spartanburg

The other night we erected our yearly eight-foot Fraser Fir. It fills one corner of our big living room. I watched from the couch as Russell and Betsy trimmed the majestic tree. This year I was feeling nostalgic, thinking about Christmases past as they assembled this one. As my only contribution I offered some coaching if I saw a significant void in the field of decoration.

Out here our house is turned to the linear wildness along the creek like a big ear. We listen for what happens in the timber and thick undergrowth below us with the fascination of someone sampling a new CD. If I hear a bird I don't know, I try to track it down for identification, adding its name to our "play list" of what this place might spin in our direction. I scribble the name in the back of an old field guide, a note as to what is passing by.

We had a little earthquake last week. Its 6 a.m. epicenter was near the town of Columbus, North Carolina. It wasn't much, just a 3.1 magnitude shaking for a few seconds, but the local paper reported it was enough to make some poor child up there wake up thinking that his brimstone preacher was right and the end of time had arrived on schedule.

One percent of the land in the lower forty-eight states is what might be considered "wilderness." Ninety-nine percent is utilized in some way for human profit-urban areas, suburbs, logging, mining, grazing. In 10,000 short years we humans have found ways to extend our shadow over the whole reach of a peopleless continent.

I've been thinking a great deal this week about vision-how it happens, how it affects community, how it morphs (and sometimes transmogrifies) from wild, bold ideas into something people can work inside and celebrate.

The Spartanburg Downtown Code, developed in partnership with the city by the Lawrence Group from Davidson, NC, will soon move from the charrette and public planning stage to a vote by city council.

The summer of 1997 I traveled west to Missoula, Montana to take part in a panel on "Southern Nature Writing" at a biennial conference of an emerging academic group called ASLE (The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment). When I received the invitation the group was new to me, but a little research showed ASLE had met once, two summers before, in Fort Collins, Colorado.

This week we've been practicing our wild food gathering skills on our evening walk. It's an August ritual. All along the road we've started seeing muscadines, or "fall grapes" as the locals call them, ripe and ready for eating.

(This story is from The Point Guard, a novel-in-progress about the fictional town of Morgan, South Carolina.)

In the old days, the weekend before Christmas, we always rose early on Saturday and headed up to Aunt Nina and Uncle Tip's to get the tree. The year I was fifteen Connie's boyfriend Randy went with us. He drove Mama's car, the old Desoto, up Highway 176 past Landrum. The mountains off in North Carolina were ice blue, and the sky was almost white, with approaching clouds behind Hogback Mountain.

I've been thinking about hunting all week. Thanksgiving morning we woke up to shooting on two sides. For a half-hour or so it sounded like a Baghdad fire fight. Upstream, to our west, ducks and geese were probably falling in a series of shotgun volleys, and to the east, downstream, somebody else had mounted a tree stand to shoot a few holiday rounds at some of South Carolina's estimated 800,000 deer in the dawn's early light.