Magnolias at "La Tete de Kiwi"

I was received with a great deal of courtesy by the mistress of the house whose husband was away. This woman was young, beautiful, but very devout, and continually reflecting on the different ways of thought among the Methodists, Anabaptists and Quakers. Conversations on these subjects went from seven until ten-thirty; I then became bored with it in spite of the kindness and charm of this woman, and I went to bed.
-Andre Michaux, December 1, 1788



The more I delve into Andre Michaux’s December 1788 expedition to the Southern mountains, the more contradictions I find. This trip has earned a place in the history of botanical explorations because Michaux collected specimens of Shortia galacifolia at the head of the Keowee River, and it took a century for subsequent researchers to locate the source of those plants. But the Oconee Bell was not the object of Michaux’s field trip. He was intent on finding Magnolia cordata, a rare tree mentioned by William Bartram on his 1775 trip through the mountains.

If diverse flora was one appeal of the region, Michaux also found a great diversity of people living on this frontier. By all descriptions, the Frenchman was a good conversationalist and well-mannered, but his diary reflects annoyances along the way. On December 1, he arrived near the head of the Savannah River (at the confluence of the Keowee and Tugaloo Rivers) where he stayed at the home of home of a Mr. Freeman (as described above).

Rather than proceeding straight up the Keowee, Michaux headed northwest along the Tugaloo. He traveled about twenty miles on December 2 and spent the night at the home of Larkin Cleveland. On December 3, he crossed the river to breakfast at the home of John Cleveland:

I crossed the Tugaloo River at the only place used for fording. It was so dangerous that two of our horses narrowly escaped drowning.

Larkin and John had fought beside their brother, Colonel Benjamin Cleveland, who was a hero at the Battle of Kings Mountain in 1780. Cleveland counties in North Carolina and Georgia, and the town of Cleveland, Tennessee were all named for the Colonel. After the Revolution, the three Cleveland brothers brought their families to the Tugaloo just east of Toccoa, Georgia.

Leaving the Tugaloo, Michaux went east, spending the night of December 3 sleeping on the ground at Seneca. That night he wrote that his twenty mile trip had been:

…through country completely covered with forests, like all southern provinces, but it was very hilly…

Michaux spent a couple of days botanizing on the Keowee. On December 6, he proceeded upriver to some unnamed Indian village, where he spent the night with a hospitable native family.

On December 7, after securing a Cherokee guide to accompany him, Michaux continued about fourteen miles up the river, camping on the shores of the river at the foot of the mountains.

The next day, Michaux drew closer to the head of the Keowee and found the way becoming more and more difficult. About two miles before the head of the river, Michaux recognized the Magnolia cordata he had been seeking, collected specimens of “a new plant with denticulated leaves” (later identified as Shortia) and also found a place to stay for the night:

In this area there was a small hut inhabited by a family of Cherokee Indians. We stopped there to camp… The weather changed and it rained the whole night. Although we took shelter under a large white pine our clothing and blankets were drenched and soaked. Around the middle of the night I went into the hut of the Indians which could barely hold the family of eight persons, men and women. There were further six large dogs which added to the dirtiness of this housing and to the inconvenience. The fire was in the middle, without an opening on top of the hut to let the smoke escape; however, there were enough openings all over the roofing of this house to let the rain in. One Indian offered me his bed which consisted of a bear skin and took my place by the fire. But finally I was so annoyed by the dogs, which fought all the time for a place by the fire; that I returned to rny camp, especially since the rain had ceased.

On December 9, Michaux wanted to investigate the more precipitous of the two headwater streams to reach the highest mountains:

We had to cross precipices and creeks covered with fallen trees where ten times our horses plunged down and came close to perishing. We climbed up to a waterfall where the thunder of the falling water resembled distant shots of musketeers. The Indians said that at night fires could be seen at this place. I wanted to camp there, but the unexpected snow and the wind were so cold that we looked for an area lower on the mountain that was less exposed to the cold and that had more grass for our horses. The night was terribly cold. There was only pinewood to keep up the fire which burned poorly due to several snowfalls. Our snow-covered blankets became stiff with ice shortly after having been warmed.




Despite the cold temperatures. Michaux collected plants all of December 10 and for part of December 11:

I noticed a chain of high mountains stretching from west to east and where the frost showed little in places exposed to the sun. I gathered a ground juniper (Juniperus repens) that I had not yet noticed in the middle parts of the United States… On these mountains I saw several trees of the northern regions such as river birch (Betula nigra), alternate-leaved dogwood, white pine, hemlock spruce, etc. We crossed an area of about three miles through rosebay rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum).

