NC’s Natural Treasures: 50 Years of Staying Wild

My husband and I, backpacking in the Birkhead Moutnains Wilderness (NC) in 2009.

My story on wilderness, below, ran in the Charlotte Observer last Monday. I wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which is upcoming on September 3, 2014 and I’m lucky enough that my editor indulged me.

Wilderness as a place is something that I’m both attracted to and intimidated by. The side of me which shuns living in a city and wishes I had a closer relationship with the natural world loves the idea of visiting wilderness. (And this from a gal who lives on several wooded acres — in the company of several black bears, coyotes, bats, flying squirrels, moths as big as my palm, and copperhead snakes —  and who can only see her closest neighbors when the leaves drop each winter.) But my attraction to actually visiting wilderness depends upon what kind of wilderness it is, and where it’s located.

The first time I stood on tundra in Denali, Alaska and watched as melting hail and sleet soaked through my cotton hiking pants, I knew I was in over my head. Never before had I stepped on ground that wasn’t solid… in Denali, each footfall sunk six inches or more, into a spongey mass of moss and freezing bog water. Sometimes, as in Denali, I’m admittedly intimidated by vast unknown landscapes devoid of marked trails, designated campgrounds, or treated drinking water. What if I get lost? What if I can’t find water? What if I encounter a rogue bear/hungry mountain lion/crazed wolverine? 

At the heart of these fears, some of which aren’t even rational, is my true fear: What if I can’t take care of myself in the woods? But this is also the same fear that attracts me to protected parks, forests, refuges and wilderness areas in the first place. To improve my skills, and to prove to myself that I can. It’s why I love going, and why I keep going returning. 

What do you enjoy about wildlerness as a place to visit, or as a construct of the mind? 

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America was forged by taming and civilizing a vast wilderness that stretched from sea to shinning sea. Yet in ecological terms, “taming” and “civilizing” involved widespread biological degradation, species extinction, habitat conversion, dammed rivers, logged forests, plowed-over prairies and the spread of nonnative or invasive organisms on a massive scale.

A growing concern that wild lands might disappear all together led to the birth of the National Wilderness Preservation System five decades ago this Sept. 3, with the passage of the federal Wilderness Act. The system began with a mere 9 million acres but has grown to 110 million acres. More acres are added every year.

These preserved lands exist in 758 different wilderness areas within 44 states. North Carolina is fortunate to have 12 different wilderness areas from the mountains to the coast. Two of this dozen were in the original batch of 54 wilderness areas created in 1964: Shining Rock and Linville Gorge wildernesses.

In lobbying for the creation of a wilderness system, famed American novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner wrote: “We need wilderness preserved … because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”

Today, 4 of every 5 Americans live in cities or urbanized areas, but many still seek out wilderness to be alone in a natural landscape and taste that character-forming challenge.

Florida’s Springs and Sun-Dappled Summer Memories

Springs Series painting, by Margaret Tolbert

This morning I was driving down our mountain through a 45-degree misty rain when I heard a familiar name float from the radio — Ichetucknee Springs State Park. A story on NPR about alternate spring break destinations in Florida had somehow landed in the sun-dappled summer memories of my childhood. Instantly, I was transported from the cold spring mountain rain of Asheville, N.C. to a refreshing, sunny subtropical river of my youth. I grew up a little bit southeast of the Ichetucknee River in northcentral Florida. The park was always a favorite destination for tubing during the summer when I was in high school. My friends and I would take turns floating along with a snorkel and mask while gazing at the bottom in the 72-degree waters, then clambering into a tube to warm up and sunbathe like lizards before slipping beneath the water’s surface once more. 

Later, when I was in college and began swimming laps to train for triathlons, friends invited me to swim the river. I thought they were nuts. The Ichetucknee is spring fed and is known for a swift, steady current which whisks tubers along at a fairly fast clip, faster than an average person strides. We would swim upriver, getting a good workout, going not only against the current but against a throng of tubers waving their beer cans at us in disbelief. I was more of a runner than a swimmer, and the only way I could keep up with them was to wear fins. After a mile or more we’d turn around and bolt back to the dock with the current amplifying the power of each stroke. I imagined that’s what swimming must feel like for Olympians.

