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Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Travels with My Ecologist.

1/16/2015

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On the first day of Trek Two, in a cypress/tupelo swamp of deep browns and greys, one mostly dead cypress provided a particularly atmospheric yawning stump, maw gaping about four feet above the current waterline. Naturally my companion, NC State University ecologist Katie Winsett, dropped her camera in it.

This I did not see -- but I turned towards her in time to see her arms and head disappear within, as she scrabbled inside to recover them. Seeing her southern latitudes extending from the tree while northern hemisphere wrestled with the insides of the cypress, I found it impossible not to think of Pooh bear.
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Not for the first or last time, I was glad she was along. The Lawson Trek has been committed from the start to getting people who know things to come along. This turns out to be very Lawsonian.

Traditional description of Lawson's trek involves some sort of assignment from the eight Lords Proprietors of the Carolina Colony. In the introduction to the current version of Lawson's A New Voyage to Carolina the author says thus: "Nothing is known of Lawson's sojourn in Charleston until December, 1700, when he was appointed by the Lords Proprietors to make a reconnaissance survey of the interior of Carolina." Interesting enough, but as we say in academic circles, nuh-unh. Lawson clearly took his journey, as his delightful book amply documents. Why he took his journey remains enigmatic. Lawson's family was well connected in London and could easily have had contact with people of that stature, and Lawson was quickly well connected with influential colonials like James Moore, who became governor of Carolina in 1700 and had before that made forays himself into the western backcountry. But we have no evidence that anybody paid, told, or even asked Lawson to go on his journey. We just know he went.
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She was a boon to the enterprise. She pointed out resurrection ferns on one Live Oak: "They look dried up now, but when they get wet they come back to life," she said -- they can lose up to 97 percent of their water, shrivel up, and still come right back with wetter weather. Same with a moss she saw near the roots, looking wizened: "It'll wake up when the water comes up." Then she pointed out lichens and moss growing on the tree. "Sure, you see them, but look closer," she said, counting different types. She got to six before stopping, point made: there is a lot more going on if you look closely. "The interesting stuff is the small stuff," she said.

She reads the country like a tracker, too. We found our first cypress swamp when an hour or so into our first day of hiking she narrowed her eyes and said, "That drops off quickly," pointing to a line of trees evident to her but not to me. We left the forest road, descended a few feet, and yes -- there was a swamp: a low bowl, with the obligatory bald cypress knees, tupelos with spreading bells at their trunk bases, and water rendered black by the tannins from leaves, bark, and pine needles.
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First came a disquisition on the nature of those wide trunk bases of the trees comfortable with their feet in the water: the spread is largely for stability. Some say the cypress knees have the same job of mostly engineering; others believe that when the water rises the knees derive oxygen from the air denied to underwater roots.
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Next the dropped camera, which led to the discovery of some lovely mushrooms in the tree trunk, and most excitingly to the discovery of slime molds, in which Katie is expert. "You never see these in January," she said. "I'm excited to see them." When we started walking back towards the forest road, which naturally tracked a little ridge to stay dry, she called out changes. We stopped squishing in the ground, the palmetto vanished, the cypress and tupelo diminished, and then, roadside, we were surrounded by pines. We couldn't have climbed more than four vertical feet. "We climbed a mountain," Katie said. "An ecological one, anyways."