By the evening of the 11th, Michaux had returned to the head of the Keowee. On December 12, he was retracing his steps as he continued downriver:

We kept close to the river and saw several flocks of wild turkeys. Our Indian guide fired at them, but the rifle failed several times since we had not been able to protect it from the rain in the preceding days. Thus our supper consisted of a few chestnuts that our Indian guide had gotten from another of his nation. We made eighteen miles. The weather was very clear. The freeze set in early in the evening, and, after having asked my Indian to tell me the names of several plants in his language, I wrote my journal by the light of the moon.

On December 13th I attempted to shoot a wild turkey at daybreak; there were plenty in this area but I was unsuccessful and we broke camp without breakfast. We were famished and changed our direction towards a camp of Indian hunters, and, although the hills became less steep, it was one o'clock in the afternoon before we arrived there after a journey of six hours estimated at only fifteen miles.

They cooked bear meat for us, cut into small pieces and fried in bear grease. Although it was smothered in grease, we had an excellent dinner, and, although I ate a lot of the fattest part of the meat, I did not become indisposed. The bear grease is tasteless and resembles a good olive oil. It doesn't even have a smell. When some food is roasted with it, it does not congeal until it freezes. After dinner, we made sixteen miles and arrived at Seneca in the evening.

What Andre Michaux actually meant by “the head of the Keowee” has been a subject of disagreement for many years. In 1886, seeking the same patch of Shortia that Michaux had described, Charles Singer Sargent attempted to retrace the 1788 journey. Sargent had his own theory about “tete de Kiwi”:

It has been suggested that the spot described by Michaux as the "Tete de Kiwi" might have been the junction of two rapid mountain torrents, the White Water and the Devil's Fork... It is more probable however, that the spot described as the head of the Keowee is the junction of the Toxaway and Horse Pasture Rivers, several miles above the mouth of the White Water and close to the North Carolina boundary… They are swift rivers flowing through beds cut deep in the rock, broken by innumerable rapids, and full of logs and boulders; in each about six miles from its mouth is a noble fall, or rather a series of cascades of great height and beauty. It was near one of these falls probably that Michaux wished to camp on the evening of the 9th of December, and the evidence favors the belief that it was the falls of the Toxaway.

Sargent believed that Michaux found the old Indian trail that continued up the Toxaway and crossed the Blue Ridge Divide between Hogback and Tigertail (now Panthertail) Mountains. This would have brought Michaux to the Tuckasegee headwaters that flow through Panthertown Valley. According to Sargent, the distant chain of high mountains that Michaux observed on December 11, 1788 would have been the Balsams.

Subsequent investigators have challenged Charles Sargent’s conclusions. In 1983, Robert Zahner and Steven Jones published the results of their attempt to follow Michaux’s path. They assert that the “head of the Keowee” mentioned by Michaux was actually the confluence of the Whitewater and the Toxaway, rather the confluence of the Toxaway and Horsepasture as claimed by Sargent. Instead of going up the Toxaway, Michaux went up the Whitewater to reach the “high mountains” (Chimney Top, Terrapin and Sassafras) where he botanized on December 10 and 11. Zahner and Jones explain that the spot where Michaux collected Shortia, two miles downriver from the head of the Keowee, was very near where Jocassee Dam stands today. This was also the location of an old Cherokee village called “Toxaway” destroyed by Colonel Archibald Montgomery in 1760.

I would like to see more evidence before casting my vote for one theory over another. Some of that evidence, though, is lost beneath the waters of Lake Jocassee. What remains indisputable is Andre Michaux’s ability to meet the challenges of exploring the backcountry. While returning to Charleston after his December 1788 trip through the mountains, Michaux encountered difficulties of a different kind. His biographers, Henry and Elizabeth Savage, describe the events of December 21:

After fording twenty large streams in bitter cold weather, he sought shelter and warmth in the home of an American loyalist with no love for Frenchmen. “This American tory said to me on my arrival that he would kill me if I spent the night at his house,” recounted the botanist, “and I told him I was not afraid of that because I was not fat enough nor my purse either! He wanted to badger me about my country but I was a match for him and he had to be content with making me pay dearly for my lodging.”

POSTSCRIPT

The illustrations, above, are of the main object of Michaux’s trip, the plant he identified in his journal as Magnolia cordata. He brought back specimens that were introduced into cultivation, but it would be another 150 years before the tree was once again found in the wild.

The “cucumber tree” or “cucumber magnolia,” notable for its rich yellow blossoms is now considered a variant of the Magnolia acuminata species (Magnolia acuminata var. subcordata).

