The Historical Importance Of An Invisible Creek

The brief summer of 2014 which followed the brutal winter of 2013-14 gave your author every reason in the world to be out enjoying the bounty of nature and not wanting to stare at a screen or gather hordes of photos together in an attempt to make sense out of the North American experience.  Well, winter is upon us once again and he finds himself indoors a lot more, even while he takes in the chilly air with confidence that he lives in Michigan and not northern Manitoba.  I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as well as a lot of listening.  The United States is currently in the midst of some of the most bitterly divided political warfare that it has seen in some time, Mexico is busy trying to deal with the fact that perhaps helping PRI regain entrenchment has done little to support growth in the country, to say nothing of stem the tide of violence from the drug cartels, and Canada sleeps above all this in some false sense of superiority.  Some jump into the fray completely ignorant of history and reason and foretell of the apocalypse; others claim they are on intimate terms with both the past and the cause of righteousness and yet present to the public rather obvious revisionist viewpoints of who said what in some document, religious or otherwise, made by a court hundreds of years ago, perhaps not even from our shores. 

Life goes on.  Freedom is maintained enough that most in North America, and yes, including Mexico, individuals can choose to tear away the veil of ignorance and find out the facts behind the truths in our larger story.  That's what this blog is about, my own journey to discovery about our story here in North America, and not just about great people or events or even transitory concepts.  Instead, I take a look at even the small things.  My latest read seems to be taking me for a ride down that particular path; Sarah Vowell has been entertaining and informing me about how taking a look at the small things can help one understand how the bigger picture fits together.  Better put by a really good friend, she takes a look a reality through the perspective of one within the fishbowl.  After all, this is why those who study history and geography even bother to look at details even when the facts are largely laid out in plain sight for them; happenings like revolutions are a bit more complex than the slogans which ignite the passions which drive them.  Sometimes we need to tear down the sacred statues and become iconoclasts in order to prevent such revolutions from turning away from said passions and into the realm of pure legalistic precedent.  Alright, so maybe I have also been reading some of that iconoclast Gore Vidal.  The thing is, I'm back to share some more of what I have found.

And what better little thing to then bring to attention than this charming little discovery:

Does not look like much, does it?  I am sure that most people would never recognize it as anything other than a slight depression in the ground which for some reason was bridged rather than filled and paved like the rest of the surrounding city.  In reality, this is what remains of Dock creek, a small tidal creek that perhaps served as the mark for where William Penn decided to center his capital city of Philadelphia.  The "dry water feature" rests buried in a lovely park behind Carpenters Hall, meeting place of the first Continental Congress ,and, as such, another relic of the city's past that gets largely ignored by the visiting public in favor of bigger, grander things like Independence Hall.  Today, aside from the depression in the ground, the only thing that lets the walker know that anything different was ever here is a plaque set up by the National Park Service.  The plaque lets people know that this center of the famous seat of American political birth was full of not only the gassy overtures of politicians, but also plain, simple swamp gas.  Much like inheritor Washington and predecessor London, this first capital of the United States was a rather wet and marshy affair that has otherwise transformed and been paved over.

Of course, the modern face of Philadelphia tends to look a lot more like this:

Chestnut street at 4th, looking west.

And, as expected, this:

Passyunk and 10th, turning south onto 10th.

She started out as the last grasp of the Atlantic's dominance against the fall line.  This is what makes this little creek so interesting, really.  Philadelphia, you see, is unlike many other cities in that it falls not soundly with the "North", is definitely not part of the "South" either, and while hardly on the ocean and farther away from salt water than even Washington, is definitely more coastal than inland.  Many houses here have gardens that feature a magnolia alongside a spruce, fitting for a city that can be buried by snow in the odd winter and yet experience a summer every bit as unpalatable as any given city further south.  In essence, we have a city that had a noticeably longer growing season than what could be offered by New England and the Hudson valley, thus suitable for plantations, yet not idealistically part of a colony founded otherwise for the sake of individual liberty (in contrast to Jamestown) in which the good land could be used for families of farmer-workers.  We thus have a city founded not in consideration to proximity to the coast and thus the broader market, and yet not so far removed from it as to be deaf to the siren song of international commerce. 

