How do you write 600 words about a bend in the road? What if that road, in the shape of a backwards “S,” snakes around a slough made gorgeous with a profusion of yellow wildflowers?
The other day, on the way to meet a friend for lunch in West Point, I took my customary route: Waverly Ferry Road, which becomes Officers Lake Road to Highway 50.
There on the left, not far from Hwy. 50, that lovely, but nameless slough was newly resplendent with yellow wildflowers.
The effect was startling. The passing motorist is confronted with a scene that could be the October page in a Sierra Club calendar.
Except it’s in Lowndes County.
Later that afternoon, around 5, the landscape had taken on a different character. The golden light of late afternoon had transformed the slough into something otherworldly. The scene was so alive it seemed to vibrate.
While I suppose you might call this a cypress slough — the russet-colored trees with their accompanying knees are abundant here — there are plenty of water tupelo, another “water tree” that inhabits our Southern landscape.
Occasionally the two are confused. The cypress has a red-tinted bark, needles and a fluted trunk. The tupelo, from whence our neighbor to the north got its name — the trees were abundant there in the early days, so the story goes — have a silver-colored bark, leaves instead of needles and are loved by honeybees.
And so it was, a day later, like the en-plein-air painters of 19th century France, who took their easels, paints and palettes out in nature to paint, I sat at the edge of the slough, my canvas a small laptop computer, trying to paint with words the scene in front of me.
I sat on the soft, leaf-covered ground under a mature sweet gum showing the first signs of its autumnal reds. A three-foot baby cypress tickled my neck.
A monarch butterfly danced by; a slight breeze caressed the yellow flowers; off in the distance a solitary crow cawed. I felt immersed in the natural world.
The plant ID app on my phone came up with 21 possibilities for the yellow flowers.
The most plausible choice seemed to be coreopsis (tickseed), that or a sunflower of some sort. Not knowing makes them no less beautiful.
I closed the laptop, put it away and began walking along the edge of the slough. In places the ground was mushy. Soon I came to a leaf-covered path leading toward the center of the slough. It appeared negotiable, so I ventured in. The mud sucked at and threatened to overtop my ankle-high rubber boots.
Soon I stood on solid ground in a dense stand of tupelo and cypress. The trees towered overhead creating a cathedral effect.
Perhaps the words trickled down from the tall trees, but at that moment it occurred to me, that Nature is the temple in which we are meant to worship.
On the walk back to the truck, my attention was divided between the occasional passing vehicles and the changing views of the slough. The world may be in turmoil, but nature calmly and deliberately persists, sometimes vivid, other times subtle.
To experience the vivid, take a drive out Officers Lake Road.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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