Late summer at the state park

Oh it was HOT today.. Mid August in South Carolina is not for the faint of heart. The heat hangs heavy like wet blankets. The air had a rather calming stillness, however, and this made for a slow, languid and enjoyable walk at the state park this afternoon.

First, down to the tidal marsh and creek where a very slight wind gave some measure of relief, but not enough. I then headed to one of my favorite benches under the live oaks, and the shade there was welcome but no real compensation for the thick humidity. But this is summer in the South, and I have determined not to stay away from my favorite outdoor walking destinations just because the heat index is 100 degrees F. I try to pick times late in the afternoon when it's a bit breezy and the worst of the heat is past. Today it didn't work out that well as I was drenched in sweat with just a half mile amble among the oaks.

Still, it is a glorious place to be even in the depths of summer, the outside world completely shut out and this natural haven opening its arms to enfold me within it's beauty and tranquility. I never tire of the great live oaks, the small lakes, and the walk along the tidal creek and marsh. It's all so enchanting, so soul-satisfying. I need this place for the balm it offered my hurting spirit today. Just being there amidst all that natural beauty granted me respite and relief, and I shall return again and again.

Here are some photos I took while at the park this afternoon. I think they convey the mood I have tried to describe.

Oh, Mother Gibbs, I never realized before how troubled and how... how in the dark live persons are. Look at him. I loved him so. From morning till night, that's all they are--troubled.

Emily in Our Town by Thornton Wilder

Some friends were down here from northern Virginia last week staying at Folly Beach. We go back a long way to 1973 in Columbia. They were staying at the beach for the week, and so I had a chance to visit and catch up with their lives and to reminisce. I tend to do that around S....

She lived with my aunt for a number of years while she was teaching in South Carolina, and so she was like family. That was back in the early and mid-70s, as I alluded to, and of course the passage of 34 years seems almost impossible to comprehend. She has two children in college and so i got to see how much they have been changing and growing up.

Around the dinner table I talked about my first job in Columbia working in shipping and receiving part time at a department store while I took courses at the university. I recalled the old boarding house where I rented a room in a leafy old neighborhood. (Aside.. I am listening to Over the Rainbow played on the piano by Art Tatum.. the song that I have been thinking about is Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John which was constantly playing on the radio back in the fall of 1973. I love life's little "coincidences.")

We had a nice visit, but i often feel vaguely unsettled and awkward in such situations. It is difficult for me to socialize although I am an outgoing person when the sitauation requires it. I am so seldom around people other than at work that when i get around a large group for dinner I tend to try to be too talkative and entertaining just to keep from being silent and awkward.

I seem to be most content when I am walking the trails at the park and nature preserve or sitting by myself at the beach listening to the waves and thinking deeply or about nothing at all. Before I went to have supper one night with S... and her family, I stood out on the beach with a rush of wind blowing through my hair, wishing I could just stay where I was and not have to be convivial and talkative.

After I left their beach house, I drove downtown to the pier and walked into the ocean on that long pier, taking in all the sounds of the vacationers strolling along, talking, listening to the ocean, observing people fishing and just enjoying themselves on a carefree summer night.

I was there on the pier only a few minutes and then left for home, stopping first at my mother's where another ghost from the past popped up on TV -- a documentary about the main character George Gibbs in Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town. What memories that brought back. Not ony have I seen it in various adaptations on TV over the years, but in high school our whole school was bussed to the Reportory Theater in downtown New Orleans for a presentation of that play, one of the first I had ever seen in a live performance.

My whole day was like that.. a series of moments that sent me back to the past time and again, whether reminiscing with old friends or walking on the Folly Pier, thinking about summer vacations there as a kid in the 1960s when life really did "seem" more carefree for a short while, although for me i know it wasn't. Life has never been carefree, never free of worry and anxiety, although that anxiety and angst resided mostly right below the surface as i tried to live as engaged with life and people as i could be.

I often see my life in little incidents, good and bad times, passing before me in my mind's eye. I wince at sudden, painful memories, I smile as I think about some of the funny times and people I have known. But isn't it strange how the bad times seem to come back to us almost with a punishing delight on the part of our memory? I don't think we can ever put those parts of our past behind us.. We just live with them.

Minutia

Twelve years in one place and the bits and pieces of a life really accumulate. I have reached a point of total satiety. I need major, big time fung shui or something akin to that. I need to clean out and organize. I cannot stand the boxes and boxes of "stuff" lying around anymore. The piles of books on the floor and in the closets. The flotsam and jetsam of many years, hidden in those boxes, some with lids on, some open. I am throwing away stuff, recycling magazines and giving away books the past few weeks. Boxes and boxes. It's painful, yet I know it must be done.

I need to free up space on my shelves for books that I treasure and know I want to keep. Since I am a compulsive book buyer -- new and used -- there is no giving it up altogether. I like to know books are there, unread repositories of knowledge, deep thought, humor, lives lived, science explored, pasts recalled, society documented in photographs. All this wealth of knowledge and yet I know I can never read or know but a fraction of what is there. It's easier to sit on the computer and wile away the hours on the Internet, the modern-day multimedia, entertainment, commucation device/drug that cradles me in it's cocoon and shuts out the immediate world in favor of one lived in cyberspace.

But leaving cyberspace I am confronted everywhere in my immediate, four-room physical environment with the saved objects that, daily over the years, accumulate and which, upon inspection with the intent to get rid of, remind me of the life I have lived, the tiniest and most concrete souvenirs and valued papers, clippings, photos, and "objects" which for one reason or another have lasted and endured, even if never looked at or thought about them for years.

Still, like the unread books in piles overflowing on the floor beneath the full bookshelves, these "documents" and objects form the patchwork quilt that is the continuing narrative of my life. I discard these things at some subtle level of psychic peril, with regret and with the pain of loss, but with resignation that once I have looked them over and decided what to throw away, there is no going back.. small parts of me are gone forever. This is one reason the sudden loss of all ones precious keepsakes in a flood or fire is so devastating. Not just photo albums, but a lifetime of memories called to mind by the simple, ordinary things we acquire and hesitate to part with, help us to know who we are now. They are in a sense, part of our identity.

I share with you now just one tny corner of this world of objects, papers and books that I am surrounded by, in this instance the contents of an inverted boxtop, one of those lids that seal security storage boxes. This lies on top of two sealed boxes, whose contents are unknown to me.

*** a beautiful Zen wall calendar from 2004 with magical quotations and black and white photos of great beauty and profundity.

*** A copy fo Yahoo Internet Life magazine from June 2000.

*** A 2007 Nature Conservancy wall calendar that I took down just the other week, I think because there were already two other calendars on the dining room walls.

*** A copy of Natural Awakenings Healthy Living Magazine for June 2007

*** The National Geographic Special Publications book, "Raging Forces: Life on a Violent Planet," just what I need to see as hurricane season enters its busiest two months here on the the coast of South Carolina.

*** Two old Life magazines, collectors' issues I am sure, from December 1966 and November 1970. The cover story on one was "The Draft: Who Beats it and How" and the cover on the other is, Co-ed Dorms: An Intimate Revolution on Campus." I found these at the used books place and will not be tossing them any time soon. These are a chronicle of life during the time of my youth.

*** A John Ford Clymer painting that is the cover of an issue of the old Saturday Evening Post magazine, a bucolic country scene, sentimental and romanticized.

*** A solicitation from the American Diabetes Association.

*** A photo copy of an article from an old magazine about books titled, "Books Carve Your Character."

** A brochure for Charleston's Piccolo Spoleto Festival with a magnificent photo of Angel Oak on the cover.

*** A picture of a landscape at sunset on fund-raising material from the Southern Environmental Law Center.

*** A photo of my favorite barbecue buffet restaurant way out in the country.

*** A thank you card from someone I helped at work in February 2006.

*** A state Audubon Society newsletter from March 2006.

*** A Nature Conservancy newsletter

*** Copies of articles printed from the Internet back in March 2006: one about "Peak Oil" in Salon.com; another on Leo Strauss, the father of neoconservativsm; an interview on Working for Change with Erik Reece about strip mining in Appalachia; and a copy of the poem "To a Skylark" by Percy Shelley ("Hail to thee, blyhe spirit!/Bird thou never wert,/That from Heaven or near it,/Pourest thy full heart/In profuse strains of unpremeditated art...."

*** More newspaper clippings and a brochure for the "South Carolina Birds: A Fine Arts Exhibition" held at the City Gallery in Charleston in April 2006.

*** A 2005 Texas Highways wall calendar.

*** The book, "Standing Up Country: The canyon lands of Utah and Arizona."

*** A photo greeting card I bought at the farmer's market of a beach scene with sea oats.

*** At the bottom, a travel pack of antibacterial hand and face wipes (Wet Ones) and an unopened package of Dr. Scholl's corn removers. (Just in case)

Midsummer

I’m on the beach in the middle of the day, in the middle of July. It’s low tide and a very different beach from the one I visited yesterday evening when the tide was high and there was barely enough room to set up a chair between the sea oats and the water.

