Summer Scenes

By Tom Poland

 

 

Schools are out. Vacations are in. The coast, great outdoors, gardening, and summer vacations get us outside and moving. Life is good. Get some sand under your feet, and water beneath you. Walk the beach. Explore a river. Get up before sunrise when the dew’s on the roses. Get some dirt on your hands. Grow things. Get serious about watching and photographing nature.

Look at summer in new ways, and try something new. Four scenes from summer give us motivation and things to anticipate and ponder.

 

 

Lowcountry Illusion

Seeing is not always believing. This landscape misleads viewers into thinking a full moon floats over the rising sun. Just the opposite. The moon sets in the west as the sun rises. Anticrepuscular rays—cloud shadows converging opposite the rising sun—reinforce the illusion.

We’ve all seen the common crepuscular rays known as sunrays. Thanks to perspective, they converge like spokes to a hub. Nothing new. You’ve seen a field’s plowed rows go from wide to narrow and train rails converge into infinity.

To put things in perspective, imagine you’re standing in the middle of a long straight road. To the east, it converges at the horizon. Now look to the west. There, too, it converges. Crepuscular and anticrepuscular rays behave much the same way.

As for that mouthful, “crepuscular, it means resembling twilight.

The setting? Fripp Inlet. None other than Blackbeard may have hidden his pirated bounty on Fripp Island, the most seaward of South Carolina’s islands. Perhaps a beautiful morning such as this greeted Edward Teach after a long night of plundering and drunken revelry. Most likely this old salt was quite familiar with such atmospheric optics. If not, no doubt he checked his compass ’fore setting sail.

 

Fripp Inlet’s Atmospheric Illusion

This photograph appears on page 224 in Reflections of South Carolina, Vol. II, University of South Carolina Press.

 

 

The Sands Of Time

Walk an Atlantic beach and you tread across granules that loomed as Appalachian mountain peaks eons ago. No rock can resist time. It fragments them into sand that rivers and wind transport to beaches.

How fitting that hourglasses use sand. Sand illustrates the grinding away of everything we think will endure. Flip the hourglass over and sand trickles from one bulb to the other, just as days trickle through our lives. We, too, begin as mountains with lofty expectations. Time break us just as water, weathering, and gravity break mountains.

From mountains to sand to poetic figures of speech … The afternoon after my grandfather died, a drenching thunderstorm swept over his farm. “God’s washing his footprints from the earth,” said my aunt. The morning after we buried my mother, a raging storm raced over Georgialina. God washed her footprints off the face of the earth.

These footprints, long ago erased by wind and water, head in opposite directions: the life well spent versus the life squandered. Said James Branch Cabell: “While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.” Time. Use it well.

 

Fleeting Footprints

 

 

Kiawah River Kayakers

Towering clouds, sumptuous light, and water slick as glass make for an inviting morning. Double-bladed paddles aloft, kayakers ride the tides; they go with a moon-tide flow as dawn breaks across salt marsh encased in serenity and drenched with grandeur and wildlife.

Today is the day to ease up on unsuspecting creatures of the marsh and sea. Kayaking lets man join nature rather than play the role of clumsy intruder. Silent and low in the water, kayakers possess unusual stealth, and that makes nature watching one of kayaking’s joys. There’s much to see. As the tide goes out, wading birds flock to the delicacies exposed on banks. Other sightings can include dolphins, manatees, and sea turtles. Sharks?

Wildlife views kayakers with far less suspicion. Men have known this for at least 4,000 years. The kayak, created by Inuit, Aleut, and Yup’ik, originated in icy waters far to the north, nothing like this palmetto postcard of paradise.

Kayaker’s choice—the whitewater of the Chattooga or the calm water of the estuary—why not both? As for the Kiawah River, it runs through a narrow channel between Seabrook and Kiawah Islands. Kayakers’ warning: the kayak doesn’t perform well in the sea: avoid Atlantic breakers this morning.

This photograph appears on page 223 in Reflections of South Carolina, Vol. II, University of South Carolina Press.

 

Kiawah River Kayakers

 

 

The Rosarians

Gone but not forgotten. The late Dr. Charles Jeremias and his late wife, Mattie Lephron “Lee,” cultivated roses, and some of their roses literally traced their roots to the 1600s.

The Jeremias loved “old garden roses,” roses known prior to 1867. Lee called them “roses out of circulation.” Once they found an old garden rose, in a forgotten family plot, perhaps, Charles rooted cuttings. If the plant grew, the next step was identification, not always easy. For ten years, he couldn’t identify a rose. The he found an 1817 rose book (“The most expensive rose book I ever bought!” he said). He came across a rose that sounded like his mystery rose and nailed its identity: a tea rose known as St. Josephs.

Among their favorite old garden rose specimens was Champneys Pink Cluster, a Charleston discovery—the first in a line of species developed in the United States. A Charleston indigo/rice planter developed this species and sent a bush to his brother in France. His brother liked it so much, he put it out as Noisette, which rosarians now know developed from Champneys Pink Cluster.

One final note that should stick with you: Dr. Jeremias held the patent to super glue.

 

 The Rosarian’s Passion

 

All photos by Robert C. Clark