A place of great beauty

Written on 12/26
1:20 pm

I’m looking out over a small lake in a great river swamp, clear woods open and austere in winter on this day after Christmas. The air is cold, but not too cold. Brisk, invigorating. Leaves sit still and unmoving on the surface of the brown water. I see the bare crowns of tall and ancient bald cypress trees. There is more water in the swamp than usual form heavier rains in the upstate. The sounds of hawks reverberate over the stillness, but there are enough oak trees with leaves remaining to create a pleasant sound as the wind stirs them from their winter slumber.

This swamp is as remote and close to wilderness as I am able to find in my circumscribed little world of Charleston and the Lowcountry. It is on days like this that I am quite content to be alone with my thoughts, listening to the sounds of Nature. Every now and then I hear hawks, and they comfort me with their presence. Free and wild forever, they soar over the canopy of trees, whereas I am a free man here in this majestic place for just a short while this afternoon.

I love to breathe the air on these mid-winter days because it seems so clean and fresh, so much a part of the land through which this swamp flows.

There are three people about 50 yards form me, talking to each other, occasionally loud, yelling about something or other, laughing. It is a bit distracting, but they are seated on a bench at the edge of the lake, and don’t appear ready go anywhere soon. I guess I’ll have to rouse myself from the spot where I’m sitting and writing this entry.

I so enjoy this act of writing “on the scene,” as it were, outdoors in the midst of what I am observing so consciously. Time is very real here and immediate. I have nothing else to do but be aware of my surroundings. My thoughts and feelings are subdued for a while by this quiet and self-contained process of observation, of being attuned to the wind and the birds and the faint sunlight which is not spreading too much warmth at the moment.

In fact, it feels kind of chilly all of a sudden. My inactivity, this rest from my walk along the trail, is causing me to notice that, yes, it truly is winter. Here in South Carolina’s coastal plain, it’s often easy to overlook that fact and pretend that we live in an endless, mellow Autumn.

Leaves still clinging to trees remind me of late Autumn, but my cold ears and the cold surface of my jacket tell me otherwise. Still, as I wrote recently, I like to think of myself as capable of being at home in any season of the year. It’s just a little more difficult in winter because this is the season when the aloneness I savor and cherish can easily be transformed into loneliness — a deep, bottom-of-the-well pit of loneliness. And it is, frankly, scary.

The cold on a late afternoon in winter, when the sun is low in the sky anyway, can bring on the most melancholy feelings very suddenly. I feel a bit of it now.

The other visitors, near me just moments ago, have wandered on down the trail. I have the lake and the birds to myself. It’s nice to hear no other human voices, but the cold is seeping in, and I must be moving on down the path myself, depsite the cheery protestations of a bird whose call I cannot identify. He seems to want me to stay and keep him company a bit longer. My invisible friend.