The ocean is now quite a ways off from the dunes. People are out sunning, watching, reading, baking under a hot sun. A small child is building a sand castle with elaborate turrets of wet sand dripped from his hands. A teenager has just dashed into the waves, cooling off quickly, exuberantly.

This whole tableaux is timeless. It’s like the days stand still, motionless in the wind-tempered heat. My niece and nephew, here from the perpetually cool Pacific Northwest, are reveling in the wind and surf, and water they can actually swim in that isn’t 56 degrees in the middle of summer.

I remember when we’d come to this beach in the 1960s for summer vacation, leaving New Orleans behind for a week or 10 days. What a different world it was here! We’d arrive, unpack a few things, and then race out to the beach. That first day of vacaton seemed to promise an unbroken expanse of carefree days stretching to the horizon. The days passed, and we hungrily clung to each one, filling as much of it as we could out on the beach -- taking walks, swimming, body surfing, lying in the sun, listening to the radio, observing the passing scene as the hours went by.

At about 1 pm, we’d struggle in for lunch, sun-ripened, hot, a bit flushed, and ready for some air conditioning. My favorite lunch was a cheese sandwich with fresh summer tomatoes and mayonnaise on soft white bread, the kind of sandwich that was so delicious on a beach day, and which invariably clung to the roof of your mouth. This would be washed down with an ice-cold Fresca, a soft drink they don’t bottle any more, as far as I know.

Toward the end of the week, as the glorious vacation drew to a close, the pain of impending separation became more intense. Our steps were heavier. We did things a bit more slowly. We savored each hour on the beach more than ever.

I realized that summer was fleeting, school beckoned once again in a few weeks, and a part of my youth was slipping away, although I didn’t think in those terms at the time, of course. The endless summers never lasted long enough those many years ago, and they were gone before we knew it.

Sometimes, like today, I feel like a smoothly functioning machine, all cylinders effortlessly providing the power to move me through a day that has one task after another to be accomplished, some simultaneously, it seems. I marvel at this ability to answer phones, do Internet research, talk and joke with co-workers, work on a project that has to be sent off in a series of e-mails, remember to write a going-away card for someone, attend a farewell lunch, answers more questions, write, pick up the phone, answer e-mail and voice mail...on and on.

Today was so busy that it seemed as if I was caught up a swirling tempest of activitity, little tasks and big ones, one right after another, that had to be done and when done, were to be replaced by other tasks that had to be accomplished. All in a ceaseless movement, orchestrated by me in some kind of orderly fashion, but yet part of an unconscious design, too. It all had to be done, and therefore, it would be. I felt myself doing too much, and yet I was so caught up in it all that I couldn’t stop and slow down. People were depending on me. I was depending on myself. The day passed liked a speeding arrow.

At one point, after two hours of work on an e-mail, I sat back, pressed the send button, and discovered, without any notice or warning, that I had been timed out, logged off, and with that fateful click, lost everything I had been working on. I struggled with my disbelief and anger only momentarily, received some knowing sympathy from a co-worker, and then went to my desk, opened a fresh template, and by sheer force of will rewrote the whole thing plus anther e-mail in one hour flat. Afterwards, I wondered: where on earth did I find the means and strength to do all that?

Three and one half hours later, after sitting by the waters of a tidal creek near the beach to eat seafood, wind buffeting me off the marsh, I at last began to wind down, slowed by both necessity and pleasant surroundings. I wasn’t a machine anymore, flawlessly energized, pistons firing.

Walking on the beach as darkness fell, calm now, ocean sounds greeting the twilight, the day was past. The elements seemed joined in proper perspective -- the darkening sky, the land, the sea. All was harmony with nature. The day just past was harmonized only to some frantic human clock of schedules, deadlines, people waiting for answers and replies. Fortunately, I was able to reply. But on that brief oceanside walk this evening, I didn’t have to listen to anything but the wind and the waves.

Sand castles

Yesterday evening about 8, I drove out to Folly Beach to sit awhile in my chair and wait for sunset and the close of the day. I read a favorite book off and on. It was one of those summer days that was too perfect. We’ve had rain recently to quench the drought, and today the temps were in the upper 80s, there was a nice breeze, just right, and the skies -- how can I describe them? Such clarity that all the colors were saturated perfectly and crystal clear. The blues were unmistakeably blue. The white cumulous clouds seemed irridescent. The Spartina grass in the marshes has attaned its soft, pastel summmer-green shades, signifying to me that life in this estuarine environment must now be at its summer peak.

In short, the summer world I observed all around me seemed to be in perfect harmony. Everything was just right. It was a day when you could really feel glad to be alive and experiencing all this beauty in the world.

As the light of day gradually yielded to evening’s lenghtening shadows, and the people who had been out on the beach went inside or left for the day, I found myself contemplating the moment when I, too, would pack up and head in. I waited a little longer. Thin clouds over the ocean glowed with color. The sky was still illuminated, but the land was growing darker. However, land and sky would soon be as one as night fell.

As I listened to the surf’s ceaseless sound upon the shore, I noticed, as I sometimes do, individual waves crashing on the beach with quick, little jabs at the shore. They stand out. They quickly subside. The larger waves have a rather full-throated roar about them as their full force spends itself in a smooth outpouring of energy, rhythmic and soothing most of the time, but sometimes strangely discordant as it momentarily seems like noise instead of the steady, gentle sound I’ve heard all my life at that same place on the Atlantic Ocean.

I watched an older couple walking along the beach, just before I went in and recall thinking how robust and healthy they seemed. Middle or late 60s I would guess, but there was something about them that seemed to defy the march of time. I suppose it is good to be as vigorous and active as you can be at any age.

One of the things I like most about being at the beach is the chance to observe people. Families are here now for their vacations, and I see all the various generations enjoying their summer routines.

And, when I go out to take my place in this seasonal tableaux of carefree existence, I almost invariably see someone’s abandoned sand castle, sometimes elaborate, sometimes very simple, left standing until the next incoming tide crumbles its loosely-packed walls, turrets, and moats and sends them all back into the ocean.

As I observed one up close the other day, I noticed that the builder’s name, Jared, was inscribed on one of the walls. I wondered how much fun he had had constructing that castle out of his imagination, and I remembered how I would sit for what seemed like hours at the water’s edge letting wet sand drip from my fingers to ornament my own youthful sand castles, watching closely the approach of the waves and building up my fortress ceaselessly as the water washed parts of it away. Then, finally, a big waves would come and inundate the whole thing, and I’d have to take my plastic bucket and shovel and go to another spot and start all over again. As children we didn’t seem to mind starting all over. It was all play and not the serious business of older kids and adults.

Sand castles. I haven’t built one in a long time.

White clapboard house and washtub

Two vignettes and one wished for:

I put up calendars on the walls in my rooms, and many of them have scenes and paintings I like to look at repeatedly. They are soothing. They relax this restless soul, who from time to time takes a break from the computer to see what the world outside is like, or was like in another age.

I’m looking at a picture in late May. It’s of a white clapboard house in the country with a woman sitting on the front porch shelling peas. Windows are open to catch the breeze, wash is on the line drying. A cat is on the bottom stoop of the steps leading to the kitchen. Part of a big maple tree is becoming fully leafed out. In the yard and surrounding the house are flowers -- daylillies and impatiens. An old pump is in the yard, too, with a blue bucket attached to the spout to receive cold, fresh water from the well it draws from. Shadows from the sun create a mosaic of light and dark spot on the grass. The cat is looking directly at me. The scene is frozen in time. Sometime in the 19th century. Fifty years ago. 75. I can’t tell. But contained in that little world, depicted in that calendar painting, is a universe of right order, hard work, gentlesness of spirit, goodness of heart.

The other scene is in autumn. A country house, but large, a big porch this time, surrounded by tall trees. A white picket fence. A swing in a tree. Two boys and a girl on their bikes heading for the dirt road in front of the house. The dirt road winds into the distance toward low hills and mountains, among other houses, barns and fields. Maybe it’s Connecticut or New England. At least, that what it reminds me of, and of how much I would love to visit New England some day and drive down such a country road, so different from the ones in my own piney woods of Lowcountry South Carolina.

Another scene I’d like to see: An old country store with people gathered in front in chairs and on benches, leaning back, taking in a quiet, late summer afternoon in the country. Hardly a car passing by on the road. Inside are old-fashioned jars filled with candy, and long wooden counters, and hardware supplies, and general merchandise -- all you’d really need, mostly, for a simple life. And I’d stop my car and get out and walk in the front screen door with the Merita Bread sign on it, and head for the soft drink case, open the lid, put my coins in, and retrieve a bottle of the iciest cold, Orange Nehi drink that ever quenched a thirst in July, and with it eat some crackers, and walk around in the store, smelling the good smells, hearing the old floorboards creak as I walk on them, looking up at the ornamental pressed tin panels in the old ceiling from when the building was constructed in the last centry. And I’d sigh a sigh of relief and satisfaction, knowing that not all of these places were lost to the world of megamalls and hard-driven commercial appetites, and traffic and noise with not much quiet civilization left. I am transported out of the present, and I wish it would last.