The Ichetucknee River is so clear that a snorkeler can easily see the bottom five to ten feet below, though some sections are even shallower. It’s been almost seven years since I swam the river, but one memory that stands out from all others is the emerald green river grass undulating hypnotically in the strong current, conjuring fantasies of a mermaid’s algae-covered hair. Then I noticed a flash of orange and red. My mind spun in a state of cognitive dissonance until it slowly registered that a brightly colored crawfish was perched atop the flat-bladed grasses, its antennae waved in the current, and one claw was half-raised. It looked as if it were shaking its fist at us intruders. It was a reminder of the loveliness and fragility of the creatures that live in the Ichetucknee. 

Florida artist Margaret Tolbert has painted Florida’s springs for many years. Her painter’s eye for color have documented changes to the quality of the water in springs across Florida over time. Almost exactly three years ago I wrote this article on a book she produced called Aquiferious. It’s a visual feast, filled with her paintings of springs, but also essays by conservationists, naturalists and scientists about what makes Florida’s springs so unique. I’m reposting the article today because of NPR’s story:

Florida springs painter finds conservation “inescapable”

Springs Series depicting bubbles, by Margaret Tolbert

Margaret Tolbert’s experience of Florida’s springs changed dramatically the day she donned a mask and plunked her face below the water’s lens-like surface. She says she felt like Alice, crossing through the looking glass into an alter world, where nothing was as it seemed. Up until then, springs were something Tolbert was aware of — they were often in the background at family picnics when she was growing up — but she’d never experienced them.

That first swim birthed a creative channel in her that is still fueling her paintings of Florida’s springs nearly two and a half decades later. Today, she has an impressive art portfolio inspired by places that sometimes only local Floridians know intimately. Rainbow Springs, Peacock Springs, Fanning Springs, Gilchrist Blue, Manatee Springs, Juniper Springs, Wakulla Springs, Ichetucknee Springs, Fern Hammock, Telford Springs, Wekiva Springs, Volusia Blue Springs, Cyprus Springs and Rock Springs Run — to name just a few. With the colors and light of specific springs in mind, Tolbert’s swiped and twirled her brushes over an array of large and small canvasses that have found homes in private collections, art museums and institutions all over the world.

“I’m always attracted, as an artist, to weird visual experiences,” Tolbert says. At Gilchrist Blue, she is entranced by medallions of light floating in the water, and the way the surface bends light waves to make swimming bodies look like contorted pretzels. She loves slipping below the surface, which she calls a “lens,” and staring into the springs’ dramatic caverns. At Juniper Springs, it’s the sand boils that catch her eye. At Rainbow Springs, it’s the enormous discharge power that stimulates her senses.

Guest Post: Meera Lee Sethi, author of Mountainfit

Meera Lee Sethi. Birding in Sweden.

Dear Reader: Prepare for a literary treat. Today I am excited to bring to you a guest post by one of my favorite science and nature writers, Meera Lee Sethi. Sethi self-published a book last year called Mountainfit, which I reviewed here, about time she spent birding in Sweden. And yet, it was about so much more. And this is the main thing I love about Sethi’s work, an essay on any certain topic illuminates not only it but layers of many other things. 

Since publishing Mountainfit, Sethi’s work has turned heads, including a few at CCLaP Publshing which picked it up and is now publishing and distributing hard cover versions. Meera also blogs at the Coyot.es network, where you can find her words at Dispersal Range. This post is the first of her blog book tour, so you’ll be able to find more of her beautiful writing elsewhere over the following days and weeks.  And now, here’s Meera Lee Sethi, with a glimpse of some thoughts from Sweden. – TDB

Sphagna

It was like the surface of the moon, people say, meaning strange. Meaning wild. I didn’t think about it much before that summer—so much of my life spent walking on concrete, on asphalt, on soil made smooth by human hands—but the surface of the earth can be all those things, too. The planet has many different skins. In a small zip-lock bag inside an envelope inside a box, I keep a little piece of one of them.