I’m afraid things are not quite that simple, though. Michaux’s magnolia has persisted as a subject of debate and speculation for botanists up to the present time, and for a thorough examination of this subject, we would involve William Bartram, John Fraser, Magnolia auriculata, M. macrophylla, M. fraseri, Mountain Magnolia, Frasers Magnolia and much more. This is not something I will attempt to sort out, but I'll recommend a couple of articles for any intrepid botanical sleuth who wants some context:

The late Robert Zahner has a helpful article, “Bartram’s Mountain Magnolia,” on the Chattooga Conservancy website,
http://www.chattoogariver.org/index.php?req=frasermag&quart=Su2006

And Charlie Williams published “André Michaux and the Discovery of Magnolia macrophylla in North Carolina” in Castanea, (Southern Appalachian Botanical Society), Vol. 64, No. 1 (March 1999), pp. 1-13.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/4034119

With apologies to Monsieur Michaux, I will call on his old friend Puc Puggy to wax rhapsodic over a tree that he saw near Mobile in the summer of 1775:

…how gaily flutter the radiated wings of the Magnolia auriculata, each branch supporting an expanded umbrella, superbly crested with a silver plume, fragrant blossom, or crimson studded strobile and fruits.

Finally (and this is not too much of a stretch) J J Cale sings about those whippoorwills that Bartram heard in the Keowee Valley where Michaux found that special magnolia.



Encore! Encore!

For all stories on Andre Michaux http://gulahiyi.blogspot.com/search/label/michaux

Gusti Nyoman Lempad at Age 116

I used to have lots of money until it got rotten. I was not too happy. Happiness did not count on how much money you owned but what’s inside your heart.
-Gusti Nyoman Lempad



Every year or two, while going through my library, I'll come across a slip of paper that has marked places in one book after another. The handwriting is not mine, and I can't remember how this note came to me. Had a friend suggested I study the Balinese art of Gusti Nyoman Lempad? Or was the note just stuck inside a used book I'd purchased some time?


Belajar Menari / Dance Lesson, ink on paper, 19 x 29 cm, I Gusti Nyoman Lempad (1862-1978)

Since I'll never know, I might as well get a blog post out of it. The following video tells his story better than I can, and provides a rare visit with someone who had lived 116 years. Lempad, a stone sculptor, architect and artist produced hundreds of linear drawings, and built temples and buildings. He was illiterate, but had brilliant ideas and intellectual discussions with fellow artists.

The way he died was as interesting as the way he lived.

He chose the day on which he was going to die months in advance and on that day he called his descendants together, asked them to bathe and dress him, told them their inheritance, bade them farewell and then died. The day he chose was a holy day.



Digging a little deeper into Balinese culture, I learned this about the Balinese Monkey Chant:

Kecak (pronounced [ˈketʃak], alternate spellings: Ketjak and Ketjack) a form of Balinese music drama, originated in the 1930s and is performed primarily by men. Also known as the Ramayana Monkey Chant, the piece, performed by a circle of 100 or more performers wearing checked cloth around their waists, percussively chanting "cak" and throwing up their arms, depicts a battle from the Ramayana where the monkey-like Vanara helped Prince Rama fight the evil King Ravana. However, Kecak has roots in sanghyang, a trance-inducing exorcism dance. (From Wikipedia)

What a performance in this video!



The kecak scene is from the movie, Baraka (1992), a non-narrative film directed by Ron Fricke, who was the cinematographer on Koyaanisqatsi. Baraka's subject matter has some similarities—including footage of various landscapes, churches, ruins, religious ceremonies, and cities thrumming with life, filmed using time-lapse photography in order to capture the great pulse of humanity as it flocks and swarms in daily activity. The movie was filmed at 152 locations in 24 countries. The title Baraka is a word that means blessing in many different languages.

Here's a trailer for Baraka, and a clip of the first ten minutes of the film:






Koyaanisqatsi has been one of my favorite films since I first saw it many years ago:



Finally, I came across this video which is somewhat in the vein of Koyaanisqatsi. Very illuminating...pardon the pun:

Andre Michaux Sets Out from Keowee

People in the Old World were always being surprised by reports from America of spiders as big as cats and birds as small as fingernails, squirrels that flew and frogs that whistled, of plants so blessed that they could cure almost any sickness and of others so strange that their discoverers were afraid to describe them, lest they be called fools or liars. Americans forested the parks of rich Europeans with sugar maples and hemlocks, filled collectors’ cabinets with mockingbirds and rattlesnakes, enlivened their gardens with fly-eating tipitiwichets and early blooming skunk cabbages. Their science was a matter of the heart as well as the mind, a way to express their feeling for their land and their countrymen’s unabashed pride in it.
- Joseph Kastner

...aromatic Calycanthean groves on the surrounding heights, the wary moor fowl thundering in the distant echoing hills, how the groves and hills ring with the shrill perpetual voice of the whip-poor-will...
-William Bartram, describing Keowee, 1775

Rhododendron calendulaceum

Whenever I'm on the Bartram Trail along the Chattooga or the Little Tennessee I revel in the privilege of walking in the footsteps of a flower-hunter whose ways with words inspired the British Romantics.