Here we have a city founded on the principles of religious tolerance and a degree of personal liberty that also had an increasing number of African slaves imported into it in the mid-eighteenth century.  Proudest son of the city, Benjamin Franklin, otherwise later noted to be something of an abolitionist, did not actually free his slaves until after the Revolution.  As the creek was covered over, so too was slavery, and the city and her history were simultaneously whitewashed; the colonial federal style look was abandoned for a lot of marble even as Pennsylvania passed the first abolition act in the United States in 1780.  The creek gives us two lessons: not everything is as simple as it seems, and nothing on this earth is immutable.  So, let's take a stroll further up the creek...

Treasures Of The North And Winter: Redtwig Dogwood (Cornus Sericea)

In addition to the birches, willows, and mountain ashes which make up the broadleaved gang of the Boreal north, one can also find a nice collection of dogwood, sometimes nearly to the Arctic treeline.  One in particular ranges even further north and bit further south than our Sorbus friend which we visited on ye olde blog yesterday, the magnificent Redtwig Dogwood (Cornus Sericea).

All but the last two of these pictures are taken from a tamarack swamp/fen (pretty sure it is actually a prairie fen) about two miles from your author's dwelling near South Lyon, Michigan.

While most winter interest deciduous plants try to fall back on great features like berries or persistent fall foliage, the Redtwig adds spice to the landscape with wood alone.

They like the same sort of cold winters that Sorbus seems to like, but because they like to get their feet good and soaked (or at least within root range of some plentiful water; I have seen them higher up on stream and pond banks), they don't range as far south into the Appalachians as the Mountain Ash or spruce and firs do.  There are some amazing cool, wet areas in West Virginia and Maryland where this dogwood and its best tree friend, the Tamarack (Larix Laricina) can be found at the far end of their eastern southerly range.  On the other hand, they extend well south into parts of Mexico where a combination of persistent water and artificial north provided by altitude allow them to thrive.  A subspecies is also found along the Pacific coast as far south as the mountains around Los Angeles, a rare find for a climate which does not have much in the way of eastern North American wetlands beyond its vernal pools (which does in fact have some populations of this remarkable plant).

USGS Geosciences, please never stop giving us awesome maps.  We love you.  Very much.

That said, they are indeed a northern plant, and I would definitely classify them even as a Boreal plant, and thus another gift of the winter lands.  Around here, they are a common feature of the swampier parts of the world, and they often form pretty amazing gatherings, as if nature did have some sort of aesthetic plans in mind and desired mass plantings.

Filling a swampy niche and having evolved within a balance, they never tend to completely form monocultures, even while they do dominate the scenery.  When the sun catches these things they turn an incredible bright ruby, but even in the dull overcast winter days they are far more brilliant than most cameras can even hope to demonstrate.

 

They grow slowly, and the old wood does turn brown even while the newer wood is the same amazing red:

Not the best image, but this old wood versus new wood is demonstrated by the emerging red stem from the central branch here.

In general, though, they tend to form an understory beneath taller wet foot trees like cottonwoods, the lovely Tamarack...

 ...and in a particular lovely combination of color and grace, the Black Willow (Salix Nigra):

Finally, they look amazing against the snow, almost as if to proclaim that not only is this winter and snow not so bad, it is positively enchanting.

Thankfully, Redtwig is pretty popular in the nursery trade, and even if Siberian Dogwood (Cornus Alba) seems to be flavor of the month lately, this is one case where even gardeners in its native land are falling head over heels for our friend.  Heck, there are even golden and green cultivars/selections out there!  Apparently you can plant all three as far south as the lowland Carolinas and parts of Georgia and Alabama, but I would imagine that like any northern plant, they probably do best in wet conditions with colder winters back home; they certainly do not naturally occur much farther south than the Great Lakes, at least at lower elevations. 

I do not know how the early colonists would have seen this plant and have yet to run into early botanical and garden literature regarding it, but the First Born absolutely loved it and used it in everything from smoking mixes to wound treatment.  Redtwig would make an excellent candidate for serious ethnobotanical study, and if this blog did not have a more general focus beyond ethnobotany (I know, I know, sometimes I get carried away with it) I would probably bore you all with a good solid set of posts on findings about good old red bark shrub. 

