and Mathew  around the lake and gardens salvaged from a trash strewn landscape of storm water runoff and flooding.  It serves now as a retention basin.  This urban greenscape of blooming grasses and plants is a haven for ducks, geese and human beings in the middle of the city.

Across the way, looms the seven story Ponce City Market (previously the Sears Building), now restored with shops, apartments and restaurants.

We walk around the lake to the tune of bullfrogs croaking and up around the playground where an extended family is grilling and celebrating a luau.  All the young girls are dressed in swim suits with grass shirts and leis of flowers around their necks, flowers in their hair.

We pass a drunk sprawled out on a bench, mumbling obscenities to his own demons, his bicycle parked beside him.  When we return and pass by again, he is passed out and silent.

June 7, 2015 In the Wetlands, the Luna Moth

It is the magic hour.  Early mist drifts up from the Lawson's Ford Creek.  A man is photographing a luna moth. He has found it lying on the bridge over the creek.  In death, it is perfect, a pale luminous green, white body with intact antennae, and on its wings painted eyes to  freighten predators.  It lives in the night world of scents of flowers and grasses, the blossoms of trees, hickory, sweet gum and birch.

On the boardwalk over the wetlands, another photographer is carrying his camera approaching me. He tells me that he has just seen a doe with two fauns, no more than a day or two old.

A large dead tree has fallen across the boardwalk. I brush against blackberries, now pink and red and soon to be black and ripe.  May has been the time for strawberries, soon to be over. Before they are gone, make shortcake.

This is how my mother made strawberry shortcake:

OLD FASHIONED STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE


Slice one quart of strawberries and cover with one cup sugar. Let sit.

Make dough.
2 cups flour
2 Tbsp sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
1/3 cup shortening
1 cup milk
light cream or whipped cream

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Grease cookie sheet
Combine flour, sugar, baking power and salt in bowl.
Cut in shortening.
Stir in milk.
Pat dough into a large rectangle one a a half inch thick on cookie sheet.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes.
Split cake while warm.
Spread with butter.
Fill with berries.

Serve warm with cream.

May, 30, 2015 Hobcaw Barony: The Lost World

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.