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A river carries things away, and gladly it will steal your heart; Lawson's Fork has taken mine clean away. On the seventh day we came to the end of the creek, before it merged with the Pacolet River. This was the wildest, most magical section, long calm stretches of brown water punctuated by bellowing rapids, and all along it, the blue flowers of spring bloomed -- phlox, violets, lyre-leaved sage, bluets. A blue sky overhead, through a green lace of box elder, sycamore, hackberry, hornbeam, red maple and beech. Steve Patton was with us, as well as David Taylor, one of the authors of the book, and Rob, Betsy Teter's oldest son, and two crackerjack kayakers, Guerry and Watts. We made a merry band of it, our breaths hanging after us for the first couple of hours, stirring up life. Sometimes fights broke out between our boats -- we went at each other like gladiators, suddenly paddling furiously and slamming boats together, and also playing all kinds of tricks. Guerry unscrewed Rob's drain plug atop one end of his kayak and held the boat underwater, letting it fill, which meant Rob had to find a sandbar, climb out and drain his boat. |
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Maybe it was the balls that made us feel so playful. For some odd reason there are balls everywhere along the creek, and all week we have been gathering them, like strange and colorful blowfish floating on water, until by the take-out point on the last day we have enough almost to fill the back of John's truck. Beach balls, footballs, tennis balls, ping-pong balls, basketballs. Tell me why there are so many balls in the creek. Some smaller ones are marked McDonalds -- obviously a restaurant playground somewhere in Spartanburg is losing its balls. It should build a fence. Blue-eyed David dawdled, as usual, taking pictures of resurrection fern and fringe tree, sometimes standing in his unsteady craft hanging to a branch or a bank, risking limb if not life, and mostly I lingered with him, not wanting to get too soon to the end and feeling somewhat useful in helping stabilize his boat. A northern water snake sunned in a knot of grapevine above the water, plopping to safety before our boats got closer than six feet. A crop of Southern ragwort. A bank of rhododendron, galax and mountain laurel, as if we were up in the Appalachians. Before us a female mallard pretended to have a broken wing, zigzaging through the water theatrically until we were well away from her chicks, which we did not find. |
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The creek was supremely beautiful, but a strange smell to the water in places reminded me of formaldehyde, as if I had been dissecting a frog and hadn't washed my hands. "The creek's actually a Class B stream, " Rob told me. "What does that mean?" I asked. "It's not in as bad a shape as it could be." Class B is not good enough, water quality-wise. As the river becomes more and more a valued and honored resource of Spartanburg, a place where people have fun and see wild things, the degradations will stop. The farmer who is pasturing cows right up to the creek will build a fence a few hundred feet back, to keep feces from washing directly into the water. Polluters and dumpers will stop. The sewage treatment plant will make sure its discharge isn't damaging. The roadbuilders and waterline installers should be using sediment shields, to keep the immersed solids count low. I keep thinking of the murky and sometimes smelly waters. What will Lawson's Fork look like, I wonder, in ten years? How blue will it have become? What will I have become? By then where will my heart be?
The Lawson's Fork flows to the Pacolet, which runs to the Broad, which enters the Saluda, which finds the Congaree, which joins the Wateree, which empties into the Santee. The Santee finds the wide and blue-filled ocean.
Burn a blue candle for my heart, Lawson's Fork. I will remember you. |
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Point number 1 -- Although I am a merely biologist, I have just as much right to verb a word as anyone... "confluencing" it is... Point number 2 -- Seven of us, a small flotilla, paddled the lower stretch of Lawson's Fork on Sunday morning. Shortly after our put-in below the Glendale Falls some trash catches David Taylor's eye. He heads to shore to extricate tangled, fibrous bags from overhanging limbs, a sign that water was six feet higher during at least one recent flood. Just the routine sort of clean up that David and Steve Patton and many others do whenever they enjoy the splendor of the river. Like Janisse and her privet plucking, even maintaining creek litter at status quo is laudable. But these bags are no ordinary litter, David tells us. "The writing is in Latin," he says. No run-of-the-mill stuff. Perhaps the flood wasn't so recent after all. Confluence from the Latin "to flow together." Streams do it. People do it. Communities do it. All have been in evidence this past week. |
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At the take-out point, near the confluence of Lawson's Fork and the Pacolet River, it strikes me how incredible the week has been. Betsy Teter, John Lane, and the Hub City Writers Project took traces of ideas from the headwaters of Gibbes Patton's vision, and their ideas trickled into plans. Slowly at first, but in time the plans coalesced into torrents of action, and as one tributary fed another, resistance was eroded until finally the force awakened the community like a dam breaking. It is a great starting point. Enough with the bad-water simile and metaphors, you say, and rightly so. I will go back to Aiken, South Carolina, to study the ecology of wetlands and amphibians. Janisse returns to the sandhills of South Georgia, where the spirit of the remaining longleaf forests inspires her to inspire others. (But look for her on Oprah...) Betsy and John will (they hope) relax and get back a little bit of their lives. But my hope for Lawson's Fork is that it does not return to the waters of yesterday-in Janisse's words, to the poison of "that which was." The confluence of the people and communities along the Lawson's Fork, like the confluence of streams, has created a unified whole. It is powerful. It is vital. It is a good beginning. Point number 3 -- What a wonderful, underappreciated habitat Lawson's Fork is. Get out on the river. Enjoy the waters physically, ecologically, aesthetically, perhaps spiritually. Lunch at a logjam. Have a happy meal among all the multicolored balls. Point number 4 -- Don't you just hate it when scientists go point by point? What is it with us anyway? Just the facts, m'am. |
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