Oh, and this is just our friend in the winter.  In the spring it bears white flowers, in the summer these turn into white berries,and they all look great on those ribbed leaves.

Again as with our friend Sorbus, this apparently also occurs in northern Illinois, classic eastern Tallgrass Prairie country, a far cry from anything Boreal.  If anyone reading this knows more, by all means, share! 

Note: Cornus Sericea has also been known as Cornus Stolonifera. 

The View From (Part Of) The Boardwalk At Congaree

As I have said many times, Congaree and the rest of the lowcountry South is a harsh environment for comfort minded humans.  Whether you call it a floodplain or a cypress swamp, the fact of the matter is that the place is spongy and mucky even in drier times.  The grand pines and the gigantic Beech tree (Fagus Grandifolia) are blessed and able to grow to such dizzying proportions due to the abundance of water in this humid subtropical land, but even they don't like what lies just below the first significant set of steps one comes across on the boardwalk.  This is not to say that things resemble a true swamp right away, but water is certainly never far away, and small puddles let the high and dry walker know that they have entered the domain of the river.

And this is where things start to get truly magical, majesty of the pines and beech aside. 

The main players here are the amazing Water Tupelo (Nyssa Aquatica) and Balcypress (Taxodium Distichum) and they are both very annoyingly similar to the forest frolicker.  Because they like getting their feet soaked, they need support in the riparian muck, and this support includes swollen trunk bases.  As a result, it can be frustrating trying to pick out one from the other in a mixed forest of both:

In general, the tupelos seem to have the smoother trunk, and the cypresses look a bit more like fluted columns.  Up close, they are a bit easier to differentiate.  The tupelo are broadleaved, whereas the cypresses (not actually true cypresses) are needled.  If they were fully exposed and allowed to grow open, the tupelo would look something like an ice-cream cone in crown shape, almost as if pruned by a giant gardener.  Remember the backdrops in the Disney version of Pocahontas?  Those slender, vase topped trees growing along the James River look as if the artists involved were actually trying to capture pre-settlement Tidewater Virginia.  For some reason, however, popular imagination of southern river scenes does not otherwise include much focus on the tupelo, probably because of just how unique the cypress looks;  they are far more sprawling and fluid, reminding a northern or backcountry onlooker of a mature Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga Canadensis).  They also have a very cool ground feature which most other trees can't lay claim to: knees.

No one knows what they are really for, but the predominant theories ponder that the knees either help hold the giants up in the soggy ground or help with respiration for the roots.  I tended not to think about it too much when I got to see the knees for the first time in nearly two decades.  Instead, even as I dripped in the humidity and wished the mosquitoes would find a dragonfly to run away from, I just let the place speak to me on it's own terms, removed from science, from history, from names, from preconceptions.  I did not even make it that far into the place before the realities of the hot and humid South and a long drive back to Michigan loomed before me.  I definitely want to go back and see the water's edge, see the palmetto which I never imagined grew so far inland, and just see whatever nature wants to present to me.  I find that is what is best about places like Congaree, little remnants of Eden which act as natural icons to silence the busy mind and heart and allow for a gaze into something bigger than ourselves.  Visit the place, you won't be disappointed.  In the meantime, take a look at these pictures, which I figured could speak for themselves:

 

More information on Congaree can be found here:

http://www.nps.gov/cong/index.htm

They also have those fancy, new-fangled Facebook and Twitter pages. 

Why Is Congaree National Park Special?

I have mentioned this place quite a bit in talking about the natural South.  Historically speaking it would not have been overly different from many other places in the lush bottomlands of the greater Southern lowcountry.  Yes, its location in the midst of South Carolina meant that it has played host to a number of significant historical events, not the least of which were the exploration of DeSoto and subsequent colonial ventures by the Spanish, as well as being a hiding place from which American nationalists would seek refuge from and use as a striking point against British forces during the Revolutionary War.  By and large, however, this land would just be considered more of what people were taking pains to avoid throughout the South.  People settled on higher ground where the floods could not reach and the land proved workable enough to not necessitate making an existence out of a swamp.  The mosquitoes alone would have sent me packing, as least as soon as summer came around!