Thanks to Bartram’s Travels, our flame azaleas were transplanted to William Wordsworth’s poetry:

Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
To set the hills on fire.
(From “Ruth” by WW)

The question arises: if Andre Michaux had possessed Bartram’s literary talents, would he be better known today?

Michaux came to the southern mountains a decade after Bartram. As far as I know, we don't have a Michaux Trail Society. Much of Michaux’s trail is lost since Lakes Jocassee and Keowee have flooded his path along the west bank of the Keowee and the Whitewater River.

In a book on early American naturalists, A Species of Eternity, Joseph Kastner indicates the respect that Michaux commanded:

William Bartram knew him as one of the very few collectors who could go over the ground that he and his father had covered and come back with plants neither of them had found.

Michaux first explored the Carolina backcountry, and the Keowee River, in 1787. Keowee, “the place of mulberries," was principal among Cherokee Lower Towns - a mother town that was a busy center of the deerskin trade. On a contemporary map, Keowee is (or would have been) about 12 miles north of Clemson, South Carolina. Today, the old village and Fort Prince George are both submerged by the waters that cool the reactors of the Oconee Nuclear Station on Lake Keowee.

Now at this point, I must interrupt. I thought this story could be told in ONE blog post. After pursuing an infinity of rabbit trails, I realize that it could take a hundred instead.

Keowee was on the west bank of the river, just downstream from Crow Creek. In 1753, the British established Fort Prince George on the east side, across the river from the Cherokee village. By 1760, after ongoing tensions, the British destroyed Keowee. By the time of Bartram’s visit in 1775, Keowee was a ghost town. Bartram writes:

There are several Indian mounts or tumuli, and terraces, monuments of the ancients, at the old site of Keowe, near the fort Prince George, but no Indian habitations at present; and here are several dwellings inhabited by white people concerned in the Indian trade. The old fort Prince George now bears no marks of a fortress, but serves for a trading house.

Fort Prince George, on the Keowee River

Bartram describes the Keowee valley as being “seven or eight miles in extent” and he pictures the thriving place it had been just a few years earlier:

This fertile vale within the remembrance of some old traders with whom I conversed, was one continued settlement, the swelling sides of the adjoining hills were then covered with habitations, and the rich level grounds beneath lying on the river, was cultivated and planted, which now exhibit a very different spectacle, humiliating indeed to the present generation, the posterity and feeble remains of the once potent and renowned Cherokees: the vestiges of the ancient Indian dwellings are yet visible on the feet of the hills bordering and fronting on the vale, such as posts or pillars of their habitations, &c.

Bartram remained at Keowee for a week, hoping to find a Cherokee guide to lead him safely through the mountains. He must be have been struggling with strong mixed feelings. The mid-May spectacle of “the great blue wall” was almost within reach, and yet Bartram was alone, lonely, and aware of the risk he was about to take:

Keowe is a most charming situation, and the adjacent heights are naturally so formed and disposed, as with little expensive of military architecture to be rendered almost impregnable; in a fertile vale, at this season, enamelled with the incarnate fragrant strawberries and blooming plants, through which the beautiful river meanders, sometimes gently flowing, but more frequently agitated, gliding swiftly between the fruitful strawberry banks, environed at various distances, by high hills and mountains, some rising boldly almost upright upon the verge of the expansive lawn, so as to overlook and shadow it, whilst others more lofty, superb, misty and blue, majestically mount far above.

Artist's rendering of Oconee Nuclear Station in the Keowee Valley

The evening still and calm, all silent and peaceable, a vivifying gentle breeze continually wafted from the fragrant strawberry fields, and aromatic Calycanthean groves on the surrounding heights, the wary moor fowl thundering in the distant echoing hills, how the groves and hills ring with the shrill perpetual voice of the whip-poor-will!

William Bartram

Abandoned as my situation now was, yet thank heaven many objects met together at this time, and conspired to conciliate, and in some degree compose my mind, heretofore somewhat dejected and unharmonized: all alone in a wild Indian country, a thousand miles from my native land, and a vast distance from any settlements of white people. It is true, here were some of my own colour, yet they were strangers, and though friendly and hospitable, their manners and customs of living so different from what I had been accustomed to, administered but little to my consolation: some hundred miles yet to travel, the savage vindictive inhabitants lately ill-treated by the frontier Virginians, blood being spilt between them and the injury not yet wiped away by formal treaty; the Cherokees extremely jealous of white people travelling about their mountains, especially if they should be seen peeping in amongst the rocks or digging up their earth.

With no Indian guides forthcoming, Bartram “determined to set off alone and run all risks.”