Days passed like this. As an ecologist Katie's training is, basically, in noticing things. My friend and fellow Lawsonian Tom Earnhardt has described Lawson as "a great noticer" -- his book is full of things that he points out, in lovely, satisfying prose, simply because he notices them. That's the value of his book -- not so much that he discovered things, but that he put down what he saw in a way that we can still understand. On Bull's Island, on the coast, for example, he described the first jellyfish he'd ever seen: "There was left by the Tide several strange Species of a mucilagmous slimy Substance, though living, and very aptly mov'd at their first Appearance; yet, being left on the dry Sand, (by the Beams of the Sun) soon exhale and vanish." The slime molds Katie studies Lawson never mentioned, but they’re bizarre creatures that are not fungi, though they used to be classified as such. Some of them exist in enormous supercells with thousands of nuclei; others exist as single-celled protists but on a chemical signal suddenly begin functioning as a unified organism. (Neither of the two we saw in the tree stump looked about to league together to take over the world, but to be honest I’m worried about that now.)
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Katie's descriptions are not always as literary but are every bit as pleasant. When I asked more about those microscopic slime molds, she corrected me. "They're not microscopic so much as teensy," she said, and until you have had a scientist describe something to you as teensy you have not spent enough time with scientists. She is very interested in scale -- she says a big part of her job is training her students to see scale as more gradual than they see it. "They see three levels: big, small, and microscopic. But nature doesn't work that way." Nature is comfortable on many levels. Katie recommended to me the classic The Scale of Nature, by biologist (and slime mold expert) John Tyler Bonner, which discusses nature from the scale of galaxies to subatomic particles and has become my bedside reading.
We lay one night in the darkness, each in our own tents out of evening rain, our voices murmuring back and forth across various tent and rainfly walls. A full moon hung in a sky of scudding clouds, shadows of swaying pines scratching illuminated nylon as drizzle occasionally spattered down. Katie free-associated about cypress intraspecies variation: If an animal drags, say, an unusual seed into one bog and not another, the two differ. "Each individual bog develops a personality," she said, with particular species of microorganism in the water -- and water samples from the same bog will differ significantly in the life they contain depending on whether you take the sample from open water or from beneath leaves at the shore, a foot away, she said. "When you work with microorganisms you get a sense of how complicated things are the smaller you get. All those swamps we saw would be considered cypress/tupelo, but each one had a little different character for whatever reason.

"It's not just about deer and squirrels. It's not just a longleaf pine forest. I think it's more interesting what's going on down in the soil. On the level of the microorganisms.”

The rain stopped awhile and we heard only the wind high in the pines. The slime molds we had seen could grow in a short warm spell. “They fruit very quickly,” she said. “But I’ve never seen them in January.” 

More silence. “I like that it’s all more complex than we can really organize in our minds,” she said later.

Overnight we heard owls. The next day we learned the lake we slept near was full of hibernating alligators. 
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Hospitality

1/7/2015

4 Comments

 
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Not recycling my pack, but this was the only shelter around.
We found shelter from a steady downpour beneath the overhang of the Shulerville used oil recycling center. Katie and I managed to exchanged soaked capilene for dryer materials from our packs without scandalizing any passersby, and then we waited for our new friend, Douglas Guerry, to drive by to pick us up.

I had heard from Douglas during the previous segment of the trip. Douglas was a descendant of one of the original settlers, Pierre Guerry, one of the original Huguenots who settled the lower Santee in the 1680s. He wondered whether as I approached Jamestown, currently mainly a crossroads near the end of my trail in the Francis Marion National Forest, would I like to see the site of the original town of the French Huguenots among whom Lawson spent a few days, the site now owned by the Huguenot Society of South Carolina.
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Well, yes, I would.

So we kept in touch, and when I headed down for the next segment we texted back and forth. I have lived in two countries and eight states, so the idea of spending time with a man who was born not two miles from where his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather hacked his home site out of raw forest was very exciting. Plus, like Lawson, I was traveling through to see what I could see; like the Huguenots of 1700, he was offering hospitality. It sounded like a fit.