Time pressed on, and with it came development.  The end of the antebellum economic system based on slavery meant that the a greater amount of industrialization came to cities like Columbia and Atlanta, along with railroads and a noticeable increase in population.  The swamps were still less than desirable to settle in, but as free and open land became harder to find, they too would fall before the path of civilization.  What's more, there were still incredible trees here the likes of which the first Europeans had seen when they landed on these shores centuries before.  Picture then the typical avarice found in your timber baron and it does not take long to imagine that the giants were seen wrapped in gift paper for the taking.  Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum) grew this big, and had an even greater advantage to the consumer: extreme resistance to decay and rot.  What else would one expect of a tree that basically thrives when getting its feet wet?  When the forests of northern Michigan and Wisconsin started looking a bit thin of those equally valuable Eastern White Pines (Pinus Strobus) as the end of the nineteenth century arrived, northern millers also started turning an eye to new Southern potential.  With so many eyes on the scenery, it is a wonder that most of the riparian South held out as long as it did.

Congaree was fortunate, however, in having a rather broad floodplain which made extraction more difficult than in many places.  Even Chicago's Francis Beilder, one of the continent's most resourceful and determined timber barons, found that the logistics of extraction were just not economically feasible to make a clear cut of the place.  His company, which by the early twentieth century had purchased the land the park now sits on, left it alone.  Come 1969, prices for timber eventually caught up to the logistical difficulties.  Even as the Tar Sands of Alberta are now tapped for petroleum in an age when the costs of the process of extraction are cheaper than the raw material, so too then did the same reality come to nearly claim Congaree. 

The late sixties were a different sort of time, however.  Even as social upheaval changed the face of the continent and was putting a fight to sexism, racism, and a lot of different conventional ways of thinking, so too had come to pass a new environmental consciousness which had dawned in the wake of Rachel Carson giving everyone a reminder about the danger of our artificial domination of the biosphere.  By the end of the decade, a new appreciation for the science of ecology had awakened local fervor for such otherwise ignored sites like Hoosier Prairie.   What had once been viewed up as a typical Midwestern abandoned field was rediscovered as a true remnant of an otherwise glossed over tallgrass prairie.  In the South, the old bottomland finally got the same recognition, and the Sierra Club and others started to fight for Congaree.   By 1976, just as the locals back in Indiana got a taste and rush of feeling for something they had almost entirely lost, the locals down in deep South Carolina got the same thing for their majestic Congaree.  That's what makes this place so special, really.  Congaree is an amazing link back to the historical, indeed wild and primordial, South.  In an age when political divisions were already working toward the societal breaking point that they find themselves at today, you had all sorts of politicians suddenly drop camp, including even Strom Thurmond, better known for turning back the clock in other less than lovely ways.  All of a sudden people started looking at just how far we had come and just how much we were willing to throw away.

I mention the White Pine logging and Hoosier re-discovery in this post because of just how important Congaree is in relation to the rest of the, well, world conservation movement.  All too often national parks are thought of as areas that protect outstanding natural scenic beauty and little else, and while Congaree does boast incredible spires of trees in a nearly vanished virgin Southern bottomland, we really only see this now after the park has been in existence for a decade and has been officially protected since 1976.  People went nuts over the Sequoias as soon as they were found by us second-born North Americans; a swamp or a floodplain would take much longer to appreciate.  Hell, people still don't appreciate why Cuyahoga Valley got full national park status and probably will not for a long time to come; why be giddy over your typical Ohio low-relief ravine?  There is no towering cliff-face or even old growth forest there, it's just the natural backyard with a few historic trinkets... right?  Guess what, people thought the same thing about your background cypress swamp named Congaree.  People thought the same thing about Joshua Tree National Park until Minerva Hoyt spoke up on behalf of the Mojave.  People thought the same thing about the Everglades (a much better example for this soggy part of the world) until Marjory Douglas told the rest of us to give a damn.

