Posts Tagged ‘south carolina’

Susan Simmons

Hope we PASSed

by Susan Simmons

Comments Off    |   Email to Friend    |   Print    |   RSS 2.0
Oct
8

By now, our governor is deep into her cross-state tour to reveal her graded report cards for every member of the General Assembly. This week she held town halls in Rock Hill, Irmo and Aiken. Next week: Hilton Head and Charleston.

Alas, we will have to wait until week three to hear a live report on how the Spartanburg and Greenville delegations fared on the Haley PASS test. Those so interested should plan to join her Oct. 17 at 5:30 p.m. at Byrnes High School in Duncan.

As this column was due before the first town hall, I don’t know whether the governor chose to be combative or collaborative in tone. Experience shows she is fully capable of both. Either way, the town halls are sure to reveal more about Nikki Haley than any of the legislators she judges.

Start with the events themselves. As vehicles to unveil the governor’s agenda for the next year and get a grassroots reaction, town halls are a great idea. But to crisscross the state calling out individual lawmakers for their performance on her goals, not their own, presumes a superiority Haley doesn’t have. As Columbia Sen. Joel Lourie asked back in March, “Am I supposed to take it home and get my mother to sign it? Or maybe my wife?”

Again, if Haley takes a we’re-in-this-together approach on her travels, the end result may be a nudge toward many useful reforms lawmakers have avoided for years.

But the school marmish way she did it will still rankle, I bet, even with the lawmakers who put a good face on it. Legislators are accountable to South Carolina voters, not the governor. In the end, this is exactly what Lourie said: a publicity stunt. A good show, with questionable enduring effect.  Sound familiar?

But while the show is definitely Sanfordesque, Haley differs from her predecessor in one key aspect: Sanford was a master of the fine detail. Haley is all Big Idea. I picture her striding around Columbia tossing them off, underlings scurrying beside her, scribbling, “It’s a great day in South Carolina!” “Worker training!” “Drug testing for the unemployed!”

Big idea people are characteristically averse to documentation and detail, which is why Haley could repeat “a million times” – without checking her facts – that half the job applicants at the Savannah River Site failed drug tests. The actual number was less than 1 percent. But some unidentified someone told her the flashier statistic, and “I’ve never felt like I had to back up what people tell me,” she told the Associated Press (a quote that still staggers me every time I read it).

It’s why she can brag about bringing 10,000 jobs to the state when her own Commerce Department counts 5,000 and claim she “closed two deals” on her trip to Europe when “in the works” was far more accurate.

These are all things Haley wants to be true: the jobs, the deals, the justification for drug testing she told her hometown Rotary Club she has “been wanting since the first day I walked into office.” Wanting it so badly she can casually smear the reputation of hundreds of SRS job-seekers in its support rather than check her prattle long enough to see if the words are true.

Big ideas can be great ideas, and South Carolina surely needs some great ideas. South Carolina also needs a governor who understands that words matter – that big ideas rooted in fiction turn out to be fairytales.

 

Permalink    |   Comments Off
Bookmark and Share
Charles Sowell

Wadakoe, what a place

by Charles Sowell

No Comments    |   Email to Friend    |   Print    |   RSS 2.0
Aug
17

It is almost as if the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources doesn’t want people to find Wadakoe Mountain Heritage Trust site; their maps of the area leave a lot to be desired and the directions listed on their Web site do, too.

And, perhaps, that is with reason since Wadakoe is one of the Upstate’s premiere biological hotspots. There are at least seven species of plant that are thought to exist nowhere else in South Carolina including a specie of goldenrod unknown to science until it was found by Clemson botanist Patrick McMillan not 10 feet from his parked car a few years back.

That at your feet discovery makes for both the beauty of the mountain and its peril.

Wadakoe is technically part of the Jocassee Gorges as well as a stand-alone Heritage Trust preserve, but development eats away at edges of the 900-acre site perched atop a low range of mountains that frame Eastatoe Valley.

Natives know the hidden trails though the site and can often be found illegally riding their ATVs over the mountain for fun or as a shortcut to fishing on Eastatoe Creek at DNR’s fishpipe stocking point.

But fish aren’t the reason to visit Wadakoe; plants are, especially in spring when the mountain’s secret coves are home to an explosion of rare plant species that live in a series of ecological hotspots scattered over the north face of the mountain.

None of these spots are easy to get to and DNR hasn’t built the kind of well-marked trail system that neophyte hikers are accustomed to on Wadakoe.

Getting in is easy enough. Take Roy F. Jones Road off state Route 11 and go about a mile to the Peach Orchard fishing access point on the right.

This is the last sign even remotely giving directions to the mountain. Follow an old logging road in.

Bear right at each fork in the road (there are several) and go on past fishpipe (a long plastic tube that stretches from the logging road to Eastatoe Creek).