Leaving Keowee he travelled west toward Georgia. In 1788, Andre Michaux stopped near Keowee and did manage to secure a Cherokee guide before continued north along the river. The following entries from Michaux’s journal are translated from the French:

On December 6, 1788, I left for the mountains and I slept with my guide in an Indian village. The chief of the village greeted us courteously. He told us that his son, who was to return from the hunt that very evening, would lead us into the high hills to the sources of the Kiwi. But he did not return and this old man, who appeared to be about 70, offered to accompany me. This man had been born in a village near the sources of that river, he knew the mountains perfectly and I hoped that his son would not return. For supper he had us served fresh cooked deer meat and bread of corn meal mixed with sweet potatoes (Convolvulus batata). I ate with my guide who served me as an interpreter since he knew how to speak Indian. The chief ate with his wife on another bench. Then the mother of his wife and his two daughters, the one married and the younger one about 14 or 15, sat down around the pot in which they cooked the meat. These ladies were naked to the waist, each having no other garments than a single skirt.

On Sunday, December 7, the housewife roasted maize with hot ash sifted in an earthen pot. When it was a little more that half roasted it was taken off the fire where the mixed-in ashes went. It was then carried to the mortar and being crushed it was put into a fine sieve to separate the fine flour which was put into a sack as our provision. When someone is tired he puts about three spoonfulls into a vessel of water, and frequently adds some brown sugar or moist brown sugar. This also very pleasing tasty drink is a restorative which renews strength immediately. The Indians never go on a trip without a supply of this meal that they call. ..[Rokaharmony].

From 7:30 in the morning to 6 o'clock in the evening we marched about fourteen miles. We did not stop except for one hour for dinner. We camped on the banks of the Kiwi at the foot of hills among two genera of rhododendron, mountain laurel [with evergreen leaves], azalea [which sheds its leaves in winter], etc.

On December 8, 1788, as we were approaching the source of the Kiwi the paths became more difficult. Before arriving there I recognized the Magnolia montana which was named M. cordata or ariculata by Bartram. In this area there was a small hut inhabited by a family of Cherokee Indians. We stopped there to camp and I rushed to do some exploring.

Keowee River, ca. 1936

You would think December an odd time of year to go botanizing in the Southern Appalachians, but Michaux was here for more than watching wildflowers bloom. He was collecting plants to send back to France. Since he had already scouted the area in the summer of 1787, his winter visit was an opportunity to gather seeds and roots for propagation.

Michaux’s adventures at “Tete du Kiwi” will continue at a later date. Meanwhile, I've quoted other passages from Michaux’s December 1788 journal in the story of his discovery of shortia: http://gulahiyi.blogspot.com/2009/04/shortia-quest-then-and-now.html

For all stories on Andre Michaux http://gulahiyi.blogspot.com/search/label/michaux

At the Top of the Wish List

As I took in the shape and colors, the subdivided shades of purple and green and blue, Mr. Benefideo slid a large hand-colored transparency across the sheet, a soil map of the same area. You could imagine looking down through a variety of soil types to the bedrock below. . .
From “The Mappist” by Barry Lopez



Dear Santa,

Saturday morning, I woke up to “Selected Shorts” on National Public Radio. When they announced the first story was by Barry Lopez, I cranked up the volume and listened carefully to a reading of “The Mappist.”

Lopez calls "The Mappist" an exploration of “dangers inherent in a free-floating culture, in, literally, an ungrounded existence.” To the reader, Lopez explains, “On the day that I drafted this story, this was the best I could do with my claim to a knowledge of life. I mean it as a kind of proof against the threat of being alone in the world. I hope it fares well with you, as you bring to it an imagination different from mine.”

I won’t attempt to describe the plot. For anyone who loves books, maps and the mysterious challenge of seeing beyond the surface of things, the story is a gem. After the narrator finds “the mappist” and sees the many unique and exquisite maps that he created, the old cartographer tells him, “The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We’re lighting candles. These maps – they are my candles. And I can’t extinguish them for anyone.”

Well, Santa, I’ve been moderately good this year, but probably not good enough to expect that I’ll be finding this very special edition of “The Mappist” under the tree. I'll put in my request anyhow. Forget those visions of sugarplum fairies. I’ll be dreaming of this book...if you can even call it a book:

The Mappist
by Pacific Editions.
Lopez, Barry
Price: $2,100.00

 Bookseller: Priscilla Juvelis, Inc.
 Seller Inventory #: 9671
 Binding: Hardcover
 Publisher: Pacific Editions
 Place: San Francisco, CA
 Date published: 2005

Book Description
San Francisco, CA: Pacific Editions. 2005. First Edition thus, one of 48 copies, all on BFK Rives paper, signed by the author, Barry Lopez, and the artist / designer / publisher, Charles Hobson, in pencil and numbered by Hobson. Page size: 11 inches x 12 inches.