Four Holes Swamp

Deep, dark, murky, forbidding? Not at all. Saturday afternoon was spent walking a boardwalk trail deep into the interior of a bald cypress/tupelo river system known as Four Holes Swamp, located in the rural interior of South Carolina. It is a place of soaring 1,000-year old cypress trees, and clear, tea-colored water flowing in braided channels through the bottomland to join with the main stem of the river/swamp system. It is an oxygen factory. The air is clean, and light filters down to illumine flowing water and sunken logs. Nothing is ever done by man to alter this pristine environment -- the last remaining such virgin stand of this type of swamp forest left in the world, spared decades ago by a far-sighted lumberman named Francis Beidler, for whom the protected forest is named.

The only sounds to be heard during my walk were birdsong. Approximately 140 species of birds have been found here as well as numerous species of trees, including an astonishing variety of oaks, hickories, and elms, many of which are suited to watery environments. But there are pockets of higher ground where upland varieties of hardwoods can flourish. It is a place of amazing diversity, a refuge for the soul and spirit. A visit there never ceases to lift me up and out of the sordid realities of the world outside with its work tensions, bad news in the media, traffic, congestion and pollution. Here you enter a realm free from all that. It has been left to the forces of nature, all 11,000 preserved acres of the swamp.

As I sat on a bench overlooking Goodson Lake, about half way down the trail, a man whispered for me to look up into the tree overhead. There I saw a nest with what appeared to be two fledging blue herons, quietly waiting for their next meal. What a sight to see in my binoculars! By this point there were occasional little breezes stirring the leaves, but only temporarily. It was generally a still day which only made the quietness of the place seem more pervasive. And it was not hot at all for this time of year in South Carolina. It was, in fact, a very pleasant day. I can’t say I’d want to be walking this trail in mid-July, however.

One of the amazing things about this place is the water that flows across the swamp in narrow braided channels or else in flatter sheets with just barely perceptible movement, at least at this time of year. In summer it will all be dry except for the main swamp channel. From the boardwalk you can look down when the sun if out from behind the clouds, as it was intermittently Saturday, and see perfect reflection of the trees and foliage in the water. With a slight wind, these reflections shimmer and then become still again.

All those who love this place -- and people from all over the world come here -- are watching the results of court and other actions designed to stave off two area developers who have taken advantage of non-existing zoning laws in the rural county this swamp flows through and are attempting to build a major motor speedway for car races just one mile from the borders of the preserve. It has been a two-year fight thus far, and, as of now, the end result seems hopeful for the preserve. It is inconceivable that someone would want to destroy the ingegrity of this place with noise and pollution from cars spinning around a track, but that is what has happened. There is no limit to the depths to which some people will sink in their contempt and utter disregard for the natural world and those who care deeply about it. To them that pristine forest is nothing but a bunch of woods and swamp that should be drained and developed. Nothing is worth saving to them.

As I walked the remaining half mile or so of the trail up through slightly higher ground in the swamp, past huge overcup oaks and soaring tulip trees, I saw half a dozen egrets, take flight from their watery perches and fly off into nearby trees. Then there was silence once again.

Forest trail

After a two hour drive through rural South Carolina countryside, green and lush with spring and on a day that was mild and cool with a gentle breeze, I arrived at the wildlife sanctuary. Before me was a two-mile long gravel road that led to a complex of buidlings, including an old farmstead and house. Around a bend, I headed toward the trail that led to the Savannah River.

Winding down this road I entered an area of near wildernes, or so it seemed. All sounds from the outside had long disappeared to be repalced by wind and birdsong. I pulled up to a picnic area alongside a small lake filled with huge cypress trees. I turned off the engine and soaked up the peace of this most special place I had wanted to visit for some years.

After a short time spent in contemplation and wonder at the lake, I made my way to the trailhead and entered a world of deep green, shade and the most astonishing array of birdsong I have heard in some time. To my left was a swamp bottomland forest filled with oaks of every variety and to my right was the cypress lake. Such a contrast -- two very different natural worlds on either side of the trail.

As I walked deeper into the woods, I found myself listening to the rustling of squirrels foraging in the woods. I spotted a small armodillo burrowiing into the soft earth, oblivious to my presence. Blue-wiinged butterflies danced ahead of me on the trail. And above all else, the wondrous songs of the birds that filled this forest of old growth trees, a place primeval and unspoiled.

Alone amidst this natural wonder, I found it very difficult to turn around and head back to where I had started. I wanted to hold onto the moments of grace found here. But life is change. The time for departure would soon be upon me. What memories I hold onto and cherish as I look back on that trip just a few days in the past.

Webb Wildlife Center

Of nature and mystery

I want to share with you a quote from another journal writer who gives eloquent testimony to the wonders of the natural world. She writes from the northern part of the U.S. Midwest:

"I can’t imagine not wanting to know this world of green-ness and birdsong. I can’t ever imagine that I have learned all I want to learn about it. As I looked out over the marsh and watched a heron fly overhead, I wanted to embrace this world and become part of it again, where eveyrthing matters and nothing seems foolish..."

I just thought these words spoke very directly to me and my own experiences. At the beach where I go to often to escape the cares of the city, my brother’s house faces on one side a vast marsh of spartina grass and tidal creeks, a flowing sea and estuarine world all to its own. It is over those marshes that we have watched many a glorious sunset. On the front side of the house, across the road is the ocean and the beach we have been going to for decades. It is a timeless place.

The other day I was sitting out there watching two pelicans soar overhead and then fly out over the ocean just offshore. They are magnificent birds with long wingspans that seem to belong to this place as much as the tiniest crabs burrowing in the sand or the seemingly modest clusters of sea oats holding down the dunes and preventing erosion. It is a world of salt air and the steady rhythm of waves breaking onshore.

There is no place I know where the tensions of the world, which can be so oppressive and stomach churning, are so gradually and steadily worn away and placed in the dustbin of negative emotions where they belong. Freed from tension, even if only temporarily, I am able to breathe more deeply of the clean air and set my sights on higher things than exist merely in this world of great perils. Of the beauty I seek, I can find it here in abundance, at this beach and beside this vast ocean.

Little Black Creek

Recently I wrote about a special river I liked to go canoing on years ago, Black Creek in the southern Mississippi piney woods. Along one stretch of that stream, one of its major tributaries, called, appropriately enough, Little Black Creek, joined the main river, at which point the stream increased significantly in size.

At the meeting point, the character of the river changed -- it became wider, the sand bars were more noticeable, and it had a different flow. When I came to this place, I’d bank the canoe and walk up Little Black Creek, whose swift flow over white sand felt good on my feet. I was tempted to keep walking up the stream and explore, because that is one of the fascinations of rivers and creeks -- those mysterious bends and turns where new scenery and landmarks appear constantly, the farther you explore up or down the creek.

I’d also walk along a trail beside Black Creek, occassionally clamboring down the steep bank to the river bottom where I might set up a chair and sit awhile to read and daydream. It’s part of a long hiking trail that goes through some of the most remote sections of that part of Mississippi. Actually, it’s almost got a wilderness feel to it, which is rare in the eastern United States.

I have a picture of Black Creek over my desk, and I am looking now at another picture I took back in 1987. It is a country road that passes through one of the prettiest settings I came across during the back country drives I mentioned in my first entry. It was wide-open pasture land, dotted with oak trees, slightly undulating. It extended for eight or ten miles, until it joined with larger secondary roads. This was truly a back road, as county routes usually are. Driving down this road on a nice Saturday afternoon with the window open, allowed me to really relax and wind down for a short while.

At about the midway point in this stretch of road, it crosses Little Black Creek, and I would invariably get out to look at the stream flowing under the bridge. The flow was always steady. It was swift as it rushed along between banks about 10 feet across. It’d stand there just looking into that tea-colored water and watch as it flowed along under that bridge. That’s one reason why, when I’d get out of the canoe and explore the mouth of this creek, a couple of miles down from the bridge, it would hold so much meaning for me.

Walking iris

My mother has the most amazing, stunning flower all over her back garden by the fish pond, and in numerous pots on her porch. It's called "Walking Iris" and it blooms about this time of year, but the gorgeous flower, white and lush velvet blue, only lasts for a few hours, usually from about 10 or 11 am until 4 pm. By late afternoon its white petals are slowly curling up. An hour or so after this the blue inner petals begin curling into a ball and then the entire flower just withers into a tiny knot at the end of the stem and basically disappears. You can almost see it unfold.

There were about a dozen blooms today. When I saw them they were all about half way through their metamorphosis. Tomorrow or the next day a dozen more will bloom.

I marvel at what this delicate iris tells me: life is precious and fleeting. It flowers and then fades. But next spring this beautiful creation will awaken again and allow me to gaze on it's loveliness and be enthralled once more by the complexity and mystery of life.