Congaree got a reprieve, and in comparison with some other places like the tallgrass prairie or some bog somewhere on the Canadian Shield, it is easy to see why this place is special.  After all, the trees here are something amazing!  But like all those other places, what is most special about Congaree is how it keeps us connected not only with the wilderness, but with our connection to it.  I may constantly bring up the insane June visit I had among hordes of mosquitoes, but the fact is that this was a wonderful time to visit, to see just how comfortable this Northern Ontarian had otherwise become with the the ease of modern convenience.  It is easy to point out just how easily we can lose historical memory when we demolish a building or change a school curriculum to focus on more "practical" subjects, but it is even easier when do lose that "background" swamp, desert, prairie, etc. that we had to remind us what existence itself was like for those who brought us into our own.  So what does Congaree do for us that other parks do not to the same level of consciousness?

Let's head north for a little bit.

In Canada our national parks got to the same start the way that yours did.  We had our pre-Carson conservationists who had a sense of the overall importance of nature for the soul, you know, like your Roosevelts or Muirs or such.  They saw Banff and made a park out of it (yes, there is more to it than that, but you get the idea) just as down here you had Yellowstone and realized what a unique natural place it was and did the same thing.  After this, though, the Canadian concept of national parks changed.  Perhaps starting as early as 1893 when Algonquin was made into a (then) national park in an otherwise fairly typical section of southern Canadian Shield highlands, park makers got to thinking that in addition to protecting the outstanding areas, perhaps we should start protecting some of the more pristine or exemplary areas of particular biomes across the country.  Today we thus have a place like Point Pelee National Park set aside to show us what is so special about the southern Great Lakes and the Carolinian (eastern-mixed) forest, a place which aside from being a bird-watcher's paradise would not otherwise be seen as significant in the national or continental scheme of things. 

Back South now.

In Congaree we have an amazing park which does this very same thing, celebrating not just the lowland South Carolina landscape but that of the riparian South in general.  In essence, Congaree is amazing not just for its incredible forests but also because it is perhaps the first "regional" park of its kind according to the Canadian concept.  It has been joined recently by a California Chaparral version, Pinnacles National Park, which gives me hope for the future for the central prairies and other "background" scenery.  Yes, there have been many parks created for different purposes in the past which could easily fit into this line of conservation theory (Great Basin National Park really stands out in this regard), but Congaree strikes me as being a huge victory for this idea in general, and it helps that the place is downright beautiful and even a little savage.  Want to see what I saw?  Take a trip down the boardwalk with me next post, but in the meantime check out some of their amazing pictures at their various websites.


Main website

Congaree National Park Facebook Page

Congaree National Park Twitter Page

The Green Stuff in Swamps

While out saving the world from invasive species, I took a wrong turn and ended up finding myself at the edge of a small ash swamp that I could smell well before I got anywhere near it.  Covering the surface of the stagnant waters was a rather familiar sight, albeit one that most people think is algae or simple scum.

The scum, which is actually somewhat lovely in lighting conditions like this morning shot, is Lemna Minor, or duckweed.  It is native to both Europe and North America, and variants of it can be found throughout the rest of the northern hemisphere, preferring to grow in more temperate areas.  In Canada, it does not edge significantly into the boreal forest, though it can still grow fairly far north under ideal conditions.  In the United States, well, just take a look at the picture.  Further south than Michigan, especially along the slow-moving tributaries of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, it forms an archetypal river scene of muddy, green waters lazily flowing under bald cypresses and water tupelos.  Here it completes a rather typical southeastern Michigan scene, shaded into a strange sort of green by towering ashes, cottonwoods, swamp oaks, and even aspen.

While it does have a tendency to completely take over the surface of a pond or other stagnant body of water, it is actually a rather natural part of the enclosed environments of such places, and is a valuable source of protein for animals that consume it, notably most kinds of waterfowl.  It has more protein than soybeans, and some parts of the world actually raise it commercially as a food crop.  To our manicured lawn mentality, it appears to be scum, as it no doubt did for generations of settlers who avoided swamps like the plague.  The ducks apparently disagree.