To see Don
Hunter's Facebook album with photos of today's ramble click here.
(A small selection of Don's photos are imbedded in this blog post.)
We came from near and far on this cold morning, with roadsides and
ditches on
 |
| Catherine reading |
|
 |
| "Four eyes" Dale reading |
our journey’s routes blanketed here and there with the season’s
first frost.
Everyone was bundled up as
they gathered next to the arbor to discuss the weather and hear this morning’s
readings before heading out on the ramble.
We were graced with two readings, one from Catherine and one from
Dale.
The reading from Dale was
particularly appropriate for today’s ramble, with the mention of the season’s
first frost.
First,
from Catherine, an excerpt from Bailey White's Sleeping at the Starlite Motel.
Garden
of Eden
I know some people who believe that God
created Adam and Eve one mile east of Bristol, Florida, on the Florida
panhandle, and that the Garden of Eden was located in Torreya State Park just
north of Bristol, and that Noah built the ark right near the intersection of
state road 12 and I-10 out of the wood of the now-endangered Torreya tree, also
called Stinking Cedar, which grows nowhere else in the world.
The book of Genesis
says, “a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was
parted, and became into four heads.”
There’s only once place on earth where four rivers come together, and
that’s near Bristol, Florida.
God told Noah,
“Make thee an ark of gopher wood.” The
Torreya tree, an ancient and primitive species, has another name besides
stinking cedar: locals call it gopher
wood. When the flood came, so they say,
the ark floated all the way from Bristol halfway around the world to Mt.
Ararat, and Noah and his dazed family climbed out into a strange land, with
nothing left but stories of their lost homeland in north Florida.
(Note: Bailey White is from Thomasville, Georgia and
has written several books, including the hilarious Mama Makes Up Her Mind. She was also a frequent commentator on NPR but
seems to have disappeared.)
The second
reading is from the Oct. 24, 2013, New York Times editorial series The Rural Life, by Vernon Klinkenborg,
and read by Dale.
Waiting
for What Comes Next
The
sky to the west is kettle-gray. The last leaves on the sugar maple in front of
the house are flickering but hanging tight for now. Most of the hickory nuts
have fallen, but sometimes I still hear one clatter onto the chicken-house
roof. Another couple of months and Orion will be visible when the dogs and I go
out for the last walk at night.
The
basil has not yet been blackened by a sharp, cold night. There has not yet been
a morning when the dogs and I get our feet wet on frost instead of dew. We lit
a fire in the woodstove the other day just because the color of the world
outside seemed to demand it, but when the fire went out no one missed it. I
have wood to stack and small engines to winterize, but the weather keeps
telling me not to hurry, put it off, take it easy, and so I do.
There
is still a stand of small, pale blue flowers growing along the fence by the
barn. It has been alive with bumblebees of a kind I rarely see, leaner and
darker over all than the thumb-size, yellow-banded bumblebees that have worked
their way through summer. I can’t help thinking that all of them will be dead
before long, their queen alone alive in the winter nest.
So
we wait, me at the kitchen table, the dogs scanning the deck for chipmunks that
scurry and start, overwhelmed by their work in this year of the prodigious
hickory harvest. The dogs don’t even bother to bark. They simply watch and
wait, full of expectation.
For today’s ramble, we re-traced the route from last week, heading down
the path to the Dunson Native Flora Garden, then following the White Trail up
the power line right-of-way and into the woods to the Green Trail. We walked the Green Trail to the service road
and followed it, through the Florida Torreya clearing, finishing up with the
Blue Trail back to the power line right-of-way.
From here we made our way back up to the Visitor Center. Before we left, however, Dale teased us with
the promise of a special spider to wrap up the ramble.
