Wild Places Renew Us

By Tom Poland

 

It’s getting harder to escape civilization’s flotsam and trappings. Just about everywhere I go, telltale signs of civilization exist. If I don’t see powerlines, I see contrails streaking the sky. If I don’t see contrails, I see litter, even in wild places. Plastic bottles wash into the heart of blackwater swamps. Windborne plastic grocery bags snag limbs. We do a superb job of ruining natural places. Still, several places will reward you with near-pure views of wildness if you go to them. One is the Chattooga River. It’s the only mountain river in a four-state area free of significant development. Rising as a glittering mountain stream near Whitesides Mountain, the Chattooga flows ten miles in North Carolina before snaking a 40-mile border of rock and water between Georgia and South Carolina. The river’s ancient. Geological processes 250 million years old carved out this majestic river that drops 2,469 feet over fifty miles (49.3 feet per mile), creating a daunting and dangerous whitewater river.

Go there and it’s easy to conjure up the Cherokee who fished all along the river. Their fish traps still stand in Section IV: piles of rocks assembled for sustenance. Green milky waters still rush through them just as they did when the Cherokee lived here.

 

Woodall Shoals  Photo by Tom Poland

 

It’s wild but peaceful here. I like to walk out onto the rocks at the Chattooga’s Woodall Shoals. I sit and listen to the river purl and roar. If no contrails mar the sky and no rafters or kayakers float into view, I feel I’m in true wilderness. There’s something about whitewater that’s soothing, soothing of course unless you get out on the river. I’m long overdue for a day on the Chattooga. Next spring I plan to head to the legendary river and run it again.

Another wild place where signs of civilization are sparse is Florida Bay, also known as Wambaw Bay. It’s a surreal, hauntingly beautiful place deep within the Francis Marion Forest down near McClellanville, South Carolina. Its colonies of pitcher plants astound the eye. Yellow pitcher plants stand in dense clusters in red root grass that’s knee high, thick, green, and luxuriant. The pitcher plants stand in thick clusters, their red throats welcoming insects.

Throughout its savanna wind-twisted pond cypress evoke images of Africa’s acacia trees. It’s said this bay is among the most beautiful of the Carolina bays, and I believe it. Vegetation is lush. The vibrant plant zonation—colored bands of grasses and sedges—pleases the eye. The pitcher plants evoke images of an alien city where futuristic skyscrapers rise over a grassy plain. Red-green hooded pitcher plants grow here as do meadow beauties. In the pine tops, cicadas sing as canopy winds mimic the surf. Yellow milkwort grows here too. What I like about this wild place is its remoteness and limited accessibility. The only sign of civilization is a fence. I had hoped to get back there this fall but too many events got in the way. I will return though.

 

Zonation At Wambaw Bay  Photo by Tom Poland

 

Yet another wild place I like is Roblyn’s Neck, a 14,000-acre tract along the Great Pee Dee River in Darlington County. I’ve driven a four-wheel-drive SUV deep into the woods there, all the way to a bluff offering a great view of the Great Pee Dee River and Marlboro County. I’ve followed horsemen in an ATV as well. Swamps abound as do thickly tangled vegetation. I’ve negotiated silky green waters where snakes weave serpentine paths through duckweed. Making my way in, I saw a few signs of man, litter and remnants of a campfire. As for the river itself, it has a grand history. Virgin pine logs once floated down the Great Pee Dee, a large, wild river borne of North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. Waiting downstream at the river’s mouth near Georgetown once stood the world’s largest lumber company. The logs, sawed into lumber, found markets in the northern United States and Europe. Today the river rolls on and in the swamps edging it roam wild hogs hunted by men on horseback. You get a feeling that you’ve stepped way back in time to the 1800s. Not sure I’ll ever get to return but maybe an assignment will take me there.

One more wild place. The barrier islands of Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge. Romain lives in memory as a truly remote, inaccessible place. I’ve written about it in two books. Cape Romain stretches out, a vast refuge that embraces barrier islands and salt marsh habitats for 22 miles along the Atlantic coast. The refuge holds 35,267 acres of beach and sand dunes, salt marsh, maritime forests, tidal creeks, fresh and brackish water impoundments and 31,000 acres of open water. It is an ideal place to watch wildlife for a simple reason: The hand of man has yet to ruin it.

 

The Great Pee Dee River   Photo by Tom Poland

 

Trees grow right up to the sea’s edge where the surf undercuts their roots. Toppled trees litter the beach, their sun-bleached limbs white as marble, monuments to the sun, sea, and wind. In memory when I think of the refuge and summer days there, my blue eyes see clouds of feathers, glistening sands, waves lapping ashore, rippling marshes, and beautiful desolation.

When I return from these places to civilization I get an overdose of traffic, laws, billboards, franchise restaurants, and one of man’s uglier contraptions, convenience stores. It’s a depressing reminder of how artificial civilized life is. All in all I get the feeling that no matter where I go everything suffers what I can only refer to as sameness.

When I was a boy, my parents took to me to Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. To this day I remember the lush forest and its fallen trees covered with bracket fungi more so than New York City, which I also visited as a boy. We don’t always recognize it but we’re in harmony with the natural world, and its water, rocks, rivers, swamps, feathers, and marshes. Our manmade world? Well it gives us asphalt, wires, concrete, steel, rubber, paper, and plastic. It’s a relief and refreshing to escape civilization for places that hang onto their wildness for Thoreau was right. “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

 

Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net 

Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]

 

Tom Poland is the author of eleven books and more than 1,000 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press has released his and Robert Clark’s book, Reflections Of South Carolina, Vol. II. The History Press of Charleston just released his book, Classic Carolina Road Trips From Columbia. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.

 

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