Ecologist Katie Winsett and I planned to meet him on the second afternoon of our hike. We awoke that morning in our Francis Marion State Forest campsite and began our day by finding our complicated way to what are called the Blue Springs, one of the sources of the Echaw Creek that eventually feeds the Santee River. The springs are not on the map, and the roads through the forest are anybody’s guess, though with enough maps and texts we found them. Though the swamp was too high for the springs to be blue, we did find the swamp, perhaps the loveliest of the cypress-tupelo swamps in the forest. Katie has been astonished at how similar these swamps are to the ones she's studied in Texas and hopes to compare them. The wide bells of the cypress trunks, the knobby knees emerging out of the black water like serpents, the swaying spanish moss all made this one seem like a swamp right out of central casting. We refilled our water jugs.
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An absolutely breathtaking cypress-tupelo swamp. Lawson never mentions how beautiful they are. Then again, Lawson didn't have gore tex boots.
From there we made our way down forest roads deeper into the woods, through a stand of longleaf pine as lovely as any we'd ever seen. Katie teaches a trick in a stand of longleaf or any fire-managed trees: allow your eyes to lose their focus and see the fire line emerge. The trick works just as well in the swamps -- allow your eyes to relax and there's the water line, the highest level the water commonly reaches. You can tell by where the moss ends, but the tree trunks change, the color of the bark lightens, too. Learn the trick and you begin not just to see but to perceive.
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Let your eyes relax and there it is -- the water line, about two-thirds of the way up the picture where the tree trunks get light.
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Same here -- this exquisitely managed forest shows its fire line. It's a beautiful world.
What causes the swamps to rise is of course rain, and rain we'd had plenty of the night before -- and the area had had for the last few weeks. So we kvelled over the swamp, took pictures, absorbed the water line, and as the rain began again, instead of turning deeper into the forest for more exploration we started heading out to the road, where we could message Douglas, who planned to take us to see the Huguenot memorial at the site of the original town.
We know Lawson went to the original town only because he mentions it in a backhanded way. Across the Santee from the Huguenot town, he mentions that his group "lay all Night at a House which was built for the Indian Trade, the Master thereof we had parted with at the French Town, who gave us Leave to make use of his Mansion." So Lawson must have been to the French town, though he found nothing there worthy of note. He does tell us the French settlers treat him and his friends very courteously: "a very kind, loving, and affable People, who wish'd us a safe and prosperous Voyage." The French ferry him across the limitless creeks through the swamp in dories, feed him and offer nights' lodging. We've already had enormous assistance from our friends Cheves Leland and Susan Bates of the Huguenot Society, so we were excited to meet Douglas and continue the tradition of kindness to wanderers by Huguenots. We emerged from the forest road looking for shelter, and found it at the oil recycling station.

Douglas drove up twenty minutes later, with his brother, Mark, and his mom, Jean, in the car with him. They piled cheerfully out and announced that we wouldn't be able to see the original plot of land after all -- it's right on the Santee River, but surrounded on all sides by another property owner who is touchy about people crossing his land. About what may cause the owner to fear for the outcome if we were allowed to cross his land you may draw your own conclusions.
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That's Mark Guerry to the left, Jean in the middle, and Douglas on the right. It was because Douglas reached out that we got to have a wonderful time with the Guerry family -- and a dry night in the St. James United Methodist Church.
Anyhow, the rain stopped and we stood in the parking lot with the Guerrys, chatting about the Huguenots and three centuries of hanging around in the same spot. Mark, 57 and working in the energy industry, figures the French Huguenots ended up on the Santee because the English didn't want them in Charleston. "They said, we'll send you up here, and you fight the Indians and the Spanish." The Huguenots, Protestant refugees from religious persecution in Catholic France, surprised them by surviving -- and, in fact, thriving. In the very preface to his book Lawson describes French industry and capability: “In this Point, the French outstrip us,” he says of observation, but his passage praises the French highly. The Huguenot Society in South Carolina is proud of its heritage, and Douglas is a member. He’s a ninth-generation resident, he said, and when my eyebrows shot up, Jean smiled: “The Guerrys are long-lived.” To be sure.