Bound: with original USGS maps for the concertina binding, which, when opened, creates its own vista of mountains and valleys representing the maps that figure so prominently in the Lopez story, covers made of paper over boards, paper reproducing a 1911 map of Bogotá from the collection of the Library of Congress, publisher's slipcase of wood- grained paper over boards with brass-toned metal label holder attached to spine of box holding white paper label with title and author in black, all suggesting a map cabinet which plays a pivotal role in Lopez's story, further housed in tan corrugated paper board slipcase, slipcase and board covers made by John DeMerrit with the assistance of Kris Langan, new.



The book opens with images of hands emulating gestures of a map maker at work reproduced as digital pigment prints on transparent film. The book also contains landscape images and an image of pencils from the writing desk of Barry Lopez printed as digital pigment prints from monotypes with pastel all created by Charles Hobson.

The text has been printed letterpress by Les Ferriss in Garamond Narrow type. The book and images were created by Charles Hobson who assembled the book with the assistance of Alice Shaw. Barry Lopez's THE MAPPIST was originally published in 2000 in LIGHT ACTION IN THE CARIBBEAN. It is a multi-layered story perfectly embodied by Charles Hobson's book.



Themes of hidden identities searched out and deciphered, hidden intentions coded in seemingly disparate actions, and the tantalizing possibilities of bringing order to a chaotic history are beautifully served by the combination of maps that are the subject of the story and, literally, hold the story together. The story itself is certainly one of the wittiest "legends" ever devised for its surrounding map.

The reader is challenged with images thrown up by the author and artist: bits of map interspersing text, bits of map as foredge and gutter outside edge on any turn of the page, a phrase full of possibilities "he was a patriot" and suggestions in the form of queries: was Lewis Mumford a populist?

When "The Mappist" gives the narrator a copy of his very rare book, THE CITY OF GERANIUMS, the reader is doubly seduced with this act of generosity (or is it instinct to preserve one's values) for the words are preceded and followed by a page of transparent film with the image of a map being passed from one hand to another. Turning the film page, the reader is confronted with the act being completed and the hand off accomplished.



The narrator finishes his tale with a ride down a very dark gravel road, using the sound of the tires on the crushed stone as his "map." We are left wondering where will we find our maps - and will we be able to read them - or remember what we've read. Pacific Editions' THE MAPPIST will certainly help in this ongoing quest.

Please keep me in mind, Santa.

Your friend,
Gulahiyi

[The Selected Shorts performance of The Mappist made an impression on at least one other listener - http://wordforwords.blogspot.com/2009/12/is-this-real-study-in-verisimilitude.html ]

Whitewater Rambles

The Whitewater River has always been unfamiliar to me. I’ve seen Whitewater Falls, “the tallest falls east of the Mississippi”, on many occasions. And that was about all I knew of the river.



Somewhere along the way, I’d heard of “Lower Whitewater Falls.” But I never investigated how, or if, it was distinct from “THE” Whitewater Falls. For all I knew, the “Upper” part was what you see from the Forest Service overlook off NC 281, south of Sapphire, and the Lower Falls is viewed by descending the stairs from the overlook.

Well, I was mistaken, and so I recently devoted an afternoon to a better understanding of Whitewater geography.



Technically speaking, “Whitewater Falls” is a misnomer. It’s not on the map. According to the U.S. Geological Survey’s Board on Geographic Names, the tall falls you find on postcards is simply “Upper Falls,” while “Lower Falls” is a couple of miles down the Whitewater River in South Carolina.



With a drop of about 200 feet, Lower Falls is impressive. I finally saw it last month after a two-mile walk from a trailhead on Duke Power’s Pumped Storage Facility at Bad Creek. I had driven past the Bad Creek entrance many times. Due to the imposing gate, the chain link and the barbed wire, I assumed the place was strictly off-limits to wood tramps like me.



Once again, I was mistaken. So I brazenly steered my way through the gate and past the bizarre Bad Creek reservoir. I found the trail and commenced to walking. To reach the observation deck for Lower Falls, you have to cross a footbridge over the Whitewater.



On the east side of the river, the Foothills Trail leads north to the Upper Falls.



On the west side of the river, another trails meanders through old growth toward a twenty acre tract of virgin forest, the Coon Branch Natural Area. This path finally gave me a chance to get acquainted with the Whitewater River. The day was too short, though, so I’ll have to find the gigantic Fraser magnolia on a later date.



Once upon a time I might have known, but I had since forgotten, that the Whitewater begins near the High Hampton resort in Cashiers. Driving along NC 107 toward South Carolina, you’ll cross the river. Silver Run Branch flows into the Whitewater just a short distance downstream from Silver Run Falls.



The final stretch of the Whitewater River is the part that I will never see, since it is lost forever beneath the waters of Lake Jocassee, built by Duke Power in the 1970s. Among the worlds lost to the Jocassee damnation was the trail of the French botanist Andre Michaux who explored the Keowee and its headwaters in 1878 and 1788.



