One of the formats I’ve been meaning to try out in this space is the travel account, a genre of writing I personally know well from early modern Arabic (mostly) exemplars known as riḥla writings, which served a variety of literary and other functions, the genre more one of form than of fixed content and function, and so similar to the genre of travel writing across the early modern world and into the present in fact (the below included).
I begin with the (partial) reason for my radio silence as of late, our family’s annual vacation to the Carolinas, passing through Virginia as well (stopping at the Stonewall Jackson Shrine, Petersburg National Battlefield, and a couple units of the Richmond National Battlefield) during which I ended up doing very little writing of any sort. I’ve selected three locations along our week-long journey, in chronological order of our visits but also as it turns out in order of historical occurrence, from the nineteenth century to the Holocene to the Pleistocene and before.
June 6, 2021. Stonewall Jackson Shrine, Guinea Station, Virginia.
Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees.
Many times before we’d driven past the brown sign along I-95 south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, pointing the way to the structure in which Stonewall Jackson died, but had never stopped. On this trip it worked out time-wise as a reasonable stopping point, given that when traveling with small children it’s rarely advisable to drive continuously for more than a couple hours. As such, whereas before having children we tended to barrel south on our annual beach vacation, we have since taken it much slower, relatively speaking, discovering in the process all manner of places and towns invisible from the featureless speed of the interstate. The Stonewall Jackson Shrine- lately renamed by the Park Service in (no doubt deliberately) rather less evocative language as the Stonewall Jackson Death Site, though maps still carry the former name- is one such site, though in this case it’s a place I’ve known of since childhood. It was in the small white frame structure, formerly a plantation office, that the Confederate general slipped into a pneumonia-induced delirium and shortly thereafter died, sealing, perhaps, the fate of the Confederacy and so determining the trajectory of a great deal of history since then. Or perhaps not. Either way, few sites in the American South carry as much fraught weight and emotional significance, despite there being few visual clues in the landscape or the structure itself (though my understanding is that the ‘shrine’—almost akin to a mashhad really—was once rather more ‘shrine-like’ in terms of visitation and participation).
I’ll be discussing this is in a forthcoming essay so I’m not going to elaborate a lot here, but one of the most striking things, to me at least, about the American landscape in general is the relative absence of things like saints’ shrines or of sacred or significant features and sites with long, deep histories of meaning and use. Part of this is the legacy of the virtual extermination of native peoples due to disease and other more violent factors, part of it due to the dominance of Protestantism in most of North America. Regardless, Civil War battlefields and associated sites are among the places which most approximate the role of holy place and of shrine, at least for white Southern Americans though I think even to the present for Americans in general, though this is no doubt far less true than in the past. People need saints and need places of veneration, we need the landscapes we inhabit to have trans-temporal significance, something that I am convinced is deeply ingrained in humans as a species, and is arguably visible as far back as the Paleolithic ‘cave art’ of southwestern Europe (and its analogues at other times and places in the deep past). This crucial ‘sanctified’ aspect of these sites of memory is generally lost in the debates that have encompassed them in recent years, in part because that function has certainly declined, with blatantly political and culture war signalling ones becoming more dominant. I can’t say that I’ve found a good way to navigate the complexities of our ‘hallowed grounds,’ though the importance of doing so has certainly been reinforced through becoming a parent—a parent who insists on his kids experiencing the past, their past, up close and personal, even if for now their grasp of its significance is fragmentary (but is it otherwise for anyone of whatever age?).
The ‘shrine’—or ‘death site,’ depending on which signifying or cartographic layer you consult—was not open on our visit, so we walked around the building and peeked into the windows, seeing, through the haze of the glass, the room in which the stern, strange, pious general crossed over the river. We’d earlier this year visited Chancellorsville and seen the spot where Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men (which feels rather like an overly literal metaphor for much Southern American history), so the kids had learned about Stonewall Jackson previously and had a sense of this site’s significance. That said, the most exciting aspect of our visit for them was watching a passing Amtrak train, the rail line—the destination of Jackson’s ambulance—still very active here. We were having a picnic when we heard the train horn in the distance, so we raced—barefoot—along the little knoll overlooking the tracks, and waved as the train raced by heading north. After it passed, a barred owl began to call across the river in the shade of the deep bottomland forest.
June 8, 2021. Green Swamp Preserve, north of Supply, North Carolina.