More on the Walking Iris, also called the Apostle Plant

Imaging the open plains

As I was driving through the rural South Carolina countryside, I kept looking for all the familiar landmarks, the old farmhouses, the pastures and woods filled with oaks and hickories and pines. I thought about how comforting this scenery was, how seemingly unchanging, except for the ebb and flow of the seasons.

But then, at one point I imagined I was not headed back to my apartment in metropolitan Charleston, which was drawing nearer all the time, but instead embarked on a trip. I would be driving for days, and soon enough the woods and trees and fields would give way to wonderful wide-open landscapes as I approached the Great Plains and headed west, farther each day toward the vast, empty deserts of Wyoming, and beyond that to the north, the great land of dreams -- Montana. I could look all around and not see anything to surround or enclose me. There would only be the everlastingly wide open spaces. Hour after hour the car would make its way west. The rhythmic sound of tires on the road, and the engine humming in the background, would lull me into a trance-like state. I would lose track of time, and it would not really matter where I was as long as I was "out there" somewhere. Mile after mile. The car window open, the wind buffeting my outstreteched arm and hand.

Hardly a day that goes by that I don’t see something that reminds me of my travels across the country years ago. The other day I opened a book and saw an old country house in Leadville, Colorado. I recognized it instantly. I had toured it years ago when I visited that town high in the Rockies. I picked up a used book another day just recently, and it was a collection of Mari Sandoz’s writing from Old Jules country in northwestern Nebraska. I had been there, too, in 1984. I remember quite well visiting a small museum upstairs in a department store on a small- town main street that was dedicated to her life and work. I see pictures of the Grand Teton Mountains, rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, haystack rock formations on the Washington coast. All places and sights I have had the good fortune to see at one time or another, and hope to see again some day.

Now my traveling days are greatly circumscribed by the many obligations and responsibilities of life. But if I see someone in their late 20s or early 30s trapped in a dead-end job and seeing no way out, I want to go up to them and say, "Quit your job. Get on the road. Travel. Work at temporary jobs. See the world before you get old and have to hobble around in an RV camp or ride along in one of those hermetically sealed, sleek, air-conditioned tour buses that whisk you from place to place and take a good bit of the adventure out of your trip. Be adventurous. Embark on your own type of prairie schooner saga, across grasslands, hills and mountains until you find yourself beyond that distant horizon looking out over a vista as endless as the blue sky. Stand there and let the wind blow strong and free, and let the dry grasses crackle under your feet late in the afternoon beside a stream like Grasshopper Creek in Montana -- Big Sky country at last.

Sixties Trilogy - Part 3: Lost in Suburbia

When I look back on the Sixties, the period of my life when i was in grade school and high school (I graduated in 1969), I think not of rock music and anti-war marches, but mowing lawns every summer in the suburb where I grew up and collecting stamps. I had a small lawn mowing business, and my passion/hobby was collecting stamps of the British Empire. Why I was so intrigued by this really puzzles me these many years later, but I think i know the psychology behind it.

New Orleans is an extremely hot, sticky, tropical place in the summer, and I gave up my Saturdays on many a weekend from 1964-68 hauling a Sear's Craftsman lawnmower with grass catcher up and down the block to my various customers. Actuallly I think I mowed one lawn on Friday afternoon and two on Saturday. It was horrendous, sweat-drenching work, pushing the lawnmower through thick carpets of St. Augustine grass, trimming, sweeping with a broom (no leaf blowers, thank God), and edging and pulling weeds, etc. One of my customers had a swimming pool so I could cool off if I wanted to. She gave me a Coke and a Fudgesickle and paid me the same thing for five years -- $4 for three hours work. That works out to about $1.35 an hour. No raises. I think the minimum wage in 1967 was $1.25 an hour.

I always took pride in doing a good job and was dutiful and conscientious about showing up to cut the grass when I would have enjoyed nothing more than staying home in my air conditioned room. But the work ethic was instilled in us kids, and we were taught to do a job right or don't do it at all.

Another customer lived two doors down from us. He was a big-shot grocery chain executive, she was a homemaker and a lovely person. I always enjoyed it when I sat on her patio gulping an ice cold Fresca as I chatted with her after cutting the grass. She had the thickest and densest grass of anyone on that block, and I struggled mightily pushing the lawnmower forward and emptying the grass bag every three rows or so. It was character-building work, for lack of a better word, for what normal teenager would spend his Saturday's doing this if he didn't have to?

Talking to Mrs. R__ was always enjoyable and I became quite fond of her. I always seemed to be able to relate much better to adults and older people when I was a teenager than with people my own age. I am pretty much that way now except I am old and not young anymore. How strange.

In my leisure time, I pored over pictorial and commemorate stamps from far-flung British empire colonies and protectorates in the Carribbean and Pacific and Indian Ocean (St. Lucia, Grenada, the Solomon Islands, Pitcairn Islands and the like), all very exotic and faraway places that my adolescent mind traveled to via the scenes on those stamps. For instance, the isloated Pitcairn Island is where the descendants of the Bounty mutiny still live. The history of that one place alone was fascinating. It was relaxing and a lot of fun, though now when I look back it all seems terribly geeky and nerdy, though I really wasn't a nerd, or so I thought. I bought stamps at auction, through mail order houses, and at one of our huge department stores downtown, which in those days had a large stamp and coin department on the fourth floor. Imagine something like that today.

So while other kids my age were hanging out at the newly invented enclosed shopping malls, or partying on weekends, I was mowing lawns and collecting stamps. The tumultuous Sixties passed in that manner for me. It was only in later years that I really paid attention to what went on in that decade. Race riots and war protests seemed very far off when you grew up in a nice middle class suburban cocoon.

Sixties Trilogy - Part 2: 60s Advertising

Every now and then I come across particularly amazing and fascinating books at the used books emporium Ifrequent. Now these books are not items that I need to have. Far from it. But I am a compulsive book buyer. Alwayshave been. I love to browse shelves and hope to spot that elusive treasure that just seems to have my name on it.

Thus, the other week, a huge tome, 900-plus pages, jumped out at me on a cart of books waiting to be shelved. All American Ads 60s” contained just about every print ad I can remember seeing in popular magazines of the decade when I was in junior high and high school in New Orleans. For American consumer culture, the 60s were a golden age, a stretch of time when the American dream really seemed attainable for the middle classes filling up the vast suburbs that were springing up around every large city in ever-expanding concentric waves. It was a decade of progress, social change, musical ferment, and possibility. Young people flocked to colleges and there was an almost palpable sense of growth and change, culturally, economically, and intellectually. This consumer culture hid for many the dark side of the decade: the Kennedy and King assassinations, racial unrest and violence, the war in Vietnam.

I feel the tumult of those times more now than I did when I was growing up in the suburbs of New Orleans those many long years ago. Life revolved around going to high school and studying hard and graduating and the going to college at the end of the decade. I had a lawn mowing business for a number of years as well as various part-time jobs. Frequently looking through the pages of that huge book that constitutes a veritable catalog of 60s popular culture, brings me back to the days of my youth, learning to drive, working at a movie theater, playing basketball inthe neighborhood with friends, taking the school bus to school every day – in general, just growing up and trying to do as well as I could in school.

As for popular culture, the ubiquitous television finally came into it’s own during the 60s. It was the heyday of situation comedies, westerns, and dramatic series. One of the TV manufacturers of that time, Motorola, commissioned a series of paintings to promote the “new lively art of electronics.” As you can see, 60s popular culture was infused with an element of futuristic modernity. To us now those domestic scenes appear practically quaint, but during a decade when the New York World's Fair of 1964 promoted visions of the future with its theme "Peace Through Understanding" and the Jetson cartoon characters zoomed around in their little spaceship vehicles, tomorrow seemed to be "here" now.

The book is full of hundreds of examples of automobile ads that showcased the sunny side of the American questfor freedom and adventure on the road. (“See the USA in a Chevrolet.”). The automobile was also singlehandedly responsible for the sprawling suburbs that depopulated inner cites and gaves us interstate highwaysand shopping malls, all inter-dependent and interlocking. I will never forget when my friend got his firstcar, a 1965 Ford Mustang. I thought that was the coolest car I had ever seen. I ended up driving the family Oldsmobile Delta 88 after learning to drive on our practically vintage 1956 Chevy Bel-Air. Little did I know back then that the lure of the open road would be irresistible to me 20 year later during my round-the-country backroads car trips.

The 60s were indeed about change and the future, and the advertisements we were surrounded by in that pre-Internet age painted a rosy scenario that was quite at odds with the reality, then as now, in many instances..

The 60s were indeed about change and the future, and the advertisements we were surrounded by in that pre-Internet age painted a rosy scenario that was quite at odds with the reality, then as now, in many instances..

