A grey tree frog...one of the many creatures native to this area that Luke and I saw at the WNC Nature Center this afternoon.

A spotted turtle, photo taken by Luke.

Otters, also taken by Luke.

Bobcat?

Mountain lions (Don & I saw one last summer near Roan Mountain at the NC/Tennessee border last summer...they are not truly extinct in the east.)

...a camouflaged boy!

A red wolf...

and a red fox (photo: Luke)

Seastars

Whenever the rain gathers

your hands appear

silhouetted like seastars

on a darkened ocean floor

lightning can do that

rendering what is banal

and useful

to shocking revelation

as if thunder were needed

to make the obvious point

your hands appear to be

what they are

but I know them differently

Hickory Nut Gorge

A hike across the gorge from Chimney Rock...on a beautiful spring Saturday!
An uphill climb, on an ugly road cut through the newly accessioned Chimney Rock State Park land...

Above: the site of the Mohican village in the film Last of the Mohicans.

A little message of spring in a discarded bottle...

Dostoevsky

I believe that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage. The despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small mind of man that in the world's finale at the moment of eternal harmony God will bring to pass something so precious that it will suffice for all hearts, the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement for all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood they've shed, and that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened with men.

I came across this in one of my notebooks, something I jotted down from the pages of The Brothers Karamazov, translators Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear.

Congaree Swamp

A champion cypress at Congaree National Park, in South Carolina. It's been admired too much, with so many hands...
A baby cypress, in the swamp.


Rat snake, minding its own business.
Cedar creek, running through thousands of acres of forest.
This flower smells like curry spice.
Thunderclouds dumped rain on us.

Kingdom of the Happy Land

I'd been wanting for a long time to write about the Kingdom of the Happy Land--a post Civil War settlement of freed slaves in Tuxedo, N.C.

Here is the story, which appeared in this morning's paper.

Ed Bell at the site of the Palace, on the South Carolina state line, and (below) with the remains of a Kingdom cabin's chimney. The trail in the first photo is probably part of the newly established Mountains to Sea Trail, through South Carolina.

Photos are by Patrick Sullivan, for the Hendersonville Times-News.

Rumbling Bald

We climbed and we climbed, mostly through brush because the trail was elusive :) In the newly annexed part of Chimney Rock Park, in Hickory Nut Gorge.

If you look closely in the last picture, you can see the small opening, like a little arch, toward the edge of the rock face. I wonder when that will fall away to make a new addition to the big boulder field at the bottom of the cliff?