Good times down South

Here’s a picture of the way life should be, a Georgia smoker building up heat to slow cook a Cajun style pork shoulder. Weather near perfect, Red Sox heading toward game seven. There is a genuine cloud of mosquitoes, not pictured, everything else pretty all right.

 

Sunset chinwag

Ellen and I had the good fortune to enjoy a sunset gabfest with two of St. Simons’ most interesting locals, Stacia Hendricks and Cindy Janus. Both of them work outdoors and are wonderful teachers about the odd and unusual ecosystem of estuarial Georgia.

Stacia’s been looking at a die off of shearwaters. A pelagic bird, in between petrels and albatrosses, shearwaters are very rarely seen in inshore waters yet they’ve been washing up dead on Sea Island recently. She told me about this last week and I’d been idly pondering it and came across an article about mapping algal blooms in the Pacific which said that such blooms had increased greatly, leading to build up of toxic acids through trophic levels ( invertebrates and filter feeders, molluscs and the like, accumulate the toxins, are eaten by larger animals who acquire greater and greater levels of toxins, etc. ) leading to die offs of larger predators and neurological problems in the populations that didn’t quite die. Since drought and heat magnify the runoffs that create offshore algal blooms I thought it was possible that this might explain washed up shearwaters. Wrong again. Since I’d last seen her some necropsies had been done indicating a far more prosaic cause, starvation. The shearwaters had had a couple of good years and hatched out too large a population for the current conditions. We never did get to turtles but we’ll talk about that next time.

Cindy gave us reports from her most recent kayak tours. She leads trips along the Georgia coast, to the barrier islands, around the rivers and the meandering snakey waterways roundabout for Southeast Adventures. Check out the great pictures at her site for the amazing, unknown beauty of this part of the world. I’m so envious of her familiarity with the rarely seen parts of Blackbeard’s Island, Sapelo, Cumberland and the huge delta of the Altamaha. Every time we see her we say we need to go out on a trip with her. So far the quotidian demands of the farm have prevented it but some day we will.

We had lots of fresh veggies from the garden in our trademarked house hummus with good Greek olives and fresh farmers cheese. What a good way to enjoy a sunset.

 

Elegiac

I listen to a lot of radio, working around the farm, driving from one beeyard to another.  Occasionally I hear something that makes me sit up and pay attention.  The other day it was an interview with a Brit who’s written a just in time book about Phil Spector.  It was his verbal facility that caught my attention, describing the Tiny Terror’s “dark, orchidean mystery” and using one of my favorite words, ‘elegiac’.

Perhaps for Americans of my generation Phil Spector and his manias are a given, certainly LA seems full of people weirder than him and one would have to be older or a conventional beans on toast Brit that writes for the Torygraph to find him dark and orchidean but still its good word play.  Then there’s elegiac.  He pronounced it eel-ee-gee-ack, accent on the second syllable and, I kid you not, I reeled.  It is a word that one rarely hears spoken out loud but I say it now and again and I would say ell uh jai ic.  The dictionary confirms that both pronunciations are used.  It also says that its meaning is mostly about poetic meter going back to classical Greek.  The meaning that I think of, ‘like an elegy’ is last of the possibilities.  No more than a fancy way of making nostalgia more elegant, singing the praises of days gone by.  I wish I could remember what aspect of the Phil Spector story warranted the word.  The sense of beautiful things gone past, of lost sunsets, simpler times lit in soft focus gold with a soundtrack by Vaughn Williams, I just don’t see Phil in any part of that and I’m not going to give up the word.  So there.

 

Everything with smoke on it

I drove through the edge of the fires yesterday and there’s some kind of smoke going on over there. Visually its like a foggy Maine morning but bluer. As the wind switches every two days they must be having a hell of a time. Much of the traffic around the park ( Okefenokee that is ) is convoys of fire control equipment. The southwest quadrant of the park is where the action’s been for the last few days, Fargo was evacuated Monday and I cant’ help but wonder about the thousands of bee colonies over there for the tupelo. Our tupelo seems to be quitting early and it looks unlikely to make any kind of crop. The gallberry is starting to bloom, we’ll see if it has anything in it.

I saw very little wildlife but did get a good look at a wood stork mucking about.  The sloughs have so little water in them they are dense with wriggling life and the wading birds can feast.  Also saw a beautiful coachwhip and a snowy egret with breeding plumes.

 

Hello world!

Greetings from the swamp.  Technical issues will continue as we tune up the images.