The miracle of plastic

Go Olds '60

Climate control

Ant farm

Tarletons

Hotpoint washer

Sixties Trilogy - Part 1, "Wild Thing"

Wild thing

You make my heart sing

You make everything ... groovy

Wild thing


Wild thing, I think I love you

But I wanna know for sure

Come on and hold me tight

I love you



Wild thing

You make my heart sing

You make everything ... groovy

Wild thing



---- instrumental ----


Wild thing, I think you move me
But I wanna know for sure

So c'mon and hold me tight

You move me



Wild thing

You make my heart sing

You make everything ... groovy

Wild thing



Wild thing

C'mon, c'mon, wild thing

Shake it, shake it, wild thing (fade out)

(Written by Chip Taylor, sung by The Troggs

Sixties music had a little bit of everything, including ths classic song popularized by The Troggs in 1966, one of several bands to record it. I was never that fond of "Wild Thing," even as a 15-year-old teenager growing up in suburban New Orleans. I liked "I'm a Believer" by the Monkees better, as well as "A Beautiful Morning" by the Rascals (1968) and "Green Grass" by Gary Lewis and the Playboys (1965) which I listened to countless times.

The reason for this sudden nostalgia was a visit to the health food store the other night to have supper at the salad and hot bar. It's good stuff: free range chicken, veggie meatballs, sausage and salisbury steak, baked fish,fresh fruit and vegetables, homemade bread and baked goods that keep me coming back. This place is an oasis in a desert of fast food restaurants and conventional chain supermarkers near where I live. It's a gathering spot for the neo-hippie young folks in the area, the aging hippies, New Age counterculture and progressive types and, of course, thejust plain health-conscious among us who flock there and to the adjacent yoga and meditation center, the specialty shops and other restaurants that are not your regular mainstream fare.

The music which I end up listening to as I am eating unmistakeably caters to the Baby Boomers who are the store's bread and butter clientele, pardon the expression. As I ate my salad, fruit and vegetables, and drank organic tea the other night, I had to laugh as "Wild Thing" blared over the music system. Some nights you hear Celtic, other nights its International, progressive rock, or maybe even Bluegrass. It has to be lively though. You are not going to hear ambient or space music because that would put the shoppers to sleep.

Listening to "Wild Thing," I couldn't help but briefly contemplate a more innocent era, almost an interlude of calm in the Sixties after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and before the worst of the race riots in the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

The Young Rascals' song "Groovin" was a No. 1 hit in 1967, and I think it marked the end of an era that encompassed the British Invasion of rock music groups from 1963-67. "Groovin" was a song of innocence. It was fun to listen to.

Sadly, what followed were years that shook the soul of America in the late Sixties. The King and Kennedy assassinations cast a pall over the country, and the Vietnam War was tearing it apart by class, a lost cause that was fought by the kids who were drafted and couldn't go to college.

Anoother war is tearing our country apart slowly now, one also fought half way around the world but this time there are no massive protests in the streets because there is no draft and rapidly depleted volunteer forces are fighting it, including many thousands of National Guard troops. There is nothing innocent about the new century since 9/11.

I remember so well this song from the Sixties.. I think its words can speak to a new generation.

An emblematic group from the mid-Sixties

Intimations of mortality

Most of the time I do not at all feel my age. I have just observed my 56th birthday. That number alone is incomprehensible, a concrete number, yes, but really only a vague signifier of the passage of time, an ultimately useless benchmark that only measures out my life in the passage of decades and years.

I pride myself on my unwrinkled face, my quick and rather agile gait, by ability still to take two steps at a time up staircases if I want to, and the relative ease with which I can walk miles along my favorite nature preserve and park trails. I don't get a lot of sleep, and I don't seem to need much. I eat a good, balanced diet, take vitamins, keep my mind stimulated to the point of overstimulation, keep up with what is going on in the world, for better or worse, and deem myself in pretty good health. I am extremely grateful for this.

However, being an observant person by nature and practice, I am sometimes brought face to face with my own mortality, as we all are. This often occurs unexpectedly and in the midst of the most ordinary, innocuous settings, such as a grocery store. There, the other night, bustling about the aisles with my blue, plastic grocery basket, I can across a man, not too many years older than myself, maybe 65, maybe 70, but who seemed to me "elderly" -- pale white legs, slightly wobbly, three-pronged walking cane inside his grocery cart, going his way in slow-motion animation, basically, as do most "elderly" people in grocery stores. They are the shoppers who seem to have all the time in the world to browse the aisles while I just want nothing more than to zip around them and get the heck out of there. That man the other night just struck me as frail, losing the battle to stay mobile and limber with the inexorable passage of years. They will pass soon enough for me, too.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye with a sort of grim fascination, pondering the implications for my own invevitable slowing down. I glanced at his cart: the gallon of low-fat mik, the two loaves of bread that looked very familiar, perhaps the same Pepperidge Farm whole wheat bread that I buy. That gentleman could have been me, up the road, many years from now, hopefully. But I don't want to think about it anymore.

(This is the third and final entry I am posting that was written during a long night of waiting with nothing to do during an open-house March 27 at a local middle school. I was in an empty health sciences classroom, at the end of a long hallway, and everyone seems to stop just short of the room I was in and thus missed my presentation. Fortunately, I had some scrap paper and a pen because I did not feel like reading anything.)

Another time and place

During a recent visit to the state park near me, at the peak of Spring and walking among the most beautiful old live oak trees, shading and towering above paths lined with pink and white azaleas in bloom, dogwoods and the last of the camellias, I found myself in a calm place -- in a state of gratitude, awe and wonder. My surroundings were so lovely, the air so cool and perfect, that I could not even think about or imagine the world outside with all it's travails and strife, it's traffic, commotion, and people running around in the frenzied pursuit of busyness.

I turn off the main thoroughfare and on to the park access road and the canopy of oaks envelopes me immediately. I know that I am about to enter a very special sanctuary. It's amazing how quickly the world outside fades away. In this park, in the middle of the city, time stands still, the seasons follow one another in perfect harmony, sunlight filters through the trees, and I can forget about what might be and concentrate on the experiences of the moment, which, while fleeting in temporal terms, linger on in my spirit and imagination.

Junior high memories

6:15 p.m.
3/27/07

I am now at a local middle school, at a rescheduled career-day presentation that is now social studies night for parents coming to pick up report cards. I had been asked to talk about miy job and how it impacts students. The only problem is I am stuck in a healh sciences classroom at the end of a long hall, and not too many parents and students are finding their way here. I sit writing journal entries on some scrap paper, thilnking about how many eons ago I was a student in New Orleans public schools. This place reminds me of my junior high where I spent part of 7th and all of 8th and 9th grades. The school was brand new when we moved in somewhere during my 7th grade year, I think it was 1963. I often felt very isolated and stuck for interminable hours each day in a vast, impersonal facility, with endlessly long concrete-block-walled hallways lined with rows of lockers, each with a Master combination lock. I am sure you remember fumbling with those contraptions between classes. I can recall those times now -- the clanging bell to change classes, taking books out of my locker and slamming the door shut, and walking to English, history or science class through a packed hall full of chattering, babbling students letting off pent-up energy before their next period of confinement within four walls, presided over by teachers of various levels of competence and commitment to the profession.

6:05 p.m.
3/29/07

Resuming this entry:

I was busy writing at the middle school where I left off above when the event coordinator told me that since there were not too many parents showing up, I was free to leave. I did not have to take a hint. I grabbed my things and left with the t-shirt the assistant principal had given me in appreciation for showing up.

A few final thoughts on my junior high experience. It was not one of the finest and most enjoyable chapters of my young life. Iwas never one for teeming crowds, students or otherwise. I was very tall and gangly -- 6 ft. 1 in. -- and thin. Although I liked to play basketball, I had an aversion to organized sports, yet I had to endure a period of time (punishment for something apparently) on the junior varsity team, where I warmed the bench during games. I hated that. Then there were the awkward and nerve-wracking school dances in the cafeteria which I attended on a couple of occasions, both times feeling very out-of-place and foolish.

I don't think I was alone in believing that junior high was a very awkward and even scary stage of early adolescence. I was such a serious student, and everything had to be just right: homework done on time, tests thoroughly studied for to the point of overkill, attention paid in class. I don't remember having a lot of fun during those years. However, I was considered a model students by my teachers, one of whom let me grade quizzes in her class and another, the most feared teacher in the school, taking very kindly to me since I was such a well-behaved youngster, eagerly listening to everything she said. I was just extremely conscientious and worried about everything and I tried to please my teachers. I guess I was just brought up that way.

There were incidents I will never forget such as being taunted by a bully in 8th grade and lashing out at him finally, only the second time in my life that I was in a fight. I was a very peaceable, non-violent person. He never bothered me again though I was hopelessly out-maneuvered and he was embarrassed that I was such a wimpy guy, flailing my arms around and trying to land a punch as he danced around me. None of the other kids thought it was funny, and they felt bad for me. I was not an unpopular student. He humiliated himself that day.