We conversed briefly about the history of the Santee River. Its waters were mostly diverted into the Cooper, towards Charleston, in the 1940s, creating Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion, but the diversion compromised the Santee ecosystem and filled Charleston Harbor with silt. A rediversion canal was built in the 1980s, which is helping, but the mingled waters of the Santee and the Cooper will never be the same as the rowdy, untamed Santee floods Lawson describes. Steamboats plied the Santee until the lakes were built. About the family denying us access to the Huguenot site Jean said only of their tenure in the community, “They’re not old.” She narrowed her eyes and nodded: “I know.” And mind you, Jean is herself a relative newcomer: she can trace her family only back to 1720 -- she’s the longest-standing member of the South Carolina Historical Society, but she hasn’t made the cut for the Huguenot Society, though her sons have, on account of their father. And when our good friend and sometime guide Eddie Stroman from McClellanville stopped by, it took her only a moment to connect with his people and place him with approval. So if Jean says a family isn’t old enough for her, Jean gets the win.

Then she invited us over for cake and coffee.
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Yes, yes, Lawson had it good with the French Huguenots and the Indians. I think Katie and I had it pretty good with the Huguenot descendants. Lawson never says a word about bundt cake.
She brought us into her immaculately clean home: wide hardwood floors, oriental rugs, traditional wooden furniture. Even the books on the bookshelves were neat, though the copy of Lawson Jean had been reading in preparation for our meeting lay open on the sofa.

Jean made us coffee and brought out a bundt cake. “Welcome to Jamestown,” Douglas had said, “population 74 -- when Mark and I come home it goes up to 76.”

We had a lovely time. We discussed that in South Carolina, whose legal system is based on English Common Law, only the coroner is empowered to arrest the sheriff -- regrettably, the point had become germane recently. We talked about whether the misguided commingling of the waters of the Cooper and the Santee hadn’t accidentally protected the Santee from development, keeping much of the land of the national forest pristine. We talked about the area churches -- the first recorded Episcopal clergy appeared in 1687 (Lawson talks of being assisted across the creeks by “very officious” French settlers, “whom we met coming from their Church”), though no trace of that church remains. A newer one went up on the old Georgetown road in 1768 -- it’s a red brick church that still stands on the old dirt road, with lovely cylindrical brick columns and cypress pew boxes. Jean told us that in its early days mistrust between the French and English settlers obtained: “the Huguenots used the back door -- the English used the front.” We discussed the Peachtree Oak, a live oak hundreds of years old on the nearby Peachtree Plantation, which stood until the 1930s, when it died. “If it hadn’t,” Jean said, “Hugo would have got it.” You can’t talk for more than 15 minutes in South Carolina without Hurricane Hugo coming up. 

Anyhow. We probably stayed with Jean and Douglas and Mark (and Mark’s daughter, who showed up for a bit) for a couple hours. We ate cake and drank coffee, and we even chatted about political and social topics about which we very agreeable didn’t particularly agree. I would call it one my most delightful afternoons ever -- exactly what I left home for. Probably why Lawson left home, too.
PictureWe loved the St. James United Methodist Church as a place to eat and sleep. When the skies opened up in the middle of the night we appreciated it even more. Thank you, St. James United Methodist Church!
Jean and Douglas opened up the St. James United Methodist Church around the corner for us, where warm and dry we planned out our next day’s walk and slept in comfort on padded pews. Along with the delightful Nina Gilbert, who had allowed us to park Katie’s car during our trek in front of her church in the tiny SC burg of Lane, the Lawson Trek felt plenty of love from the churches of the lowlands this time -- more than enough to offset our sadness at people closing their land to us or fencing in an area we had hoped to traverse. When the skies opened that night and the church protected us from the downpour, we were pleased to note that one of our correspondents cited Psalm 55, verse 8, “I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.”

As we stopped to take a picture on our way out the next morning, Jean’s sister pulled up to meet Jean for church. She showed us a picture of her great grandchild, Malachi James, born in December. That makes him a Lawson Trek baby, and we hope the hospitality his ancestors showed rebounds to him all his life. Jean’s sister, by the way, introduced herself as Hazel. “Hazel Hughes,” she said. “No kin to Howard.” Rich just the same, if you ask us.

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Hazel Hughes and young Malachi James. Welcome to the world, Malachi James! The Lawson Trek wishes you the results of the hospitality of your ancestors. Times a million.
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