Somewhere between the Whitewater and the Toxaway Rivers, he took notes on one unusual plant. The subsequent efforts of botanists to find the Shortia galacifolia described by Michaux continued for a century before the mystery of the Oconee Bells was finally solved.



Michaux’s second, and last, trip along the Keowee and Whitewater was in December 1788. Over the next few days I’ll post some entries from the journal he kept on that expedition.

.

For all stories on Andre Michaux http://gulahiyi.blogspot.com/search/label/michaux

For the Love of Hemlocks

During his lifetime, Donald Culross Peattie (1898-1964) might have been the most widely read of contemporary American nature writers. Though born in Chicago, he spent much of his youth in Tryon, North Carolina where he displayed an early fascination with plants. Mark Peattie tells a family legend from his father's boyhood:

Walking along a dusty road in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina, he met another boy carrying a gorgeous flowering dogwood branch with which the boy kept hitting his shoes to keep the dust off. Young Donald was so struck by the floral glory so callously treated, that on the spot he exchanged a brand new pen-knife with inlaid mother-of-pearl for the dogwood branch.

Peattie returned to the North Carolina mountains many times. While I’ve never seen the great forests of chestnut trees myself, I am indebted to Peattie for a word-picture of chestnuts viewed from Mount Mitchell, one of the most unforgettable descriptions I’ve ever read.

If it happens that the people who come after us are denied the sublime joy of experiencing the hemlocks in our forests, at least they can turn to Donald Peattie:

In the grand, high places of the southern mountains Hemlock soars above the rest of the forest, rising like a church spire — like numberless spires as far as the eye can see — through the blue haze that is the natural atmosphere of those ranges. Sometimes even its branches reach out like arms above the crowns of other trees. But though the Hemlock’s top may rejoice in the boldest sun and brave any storm, the tree unfailingly has its roots down in the deep, cool, perpetually moist earth. And no more light than a glancing sunbeam ever penetrates through the somber shade of its boughs to the forest floor...


Hemlock Bough - Paul Landacre woodcut from Peattie's A Natural History of North American Trees.

Approaching such a noble tree, you think it dark, almost black, because the needles on the upper side are indeed a lustrous deep blue-green. Yet when you lunch on the rock that is almost sure to be found at its feet, or settle your back into the buttresses of the bole and look up under the boughs, their shade seems silvery, since the underside of each needle is whitened by two lines. Soon even talk of the tree itself is silenced by it, and you fall to listening. When the wind lifts up the Hemlock’s voice, it is no roaring like the Pine’s, no keening like the Spruce’s. The Hemlock whistles softly to itself. It raises its long, limber boughs and lets them drop again with a sign, not sorrowful, but letting fall tranquility upon us.

Meanwhile, officials with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park have just announced that they are “cautiously optimistic” about efforts to save the trees from the hemlock woolly adelgid. Although the decline is widespread, the Park has focused on a treatment area of about 132,000 trees, using a three-pronged strategy of predatory beetles, foliar treatments and systemic treatments. While the chemical treatments are expensive and labor intensive, the hope is that they will buy time for the predatory beetles to get established. So far, over a half million of the predator beetles, of three different species, have been released to gobble up the adelgids.



The adelgids arrived in the United States on nursery stock from Japan a hundred years ago, but were not detected in the Park until 2002.

More on this story from the Knoxville News Sentinel:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2009/dec/05/efforts-to-curtail-insect-in-smokies-showing/

And more on Peattie from the University of North Carolina Herbarium:

http://www.herbarium.unc.edu/Collectors/Peattie.htm

Born of the Piedmont Soil

To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in.
- Gretel Ehrlich

The voice of the land is my voice.
- from the Navaho

Our last instruction to our new explorer and frontiersman is to hold ever in sight his final goal – to reveal within our innate country a land in which to live, a symphonious environment of melody and mystery.
- Benton MacKaye


Anson natives Hugh Hammond Bennett and Blind Boy Fuller

In his books Blue Highways and River Horse, William Least Heat-Moon crosses the continent on land and on water, respectively. For PrairyErth, he stops in the middle of the country to explore Chase County, Kansas.

As I perambulate through Anson County, North Carolina I think of Heat-Moon’s words from the tallgrass prairie:

I aimed to write about a most spare landscape, seemingly poor for a reporter to poke into, one appearing thin and minimal in history and texture, a stark region recent American life had mostly gone past, a still point, a fastness an ascetic seeking a penitential corner might discover.

People might drive through Anson County, as they might drive through Chase County, concluding “There’s nothing here.”

