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.