By 9th grade I was ready for high school. I was older and more mature, although I was alway much more mature than my chronological age. I did have a very good grounding in grammar and English compositiion skills in both 7th and 8th grades, and this was invaluable in preparing me for my later writing career and encouraging my love of writing. It was something that came naturally to me, but I am so fortunate also to have had good English teachers.

When we got report cards at the end of that year, I felt a chapter in my life had ended and awaited with expectation over the summer my entrance to the hallowed halls of high school.

Familiar terrain and finding home

I spent many years in a state of exile from home, and part of the reason was that I didn’t have a home. I had a birthplace, as well as a place where vacation dreams unfolded in my youth, and a place I imagined would one day be home, but no place where I could, as Scott Russell Sanders says, "stay put."

I restlessly veered from one short-term job or teaching assignment to another, from temporary-permanent work to unemployment, and back again in a cycle that seemed to go on and on with no end in sight. The long road west on my travels during the 1980s beckoned time and again -- in the vast deserts of Wyoming I could find at least a small measure of clarity in the great emptiness and silences, but they threatened to engulf me if I stood still too long. So I kept moving.

I remember when I came across the essay by Sanders which first appeared in Orion Magazine, and in which he wrote these words at one point: "To become intimate with our home region, to know the territory as well as you can, to understand your life as woven into the local life does not prevent you from recognizing and honoring the diversity of other places, cultures, ways. On the contrary, how can you value other places if you do not have one of your own?" I’ve just re-read this essay from a collection of his writing subtitled, "Making a Home in A Restless World." The first time I read it, I was still adrift. Now, I am at last home, and it is indeed the place where, in the back of my mind, I always thought I might be at some point in my life.

It seems unreal to me at times that I have lived these past twelve years in Charleston with no need or desire to cast off for far shores, to answer the siren call of the road muse who lured me off on many a grand, but short-lived odyssey of travel in the past. Necessity drives a hard bargain, but since I knew no home port, I gladly accepted the temporary happiness of flight into the unknown. At least I wasn’t spinning in one place with anxiety and dread, but aiming for some distant place, heading who know where, and hopeful, at least, that travel would not make the current situation I was in any worse. Each leafy town I passed through, each cafe on the square where I had breakfast, each early morning stillness filled with new and exotic sounds and smells only drove home more intensely the fact of my rootlessness. "Thanks for coming, come back soon," the signs would say as I’d exit one town after another and be back on my way along that long open highway.

Maybe that’s why the taste of freedom from obligation and responsibility is so pleasurable. You don’t have to come back soon if you don’t want to. You keep on moving. Keep on keeping on.

And then, Sanders says, you become "an inhabitant rather than a drifter." I suppose, in a way, this marks the end of youth, whatever age that signifies today. When you reach the end of the road, you can no longer drift aimlessly. You have to make a stand. And that point may come, or be forced on you, quite unexpectedly, again out of dire necessity or through something as simple as the exhaustion of possibilities.

As I return to my home day after day, following the familiar contours in the road, looking at the big oak tree at the curve, slowing down at the same, precise spots with a kind of attunement to cosmic laws of motion, I realize I am not running any more, but home. The sameness is not dull or monotonous as I might have once thought, but reassuring and familiar. An indifference to monotony, and, therefore, a rejection of it, takes hold. There comes at last a knowledge and deep familiarity with a place, with the landscape that surrounds you, that is so abiding and so seemingly permanent, that you no longer think as often about taking off for faraway lands in a car loaded with all your belongings and hugging an endless country road leading only to some temporary shore far off in the imagination.

Interview

Q1: As a young man, did you have dreams and ambitions that are still as yet unfulfilled? What if anything will you to about this?

A. This is always a fascinating question and one which makes me look inside myself for some answers. I feel I have probably resolved them one way or another during the course of my life's journey these past 54 years, and yet, there is always the chance to confront the question anew, as now.

I am really not sure I had "dreams and ambitions" as such. I seemed to always follow the path of my heart's desires. Being a reflective, private person I think I subconsciously sought out work and professions that let me be more social, expansive, and outgoing, all of which I am very much capable of. I sought and took jobs which allowed me plenty of opportunities to interact with and get to know other people.

All through school I did well in writing and English, so it was natural that I would pursue some sort of writing career after receiviing my B.A. in English. Thus, I went into journalism, specifically, community journalism. By this I refer to small town or city weeklies or twice weekly newspapers. I found myself interviewing, photographing and writing about so many interesting and genuinely good and nice people that I really seemed to come alive. I thrived at this. I was young and idealistic. It was perfect for me at the time. I worked long hours and relished what I was doing. And, I was proud of my bylined stories, columns and published photographs. It gave me a great sense of satisfaction. It staved off the loneliness I so often felt. I became outgoing. I was another person from my private self while "on the job."

Similarly, when I went into teaching, I was able for the first time to delve into poetry, essays, short fiction and novels -- in-depth -- because I was learning as much as I was teaching or bringing out in my students. They infused me with life and energy. Again, I felt truly alive to the possibilities of life, apart from my rather insular, private life.

When I was in graduate school, I began to retreat back into the reclusive person I tend to be, doing most things by myself and pondering the mysteries of life in many inner dialogs and, at times, severely moody and depressed periods of self reflection.

So, in answer to the question, I think I fulfilled in the best way I knew how at the time, the desires of my heart, but they were "dreams and ambitions" that were not so much formulated and acted upon as they were actions and responses to life as I confronted it daily. I never really had short-term or even long-term dreams. I dealt with the situations in life where I was led or where I myself consciously desired to go and then tried to do my best, conscientiously, for myself and others.

Q2: Your love of beauty and general philosophy/belief system shows a very sensitive man. At what point and what triggered this 'enlightment'?

I can always recall being a "sensitive" child and adolescent, introspective, capable of worrying about the world's problems at a very early age. I was always an excellent and fastidious student, I enjoyed learning and poring over books, magazines and encyclopedias. My mother used to be startled and amazed at what I worried about when I was younger. I am not so sure this was healthy, but that was who I was.

There was nothing specifically which which triggered this. I have always been "apart" from others enough to sense that I was different, or at least to my mind I felt this way. Never having had a truly "close" friend when I was in grade school and high school, I depended on myself. I lived within my own worlds. I related to, and could talk much more comfortably with, adults than with my peers. I loved reading. I had an innate love of Nature and this is probably the influence from childhood that has persisted longer than anything else. I didn't live in the country and have pretty scenery and creeks and woods to explore as a child, but I always imagined what this would have been like.

Q3: If you could influence a major change in the world, what and how would you?

I think I would get more actively involved in environmental work here in the Charleston area, do more than I am doing now. I believe that major changes in the world start locally.

Q4: As a child, were you a dreamer/philospher or were you a 'typically' active kid, and in what way?

I was an odd mixture of both. I loved being outdoors as much as possible in the years prior to my adolescence and engaged in all kinds of imaginative games and the creation of places which further fed my imagination. This, thankfully, was in the pre-Internet and computer games age. The dark, cool world within the giant legustrum bushes of my early childhood apartment, for example, where we kids found refuge on hot summer afternoons, is one example. I have written about some of these experiences before.

Q5: Where do you see yourself in the future, say - 10 years from now?

I see myself doing my present job and nearing retirement and being totally and ecstatically ready for it, but other than that I have no idea. I have never been good at projecting myself into the future. For instance, I would never have guessed I would be doing my present job, and yet it is probably the most logical and perfectly suitable work based on my past experiences and my abilies that I could ever imagine doing. Yet it came to me unplanned and unexpectedly. Life is like that. I am not a big believer in planning.

Crystal cave

It was a pleasant evening in old Charleston's historic district, and we were all walking in the market area. The city in recent years has come alive with nightlife. People were out in droves, gawking at the sights, dining in restaurants, popping in and out of gift and souvenir shops, stopping for dessert and ice cream, window shopping, taking in the scene. So were we: my brother and I were accompanying my sister and my niece and nephew visiting from the Seattle area. It is rare and a special time indeed when all three of us siblings are together for an outing.

Our goal was a curious and very busy shop in the market that my nephew likes go to to every time he comes to Charleston...It's called Black Market Rock and Mineral Shop, I believe. What an interesting place. What a loaded name... Lots and lots of rocks and rock-made gifts and objects of curiosity. Imports. There are boxes of rocks and all sorts of eclectic gifts. Stuff you've never seen before. Like I say, it was packed with people. Curiosity, I guess, is part of it. Novelty. Never know what you'll find in a place like that.

I was never a rockhound. I always liked those little open box sets with all the main types of stones and minerals represented. You probably remember them. They always contained pretty quartzes and crystals and fools gold...and this and that. I can't remember the details. Fool's gold always intrigued me, though, for both symbolic and literal reasons. But it's been years since I even looked at rocks much.

So I was wandering around the store, picking up and examining for some time bits of polished petrified wood, which I find quite amazing and beautiful. Ever since i visited Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona years ago, I have never forgotten how beautiful those rocks are. I was looking for just the right pattern in those little pieces of wood turned to rock. Special shapes and colors. Piece after piece. Nothing really struck me as too exceptional, aside from the extraordinary fact that what I was holding was once part of ancient trees. Mind-boggling. But I was looking for something I didn't find on that table.

