an unusually colored fish out of water.
But in all my time wandering I’ve yet to have a wild creature question my identity. Not a single cardinal or ovenbird has ever paused in dawnsong declaration to ask the reason for my being. White-tailed deer seem just as put off by my hunter friend’s whiteness as they are by my blackness. Responses in forests and fields are not born of any preconceived notions of what “should be.” They lie only in the fact that I am.
Each of us is so much more than the pigment that orders us into convenient compartments of occupation, avocation, or behavior. It’s easy to default to expectation. But nature shows me a better, wilder way. I resist the easy path and claim the implausible, indecipherable, and unconventional.
What is wildness? To be wild is to be colorful, and in the claims of colorfulness there’s an embracing and a self-acceptance. We scientists are trained to be comfortable with the multiple questions that each new revelation may elicit. Like sweetgum trees, which find a way to survive in the face of every attempt to exclude them, the questions we ask are persistent resprouts, largely uncontrollable. There really aren’t hard-and-fast answers to most questions, though. Wildness means living in the unknown. Time is teaching me to extend the philosophies of science to life, to accept the mystery and embrace the next query as an opportunity for another quest.
I find solace, inspiration, and exhilaration in nature. Issues there are boiled down to the simplest imperative: survive. Sometimes my existence seems to hang in the balance of challenges professional and personal, external and internal. What allows me to survive day to day is having nature as my guide.
But I worry as the survival of many of the wild things and places themselves seems increasingly uncertain. Called by something deep inside, I have joined with kindred wandering-wondering watchers and ecologically enlightened spirits in the mission to keep things whole. After all my years of being the scientist–idea generator–objective data gatherer, I yearn for more than statistical explanations.
My colleagues and I have mostly done a poor job of reaching the hearts and minds of those who don’t hold advanced degrees with an “ology” at the end. We take a multidimensional array of creatures, places, and interwoven lives and boil them down into the flat pages and prose of obscure journals most will never read. Those tomes are important—but the sin is in leaving the words to die there, pressed between the pages. As knowledge molders in the stacks the public goes on largely uninformed about the wild beings and places that should matter to all of us.
Science’s tendency to make the miraculous mundane is like replacing the richest artistry with paint-by-number portraits. In the current climate of scientific sausage making—grinding data through complex statistical packages and then encasing it in a model that often has little chance of real-world implementation—we are losing touch. How inspiring is the output that prescribes some impossible task? How practical is it? We must rediscover the art in conservation and reorient toward doing and not talking.
What do I live for? I eventually realized that to make a difference I had to step outside, into creation, and refocus on the roots of my passion. If an ounce of soil, a sparrow, or an acre of forest is to remain then we must all push things forward. To save wildlife and wild places the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad-news data but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors, and presidents who have always dared to inspire. Heart and mind cannot be exclusive of one another in the fight to save anything. To help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant: a revolving, evolving, celestial being with ecosystems acting as organs and the living things within those places—humans included—as cells vital to its survival. My hope is that somehow I might move others to find themselves magnified in nature, whomever and wherever they might be.
These chapters are a cataloging of some of the people, places, and things that have shaped me. They are patchwork pieces stitched together by memory. They pose questions: Where do I come from? Who are my people? Why does my blood run wild? These questions and so many more fly like dandelion fluff before me. Each one is a part of some greater whole but seems to have its own destiny. The seeds that find fertile ground yield occasional answers, which eventually send other questions into the breeze. But in the quilt that unfolds I hope I’ve captured what it took for a bird of a different feather to hatch, fledge, and take flight.
This is a memoir, then, but it is also the story of an ecosystem—of some land, the lives lived on it, and the dreams that unfolded there. It is a tale of an in-between place and its in-between people. And I tell it with a sense of responsibility. I believe the best way to begin reconnecting humanity’s heart, mind, and soul to nature is for us to share our individual stories. This is my contribution to that greater mission; sometimes the words that make the fragmented more whole need to come from someone in a different skin. Beyond that, however, I simply hope those words inspire you, too, to see yourself colored in nature’s hues.
Home is a place we all must find, child. It’s not just a place where you eat or sleep. Home is knowing.
IT WAS HOME: EDGEFIELD, SOUTH CAROLINA, A SMALL COUNTY on the western edge of the Palmetto State. The county’s name is well earned. With its western flank tucked tightly against the banks of the once mighty but now dammed Savannah River, on the edge ecologically between Upstate and the Lowcountry, Edgefield contains an incredible natural wealth of mountain, piedmont, and coastal plain.
Among South Carolina’s forty-six counties, Edgefield is not large, covering only some five hundred square miles. The political boundaries drawn by human hands give it the appearance on maps of a cartoonish chicken’s head, its squared-off comb to the north, huge triangular beak pointing east toward the Atlantic, and shortened neck jutting to the southwest. Nature sketched the westward boundary where Stevens and Turkey Creeks skirt along the raggedy rear of the bird’s head and form the long border with McCormick County. Surrounded by piedmont places to the north—Greenwood, McCormick, and Saluda—and Aiken, an upper–coastal plain county to the south, Edgefield is a transition zone, with each of the imaginary poultry’s portions harboring ecological treasures. Growing up near the bird’s scrawny neck—in the south-central part of the county, only a few miles from the Savannah River and an equidistant stone’s throw from the sprawl of North Augusta and the sleepy town of Edgefield—I was privy to the beauty and diversity of a spot most ignore.
Edgefield is many places rolled into one. With the exception of saltwater and high peaks, there’s not much that can’t be found there. Droughty sand holds onto remnant stands of longleaf pine and stunted turkey oaks in the southern and eastern extremes where the upper coastal plain peters out. In the soggy bottoms along many of the rivers and creeks, rich alluvial soils grow splotchy-barked sycamores and warty hackberries to girths so big that two large men joined hand to hand couldn’t reach around them. A few buttressed bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss sit in tea-stained sloughs. Between the extremes of wet and dry, high and low, even the sticky clay nourishes a surprising variety of hardwoods; slow-growing upland oaks and tight-grained, tough-as-nail hickories grow alongside fast-rising tulip poplars and opportunistic sweetgum. In the understory