I would disagree. William Vogt discusses the need to recognize “something there”:

We must come to understand our past, our history, in terms of the soil and water and forests and grasses that have made it what it is. We must see the years to come in the frame that makes space and time one. Our philosophies must be rewritten to remove them from the domain of words and “ideas,” and to plant their roots firmly in the earth.

In Characters and Their Landscapes, Ronald Blythe makes the point even more concisely:

Does landscape enter the blood with the milk?

In the case of the Anson landscape, the answer to Blythe’s question is found in Elder Ralf, Lockhart, Hazel, Buck and Scarlett. And I’ll add two more Anson Countians to that list: Blind Boy Fuller and Hugh Hammond Bennett.



Whenever I listen to the Piedmont blues, I can hear the rolling farmlands and mill towns where I grew up. One of the great guitar players and singers of the Piedmont blues was born in Anson County.




Blind Boy Fuller (1907-1941, born Fulton Allen) recorded with and influenced other blues musicians like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. After Fuller died, McGhee recorded The Death of Blind Boy Fuller and even performed as “Blind Boy Fuller No. 2” to capitalize on the late blues man’s popularity.



Like Blind Boy Fuller, Hugh Hammond Bennett (1881-1960) knew his way around a cotton field. Bennett’s father managed a 1200-acre plantation in Anson County, and he managed it well during a time when many, if not most, farmers were squandering the nation’s richest topsoils.

One of young Hugh’s first tasks on the farm was to help lay out contour plantings to prevent erosion. Eventually, Bennett built upon those early lessons and became known as “the father of soil conservation in the United States.”

As director of the Soil Conservation Service during the Dust Bowl Era, Bennett fought for the cause with visionary zeal.

In 1935 (the same year Blind Boy Fuller recorded Rag, Mama, Rag) Bennett went to Capitol Hill to justify establishing the Soil Conservation Service as a permanent agency of the government. Bennett biographer, Wellington Brink, graphically describes the event:

The witness was not cheerful, but he was persistent, informed, and courageous. He told a grim story. He had been telling it all morning. Chapter by chapter, he annotated each dismal page with facts and figures from a reconnaissance he had just completed. . . . The witness did not hurry. He did not want to hurry. That extra ace he needed was not yet at hand.

Well he realized that the hearing was beginning to drag. Out of one corner of his eye, he noted the polite stifling of a yawn, but Hugh Bennett continued deliberatively. . . . Bennett knew that a dust storm was on its way.

He had newspaper items and weather reports to support this knowledge. But it seemed mighty slow arriving. If his delaying tactics were successful, the presence of the swirling dust—material evidence of what he was talking about—ought to serve as a clincher for his argument.

Presently one of the senators remarked—off the record—'It is getting dark. Perhaps a rainstorm is brewing.' Another ventured, 'Maybe it's dust.' 'I think you are correct,' Bennett agreed. 'Senator, it does look like dust.' The group gathered at a window.

The dust storm for which Hugh Bennett had been waiting rolled in like a vast steel-town pall, thick and repulsive. The skies took on a copper color. The sun went into hiding. The air became heavy with grit. Government's most spectacular showman had laid the stage well. All day, step by step, he had built his drama, paced it slowly, risked possible failure with his interminable reports, while he prayed for Nature to hurry up a proper denouement. For once, Nature cooperated generously.

Bennett’s dramatic appearance before the committee secured passage of the Soil Conservation Act, with no dissenting votes cast. It was the first soil conservation act in the history of this or any other nation.

Now that all our food comes from the supermarket rather than the soil, Hugh Hammond Bennett’s words may lack the relevance they once did. Despite that, here’s the opening of his classic 1939 text, Soil Conservation:

In fifteen decades, Americans have transformed a wilderness into a mighty nation. In all the history of the world, no people ever built so fast and yet so well. This will be a land of liberty, they said in the beginning, and as they hacked the forest, drove their ploughshares deep into the earth, and spread their herds across the ranges, they sang of the land of the free that they were making. All that they finally built upon this continent is founded in that faith – that here there would be opportunity and independence and security for any man.

Those things are the power and the hope of this democracy. And they have sprung, very largely, from the goodness of our land, its capacity to produce rewardingly. Yet with astonishing improvidence, Americans have plundered the resource that made it possible to realize their dream.

Moving across this country in the greatest march of occupation ever known, they have exploited and abused this soil. As a result, our vital land supply has been steadily sapped by the heavy drain of soil erosion….

A permanent agriculture…is possible, even where the land is highly vulnerable to erosion, when people are willing to pay the price of protecting it. Where the price had not been paid, civilizations have disintegrated and disappeared.

Take us out, Mr. Fuller...





http://www.soil.ncsu.edu/about/century/hugh.html
http://toto.lib.unca.edu/sounds/piedmontblues/
http://blues.about.com/od/artistprofil2/p/BlindBoyFuller.htm


Not done yet, back to the goose pond soon...

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