But then at the next display shelf, the agates were arrayed before me, beaufiul and polished agates. Lots of spectacular colors -- purples and crimson and lavenders. Their shiny surfaces gleamed in the store's special lighting . I was absorbed in these agates, not knowing too much about them, but intrigued.

Then, I saw what I later discovered were geodes. Ordinary round rocks, incredibly hard, but cut in two and hollow with crystals inside. After the initial shock of seeing something so incredibly beautiful and strange, and which triggered long-ago memories of looking at these types of rocks when I was a child, I knew that one of them would be coming home with me that night.

Sure enough. There is was. It was different from the others. I peered into the narrow opening and there beheld a miniature cavern, the roof and sides of which were covered with the most delicate and sparkling crystals. They glittered in the light when I later used my flashlight to illumine the interior.

My nephew and the others were not too impressed with my purchase. Or they didn't seem to be anyway.

"It's a magic cave. It opens into another world," I said to the 9-year-old boy, wondering what his reaction to my adult foolishness would be.

"Yeah, right," he replied.

Well, think what you want, I said to myself, amused that one so young would not appreciate what I had just said and discovered.

But what on earth was I t alking about? It's not such a mystery.

It's 4 am as I write this, and I am staring at the opening to my geode's little cavern. Where is my flashlight and magnifying glass? I think I'll step inside my crystal cave tonight.

Wind in the trees

Sitting here under a holly tree at the nature preserve, listening to the wind blowing in the tops of still-winter bare trees in this stretch of forest near the cypress swamp. The swamp maples are budding and there is Spring in the air, but Winter in the cold wind's embrace as I walked past what were once flourishing rice fields centuries ago in this part of the South Carolina lowcountry. The wind blows strong and cold in the huge expanse of marsh and dikes I just traversed. It was so nice to feel the bracing cold air, to look up into the blue skies, and to feel close to the Earth on this early March Sunday morning.

I just heard a train whistle in the distance. Birds are chirping and peeping in a nearby tree. The trail is taking me through upland maritime forest now, on slightly higher ground than the marshes and swamp bottoms filled with cypress trees. This upland forest contains oaks, hollies, sweet gum and a few hickories and oak chestnuts.

I feel the familiar pull of Nature and the beckoning call to enter into both the solitude that resides here and companionship with the living things of the Earth where the cycles and rhythms of land and seasons speak to me so personally and eloquently.

The only sounds now are the wind rustling the trees and squirrels stirring up leaves on the forst floor. Many of the oaks in these forests retain their canopies until this time of year, when, as with the live oaks, they shed their leaves at last in preparation for the new growth of Spring.

How I need and treasure these restorative woods and this wind that sings in the trees and shuts out the sounds of civilization in the distance.

(Written March 4)

Among the ancient trees

I am sitting on my favorite bench, underneath live oaks at the state park, enjoying a cool breeze and thinking about my hike last Saturday at Congaree National Park near Columbia.

As I left Charleston on a beautiful and mild morning, I could not wait to get on the first open stretch of country road. The traffic and ceaseless energy and movement in the city oppress me somtimes, and it was with great relief that after a half hour's drive I was at last traveling along the Old Charleston Highway (U.S. 176) toward Columbia. Once off that road, I passed the towns of Eutawville, Santee and Elloree. A mile or so outside Elloree, I turned right on state route 267, and knew I was, for certain, way out in the country. I love the feeling of open space, farms, fields and woods.

Thirty minutes later I was turning onto Old Bluff Road, not far from the town of Gadsden, toward the visitor center and trails of the national park. The main trail begins next to a huge American beech tree, which, just this past December when I was there, was still arrayed in its golden yellow Autumn colors.

Entering and retreating into the silence of this majestic old-growth bottomland swamp forest, I soon was looking up to the tops of loblolly pines 160 tall, some of the highest in the country. Tall cypress, tupelo and a variety of oaks and other hardwoods, some state and national champion trees, made me pause in wonder and gratitude. I never cease to be astounded by the ethereal stillness and beauty of this wilderness, 30,000 acres of it along the muddy Congaree River, formed by the confluence of the Broad and Saluda rivers at Columbia.

I passed a lot of people on that perfect late winter/early spring day -- groups of friends, couples, families with children -- all absorbed in the enchantment of the place. Some I greeted, but most just seemed to be absorbed in their moments in the park, not looking at me as I passed them or sat on a bench, gazing up into silhouetted winter trees with a lowering sun lightiing up the forest in back of them. It didn't bother me, this passage of strangers I will never see again, but in a sense it did make me more aware that I was one of the only lone pilgrims in what to me is a sacred natural place. I felt a calm and peace that allowed me to savor this aloneness, not feeling lonely but feeling at one with the elements -- the tall trees, the wind, the water filled cypress sloughs with their shadows. Time stands still in this great park. One enters and leaves with reverence.

Written Feb. 27, 2007

Congaree National Park Web Site

The world I grew up in

(A reminiscence written before Hurricane Katrina changed New Orleans forever)

When I was a teenager growing up in New Orleans, I was not insulated from the shocks to my young sensibility afforded on every turn by trips from the suburbs into the big, bad city. From an early age, I had been affected by all of the strange, terrible and depressing sights one could see along the streets of the downtown business district, the adjacent French Quarter, and along the riverfront. I would make forays into this urban jungle by bus when I was old enough to do so by myself, and I'd be drawn to and riveted by every tragic specimen of the human race I passed. Although I didn't exactly comprehend what homelessness meant, as well as all its various sociological implications, as a 13 or 14-year-old I was unusually and grimly attentive to the lines of disheveled men lined up for meals and a cot at the Ozanam Inn on Camp Street. This was New Orleans' own Skid Row. How mortified I was, coming from my comfortable middle-class existence, to have to be confronted by this horrible aberration in the normal order of things.

Once on Canal Street, I'd hasten quickly to my destination, usually Maison Blanche Department Store or a bookstore, and try to avert my gaze from the beggars and limbless men in wheelchairs, shaking their tin cups. I saw the mentally ill alcoholics and occasionally heard their insane rantings. I was scared and repelled. This was part of life in a big city. I hated it. It depressed me terribly. I'd come home from breathing bus exhaust fumes and listening to horns honking and dodging crowds of people with a dull headache and a psychic knot in my soul. Why was I so affected by these sights and sounds? Other kids my age didn't seem to be bothered. They probably thought it was funny. But me, I would wonder, "What if that ever happened to me, if I was out on the streets with no place to go?" I imagined all kind of scenarios as to how the homeless men ended up on that deadly, blighted street with the empty buildings and broken glass. It made no sense. Was there any hope for them? What did they think as they stood in lines for soup and a sandwich?

New Orleans affected me this way when I was young. It was, and is, one of the poorest urban areas in the country, at the bottom. It contains massive housing projects and a welfare-dependent population. What contrasts between the upscale Garden District and university areas of the city with their mansions, beautiful old trees, and parks and the vast, low-income areas. This dichotomy between the rich and the poor always struck me as absurd and unjust. But New Orleans is a city of contrasts and always has been. It was built on the wealth of the slave economy in the South that yielded its up its bountiful cotton crops as bales of cargo for the steamboats making their way down the Mississippi to the old port city. It was founded on a malarial, flood-prone cypress swamp on a bend in the river where no city should ever have been built. Its history and culture are fascinating and weird beyond belief.

Here are some observations I made in a journal entry from Nov. 1, 1971. I was a 20-year old college sophomore, living on campus at the lakefront, attending the University of New Orleans:

Last Friday I rode the Elysian Fields bus downtown to meet my father and realized again how this bus route slices its way through just about every conceivable cultural zone of New Orleans, from the exclusive Lakefront area to the forlorn decay abundant in the regions of St. Claude and Esplanade avenues. One can see poor blacks and poor whites in close, yet fragile proximity, bound by the common ties of indefinite entrapment within crumbling neighborhoods. Traffic streams down Elysian Fields [the irony of this name should never be lost on the observer of the street scene in New Orleans] incessantly, and inhabitants of the old buildings, which are strung together nearly unbroken through zone after zone of ethnic groups, pass just as continuously along the glass-filled, cracked sidewalks. My gaze is riveted to the many people I spot in quick succession, mostly old women or young mothers, sitting on porches or stoops, watching as their neighbors trod unconcernedly by or their grandchildren or children pull wagons or ride bicycles in front of their houses. They have for a front yard a choked traffic artery and are probably desensitized to the perpetual noise.

Common sights are signs on the fronts of buildings announcing, "Furnished apartment for rent." Several blocks form a perfectly typical running narrative of urban life, starting with an oyster bar, old apartments, a funeral home of grotesque but commmercially appealing architecture, and more old apartments which rent out to anyone for $8 -$10 a week. Whenever passing one of these in particular, I always spot several old men and one or two rapidly aging young men, rocking passively in their chairs, or leaning with arms folded over the concrete ledges of second floor balconies looking out at the traffic and just staring with extremely tragic, hopeless expressions on their faces...