Our family had visited the Nature Conservancy’s Green Swamp Preserve, a premier publicly accessible site for seeing the simply amazing Venus fly trap in the wild, a few years before, when my wife was pregnant with our daughter and our son was still just a little fellow. That was a rather more arduous visit, as my wife occasionally reminds me, the day hot, muggy, and buggy. This year our visit, on the way from our two-night stay in Wilmington, North Carolina, down to the beach, was blessed with much more equitable weather, downright cool in fact (well, relatively speaking, still humid). The Green Swamp Preserve is only partially a literal swamp—though there is that, a type of wetland called a pocosin—with much of it longleaf pine savanna. The first part of our hike cut through a pretty standard dry longleaf pine savanah, with abundant young longleaf pines that Cormac and Vera were able to examine. Despite having spent my teenage years among the longleaf forests of South Mississippi I haven’t tired of these marvelous trees, they’re just wonderful, and the kids agreed.
But of course the main draw of this sprawling wildland, now surrounded by land empty of regular human presence but deeply marked by human activity in the form of commercial forestry (activity best visible via satellite view, which reveals the neat grids within which the forests are contained and harvested), are the populations of Venus fly traps contained within. And they are truly amazing. We cleared the all but dry but very thick and dark pocosin and came out into the stretch of boggy savanna rich with the carnivorous plants, and very soon were down close to the ground examining the intricate little traps. I picked a narrow sliver of grass and with it touched one of the handful of ‘trigger hairs’ that line the inside of the plant’s trap- and wham! the trap closed with what seemed like (lightning speed. I’m not ashamed to say that I shouted with glee like a kid, it’s just so unexpected and amazing even if rationally one knows what to expect. In our ordinary experience plants are passive (even if intellectually we know they’re not), so to see one basically moving of its own volition is really quite sublime.
Also in the boggy savanna were some gorgeous orchids, and a number of other flowering species typical of these prolific habitats, many of them quite familiar to me from my teenage years in South Mississippi spent scouring the empty pinelands for seepage bogs and the like, a magnificent botanical diversity scattered in little islands of peatmoss rich wetlands, places in which a couple feet of elevation difference can lead to quite dramatic changes in ecological assembly.
After some time exploring the Venus fly traps and their neighbors, we trekked back across the pocosin, my daughter stooping to examine the thick and spongy beds of sphagnum moss within the pocosin’s depths, and so back through the drier longleaf savanna to our car. Vera really wanted to find some snakes and so we flipped some fallen logs but no luck, perhaps because of the cool and cloudy weather. Fortunately later in the week we took in an abundance of skinks and other lizards as well as the crowning reptile glory of the American South, the American alligator, so we ended up doing well on the herpetological front.
June 8-12, 2021. Pleistocene finds, Debordieu Island, north of Georgetown, South Carolina.
As I turn back up the beach from my last sweep for tide-washed Pleistocene fossils on the last morning of our family’s vacation and head towards the boardwalk over the dunes, I see it—a glistening chunk of mammoth tooth, black and green, worn first in an ancient iteration of the Pee Dee River, then in the waters of the Atlantic. I scoop to pick it up and spot as well a shark tooth, perhaps also Pleistocene, perhaps far older. For a moment I imagine the layers of time and place that have come and gone here along the coastal strand, then make my way up the beach and back to pack.
From South Carolina’s Waccamaw Neck south along the Atlantic Coast, all the way to Florida, dense forest and marshland run nearly continuously, and it is not so hard to imagine what this part of the American South might have looked like during the Pleistocene before humans arrived sometime towards the end of the last great glaciation, as much of the botanical assembly seems to have remained fairly stable—sprawling marshlands, salt and brackish grading into freshwater up the estuary-draining rivers, with vast stands of bald cypress in the swamps, longleaf pine a bit higher, and pocosins and Carolina bays threading throughout, the ecologies alternating between the very dense and the very open and grass-dominated. Somewhat harder to picture are the many changes, some quite rapid, in sea level and thus in overall topography and ecological composition, that have taken place here (and, of course, around the world) since the world’s plunge into ice ages over two million years ago, a period of climatic dynamism we still inhabit, albeit with the new addition of human-driven climatic change. Even harder to picture but wonderfully tantalizing is the incredible faunal diversity of the Pleistocene South, especially in the sheltered and generally equitable clime that stretches from southern Virginia down the coast to Florida and southeastern Georgia, the Appalachian Mountains and the Gulf Stream moderating the effects of the wall of ice only a few hundred miles to the north. Not only mammoths but mastodons and gomphotheres, to name only the proboscids, ranged across this ecologically complex landscape, along with horses, giant ground sloths, massive armadillos, large cats, canids, camelids, and a host of others great and small, some more typical of subtropical climates, others of more boreal ones, with many smaller species once extant in the Carolinas now restricted to more northern or southern regions.