There are well over 130 species of Sphagnum known to science. About three dozen of those are found in Sweden alone, a country whose surface area is about one quarter peat bog. In the wetland tundra surrounding the observatory where I began writing Mountainfit I might, for example, have been tramping over the tightly clustered branches and tiny toothed leaves of Sphagnum fuscum, or balticum, or magellanicum.

It is this last I have with me, a keepsake mailed to me by a sweet friend months after I left. Its yellow fascicles and tiny, deep pink leaves are dry and disarticulated now, but once they were part of a vast, interconnected mantle. 

(Essay) On being here: Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway

Out for a spin.

Not far down the road from my home in Asheville is a shortcut through a sparse tree line that edges Bull Mountain Road. The humble dirt trail is a bit like the magical armoire in Narnia—when I pass through it I’m transported to a different world, the otherness of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s rolling black pavement, which snakes through the Appalachian mountains. I pick it up is southwest of Mt. Mitchell, elevation 6,683 feet, and the highest point in the East.

Five summers ago, my husband and I rode the entire Blue Ridge Parkway from north to south, all 469 miles in five days. We rode for three days, took a rest day in Asheville, and then finished in Cherokee two days later. I found the descent into Asheville thrilling — the road kept unfurling down, down, down. We lost elevation by the minute. I had no idea, then, that I would one day live a few minutes from that same stretch of parkway, and that I would be blessed enough to be able to ride it everyday of the week, if I so wished.

But that’s just what happened, and after we moved to western N.C. in January of 2011, I fell into the habit  of rolling my bike out the back door by eight a.m., then winding through a series of streets for a mile and a half to the end of Bull Mountain Road where the twenty-foot-long dirt trail lies off the shoulder. The trail pops me out near mile-marker 382, which is fondly associated in these parts with the Folk Arts Center and Big Boy, an amiable, often-seen local black bear. As the skinny tires of my Orbea road bike pinball through the obstacle course of roots, I peer through the trees both ways for cars and then dart out onto the parkway. I turn north and begin to climb up to Craven Gap, then past Bull Gap, through the unlit Tanbark Ridge tunnel (forever uneasy for passing cars), past the Bull Creek overlook and up to the Lane Pinnacle overlook.

A field of hoarfrost

Heavy hoarfrost on leaves. (Photo by Gunnar Ries, WikiCommons.)

When I awoke yesterday morning, the long field of grass behind my house looked awfully white and sparkly. The temperatures in the North Carolina Piedmont where I live have been sliding further and further down the path to freezing the past few evenings. The night before they’d reached 30 degrees Fahrenheit. I glanced at our neighbor’s roof, which was also dusted in white and glinted in the sun. For a moment, I thought we’d had our first dusting of snow. I pulled on my boots and jeans and walked outside past the pine trees, below which there was only green grass, and into the open field. My boots crunched the greenery below. I knelt down and inspected the ground. It was not snow. A fine rime of fragile hoarfrost clung to the edge of each grass blade and each fallen pine straw. It circumscribed the outline of every fallen sweet gum and elm leaf and lent them an odd, wintry fringe. It was beautiful: a field of hoarfrost.

Hoarfrost on grass. (Photo by Dominik Unger)

Hoarfrost forms under precise conditions when water vapor in the air undergoes a process called sublimation and transitions straight to a crystalline state on a solid surface. Because it moves straight from vapor to solid, this means that it skips the watery intermediary state of liquids. Small ice crystals sublimate directly onto surfaces with fine edges, points and textures. This explains why the edges of the grass blades I saw were lined with the fine crystals, but few grew on the face of the blade itself. The leaves looked they were outlined in thick chalk, like cartoon figures.

For hoarfrost to form, the surfaces of leaves, plant stems and grass blades have to meet two criteria: they must be colder than the dew point for the ambient air, and they must be colder than the freezing point of water. When these conditions align, the water vapor condenses from the saturated air and freezes directly onto surfaces, generally those of small diameter.

There musn’t have been much wind when the frost formed, because the crystal spikes grew perpendicular from the objects they were attached to, rather than in a prevailing direction. As the sun rose, it lit the field with pale pink morning light and a million ice crystals winked back.