As I mentioned, these fragments of city life affected me deeply from an early age. I look back on this entry these 35 years later and know, for one thing, that I am glad I don't live in that city anymore, but at the same time I feel a kind of sadness, from the perspective of many years having passed, that I was so unhappy at so many points in my youth. At the same time, although I experienced much unhappiness, I also came from there. I grew up there. It was once my home. For that reason, I will, from time to time, look back on those beginnings and my growing up experiences in the "City That Care Forgot."

I had a brief flowering of childhood and then it seemed to be over. I guess I saw myself as more adult than teenager. I wasn't like my peers. I was too serious. My journal entries from those college years reflect that.

Books

I have always loved books and read them all my life. When I was 12 years old, I joined the Doubleday $1 Book Club, or maybe it was the Bargain Book Club, I can't remember for sure. I was so excited when my first shipment of books came (those five books for $1 introductory offers are very enticing). I had a nice book shelf in my bedroom and placed my new tomes on the shelves and added to them as I got new books. Not that I read many of them. How many 13-year-olds can get into Bruce Catton's three volume history of the Civil War? But I got it for a dollar I believe.

It was around this time that my love of buying books really took off. Later when the malls first opened in the 60s, I would head over to Waldenbooks with some frequency, amazed at the selection.

In the years to come I would read a lot of Edgar Rice Burroughts science fiction ( John Carter of Mars, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and the like.. eeek). How can I even remember the titles? I went through them very quickly.. In junior high and high school I faithfully read all the assigned plays and novels.

In my senior year of college, I discovered a special sancutary of an independent bookstore, located in five rooms of an old house in the Garden District of New Orleans. The owner and founder was a remakrable woman who presided over her eclectic little book emporium with the all-wise air of a very well-read and knowledgeable person. She was like a seer or sage to me. I marveled just to think of all the books she had read and all the noted authors she had met and spoken to. I spent many happy hours browsing the shelves in one room after another, walking across creaky old wood floors and cooled on hot summer days by a couple of noisy window air-conditioning units.

A few years later, and for much fo the 70s, I frequented a marvelous independent bookstore in Columbia, S.C., where I lived for much of that decade. It was called "The Happy Bookseller" and was evidently the cherished dream of a successful carpet dealer in that city who loved books with a passion I still recall with astonishment. Everyone he hired had that same passion for books and knowledge of them.

Years ago, I dreamed of having a book store myself, and there was a litle shop on Magazine Street in New Orleans that served as a model of what a good book store would be like. This was in the 1980s when I briefly lived in New Orleans, the city where I grew up. Now, I go to Barnes and Noble and Books a Million, which are very nice, but not the same as the quirky independent bookstores I loved to visit, just for the experience if not to buy something.

And, I must confess...Now that so much of my reading is one on the Internet, a virtual cornucopia of magazine articles, journal articles, Web sites, diaries, instant messaging and the like, my reading of books has suffered as a result. My goal is to achieve some balance, spending equal amounts of time with books and the many magazines I subscribe to, and online reading. It's a daunting task, but I have so many hundreds of books waiting on me, I cannot fail in my quest.

This is a survey I completed a while back, but it forms a perfect snapshot of where I was in my bookbuying history and in what direction I am likely to go in the future.:

How many books do you own?

At least 1,000. They fill all my shelves in three rooms of my apartment and are stacked on the floor in each room, also. Boxes of books line some of my walls, and they fill my walk-in closets.

What is the last book you bought?

I picked it up tonight at Barnes and Noble. It's titled "Fried Chicken: An American Story", by John T. Edge. It is full of choice stories and the history of my all time favorite food, plus recipes. Not that I cook my own fried chicken. I have so many pleasant memories of savoring really good fried chicken, whether the kind my mother made when I was a child or my aunt's cook prepared for us when we went to Sumter on vacation. I love it at barbecue buffets, at chicken restaurants such as Popeyes, and, really anywhere it is sold.

Five books I have bought in the past few weeks (I buy many used books):

The Education of an American by Mark Sullivan ("A famous journalist, author of Our Times, reviews the forces which shaped his life."

The World's Great Letters

The Beauty of America: Our Heritage and Destiny in Great Words and Photographs

Vermont People (photographs by Peter Miller)

American Ruins, Ghosts on the Landscape (photographs by Maxwell MacKenzie)

Montana: Photography by John Lambing and Wayne Mumford

Books I am currently reading:

Living on Wilderness Time by Melissa Walker

Attack Poodles and Other Media Mutants: The Looting of the News in a Time of Terror by James Wolcott

Lost Time: On Remembering and Forgetting in Late Modern Culture by David Gross

The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves by Curtis White

Watching the Tree: A Chinese Daughter Reflects on Happiness, Tradition, and Spiritual Wisdom


Leaving a Trace: On Keeping a Journal -- The Art of Transforming a Life into Stories by Alexandra Johnson

Going to Ground: Simple Life on a Georgia Pond by Amy Blackmarr

Connecting: How We Form Social Bonds and Communites in the Internet Age by Mary Chayko

Five books I have long remembered:

Cousin Pons by Honore Balzac -- One of the most moving and astonishing novels by the great French novelist. I will never forget it. I read it right after I graduated from college in 1973.

The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton -- these books profoundly influenced me during a period of spiritual awakening in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole -- Probably the funniest novel ever written. A sprawling saga about the life of one Ignatius Riley as he confronts the absurdities of life. Set in New Orleans, where I grew up. (the only novel I have read three times).

Green Mansions by W.H. Hudson -- I remember this book from ninth grade and how mysterious and exotic it was.

Seeking contentment

In the most recent issue of Scientific American Mind, psychologist Michael Wiederman discusses his research on happiness and why it's so hard to achieve that elusive state, even momentarily. What he finds and reports on is quite interesting, and coincides with some thoughts I have been having on this very same subject.

According to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has been asking Americans to rate their levels of happiness since 1957, the proportion who rate themselves as "very happy" has remained about the same at one-third across the decades. So in spite of our increased affluence and technological and scientific improvements and advances, we are no less happy. Children and college students, according to another review of research, are more anxious today than kids int he Fifties. The world of "Leave it to Beaver" might have been a bit more innocent despite the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. Today we face many other, different threats of annihilation.

We have a tendency to think more negatively than positively, according to Wiederman, and this goes back to our species' earliest history when to survive, Homo Sapiens had to be aware of the negative changes in the environment which signaled danger. Our brains are wired to "notice trouble" and we take the positive experiences for granted and focus on the bothersome aspects of life.

Sad, but so true when I think about my life on a day to day basis. While generally I float along in a state of habituation to the the life I have created for myself here through my job, work friends, family, and online friends, I don't often feel "happy." What can go wrong tends to pop up in my mind more than what can go right.

What does "happy" even mean, anyway? A state of complete bliss? Comfort in religious or spiritual attainments? Joy in being alive and healthy? There are times when I feel a rush of happiness, but those are just moments.

I don't think we can ever shield ourselves from the realities we confront in the dailly news unless we choose to go off and isolate ourselves from it and never turn on the TV or Internet or read a newspaper. Unfortunately, being a former newspaper reporter and editor, this is not an option for me. I am a newsoholic. I seem to need a steady diet of what's happening in my community, state, nation and world. Yet, as Wiederman says, the danger in this is that we get habituated to the bad news and adverse conditions so that, for sanity's sake, we no longer even notice or think about it until we see that unimaginably horrible news photo from the war in Iraq or stop to think about the total madness that country has descended to. That is just one glaring example.

Yet, despite all the reasons to be unhappy and to worry and be anxious, there are countless acts of kindsness and prospects for seeing and finding beauty and wholeness in this broken world and civilization. I don't think people would bring children into the world if this were not so.

Wiederman offers these suggestions for becoming happier:

* Do not focus on goals. We tend to think a certain accomplishment or goal accomplished will make us happier, but in most cases, people's lives are not significantly different after reaching these goals.

* Make time to volunteeer.

* Practice moderdation. You may enjoy two or three short vacations more than a long one, for instance.

* Practice living in the moment. This is alll we reallly have, in fact.

And finally, what I think is the key to what we want out of life -- contentment. According to Wiederman, we should:

Rethink [our] beliefs about the nature of happiness. Experiences of great pleasure or joy stand out in memory, andit is easy to conclude that being truly happy means being in that state most of the time. The very reason you savor and remember such an experience, however, is because it is not the norm. Instead of equating happiness with peak experiences, you would be better to think of happiness as a state of contentment and relative lack of anxiety or regret.

I think if I could learn not to regret or think about past mistakes and failures, however grievous and awful, I will have positive energy instead to concentrate on the present. I find that as I get older, I do just this. I don't look back that much, and I know that thinking about what the future might be like is the greatest folly of all.