The megafauna assemblies are almost entirely gone, of course, with only mid-sized exceptions such as white-tailed deer, black bears, and the alligators (the latter a denizen of the Pleistocene South as much as mammoths). Their traces linger in the ecological profiles of the region and in the morphologies of a number of trees, their seed-bearing structures and defenses evolutionary hold-overs from an era of megafaunal browsers and seed distributors. And here and there the fossils of these creatures crop out. One such place is, at least at the moment, the beach of a private community north of Georgetown on the Waccamaw Neck, the location of our family’s annual summer beach sojourn in the company of my wife’s extended family, members of which have been summering at Debordieu all the way back in the days it lay down a dirt road and hosted far more modest summer refugium than today. And so by that long-standing familial connection we have temporary access to the place, specifically a rented beach house hard against the Atlantic strand (and which is no doubt not long for this world, doomed to join the drowned Pleistocene coastal plain probably in our lifetime).
Debordieu Island is, to put it somewhat bluntly, not the sort of place to which I am used and which always feels like a visit to a foreign country; the houses proper which line the beach and back into the edges of the wildland surrounding are at least generally tasteful architecturally but otherwise are displays of absurd levels of wealth, restricted to the few who are permitted access and so between conspicuous and obscured consumption. There is something particularly exorbitant just in general about building on an extremely geologically active site, knowing that one good hurricane or a couple decades of sustained sea level rise are all that lie between your lavish property and the deep blue sea. That said, wealth and influence can buy a bit more provisional security against inevitable forces than might otherwise be available, and at Debordieu this has meant periodical attempts to stave the rising seas in the form of seawalls and of beach replenishment efforts. The unintended consequences of the latter, it turns out, permit delving into the deep past of the place, a past which underlies, literally, the shifting shore and which speaks of likely futures to come.
I have been visiting the beach at Debordieu for years now, walking its length all the way to where a large salt marsh drains into the Atlantic, paddling the extensive marsh creeks and guts lying behind, swimming in the waves, wading out to the shipweck by the North Inlet, and for all that time I was oblivious to both the fossil wealth literally at my feet and to the geological history further underneath. This year, however, I was much more aware of the possibilities, and so upon arriving and heading out to the beach, I made sure to scan the waterline. Sure enough, within seconds of stepping out onto the sand I had espied a shark tooth, with terrestrial vertebrates following soon after; by the end of our stay I’d amassed a nice set of marine and terrestrial remains, albeit many the worse for a hundred thousand or so years’ worth of wear in river and sea. As it turned out, I had the beach replenishment efforts to thank, as the dredging had taken place a couple miles offshore, cutting down into deposits laid during the late Pleistocene, probably a quarter of a million to a hundred thousand years ago, during both periods of glacial expansion and retreat, resulting in marine and terrestrial animals fossilizing, with much older, reworked (that is, washed out in the past then redeposited, then exposed again in the present) shark material mixed in. The ancestral Pee Dee River, which today empties into the Atlantic a few miles to the south, once cut through here, and would have turned to estuary as marine transgressions rose with declining ice levels. The burr fish mouth plates, great white shark teeth, fish vertebrae, and other marine elements, mixed in with horse teeth, mammoth tooth fragments, and tortoise shell plates, among other elements, all stained a deep and shiny black, bear silent witness to the rise and fall and ultimate disappearance of these Ice Age worlds.
It’s a bit melancholy, to be honest, contemplating these lost creatures, given how relatively close they are to our own world, as well as the possibility that humans had something to do with their extinction (though this is contested and will probably never be entirely resolved). There is also a certain irony in their being exposed to human view due to industrial-scale actions taken to protect human investments from the consequences of human-drive climatic change (and contemporary human obsession with building right against the ocean shore).
That’s all for now—I think there’s a theme coalescing in the above, one of landscapes of loss and of persisting presence in the American South, a theme I hope to explore more in coming years, particularly as I continue to come to terms with my own personal history and place in this often tragic and complex tapestry of history and present. Like, I imagine, a lot of intellectually-minded Southerners I have long had an ambiguous relationship with my natal land, but increasingly recognize how inextricable my identity and imagination is from it, and the degree to which I both miss immersion in it and feel a responsibility for its future. Certainly, ‘I dont hate it,’ even if I can’t always love it or even really quite know what ‘it’ is.