DNR personnel regularly flush fingerlings into the creek from here in season.

From there the trail will start a long series of switchbacks. Keep your eyes glued to the borders of the road, especially in wet spots. You’re likely to see trillium in season and more uncommon species of plants at other times.

Hikers will pass under two power lines. One is fairly small, the other major with massive steel towers and a good view of the mountains ringing Lake Jocassee.

At the spot where the logging road starts to drop back down the mountain is a very obscure logging trail on the right.

Hikers are on their own from this point. A good topographical map and the ability to read it are highly recommended.

You must bushwhack your way over the top of the mountain and using a topo map pick out drainages the lead down to Eastatoe Valley and Wadakoe’s secret coves.

Some of the cove plants, like the Plantain Sedge, are supremely unimpressive but rare. Others, like Foam Flower, or Nodding Trillium are gems both in their uncommonness and floral passion.

The roots of this profusion of rarity are sunk into the singular geology of Wadakoe. The discovery of the mountain’s uniqueness happened one day while Dennis Chastain was out hunting.

“I happened across this deer trail that had been worn hip deep into the side of the mountain back in 2000,” he said.

“Being a hunter (he is also a talented amateur botanist with books on mountain wildflowers to his credit), I followed the trail to see why so many deer were using it.”

What he found was an exposed rock face made up of amphibolite – a metamorphosed rock rich in calcium and magnesium, a poor man’s marble. The deer had, quite literally, licked the face of the rock smooth and were eating the dirt at the base of the rocks.

Wadakoe alone in the region is built on foundation of amphibolite; deer crave the minerals for their nutrient value. So do the plants.

However, for plants there is the additional benefit of calcium and magnesium making the mountain’s dirt basic versus the normally acidic soil of the surrounding mountains.

On Wadakoe there is almost no mountain laurel, or rhododendron – both acid loving species. The soil is “sweet” and many species of plant, like Sweet White Trillium (Trillium Simile) and nine other species of trillium thrive on it. Some species are not common anywhere else along the Blue Ridge Escarpment. On Wadakoe one can stand hip deep in rare Blue Cohosh (Caulophyllum thalictroides), while surrounded by troops of white trillium, under a canopy of titanic hickory and poplar spiced with rare Butternut trees (Juglans cinerea), a variety of walnut.

The coves on Wadakoe’s north-facing slope are part of an intricate system of “nutrient sinks” that funnel food and water down slope until they hit an obstacle and concentrate there.

Bookmark and Share
Lyn Riddle

On remembering summer days

by Lyn Riddle

No Comments    |   Email to Friend    |   Print    |   RSS 2.0
Jul
17

South Carolina Information Highway – known colloquially as Sciway – has some suggestions for how to spend July in South Carolina.

I love this online service from James Island. It offers a thorough look at the goings on in our state, the festivals, the cool websites, the history.

So when I saw the e-mail announcing July events, I eagerly opened it and found a path back into my childhood summers with my grandmother.

Here’s what they said:

Feast on a peach – This year’s expected to be a bumper crop – which means 60,000 tons of peaches grown on 18,000 acres – more than Georgia, the Peach State. The prevailing smell of my grandmother’s summertime kitchen was ripe peaches. With pudgy, nimble fingers and a well-worn paring knife, she’d strip those beauties clean and either slice them into a bowl for breakfast or a casserole dish for cobbler.

Sometimes we’d pass Taylor’s Peach Shed, but never went in. Friends and family regularly brought peaches along with homegrown tomatoes and cantaloupe and all manner of vegetables to her five-room home in Greer.

I am sure my aged mind has warped the memory but it seems like that backdoor slapped with visitors every 10 minutes. And just as no one ever left her house without her giving them something, no one arrived empty handed either.

Live large on local shrimp. Now this was one foodstuff I rarely saw at my grandmother’s table but we sure ate it at Myrtle Beach for that one-week vacation – always July 4 – every year. We’d stay at a motel on the oceanfront. My uncle didn’t believe in making reservations, but we never wanted for a clean bed and an ocean view. Sciway mentioned paring the shrimp with corn on the cob, hush puppies – yes – and cold beer – a definite no in my family.

Hit the road. We spent a lot of time at home, but on special weekends one of my aunts would invite us all up to her place in the North Carolina mountains near Tuxedo. This usually involved driving the Willys Jeep around the little lake my uncle created. Yes, we were 12 and yes, we did get it stuck in the mud, which resulted in my uncle pulling it out and saying, “Ready to go again.” My cousin and I always wanted to spend the night in the silver trailer by ourselves, but if it was raining we were out of luck. Grandma wanted to fall asleep the sounds of raindrops meeting tin.

Catch a wave. Already covered that but Sciway also says go surfing, which was not something any one of us had heard much about 40 years ago.

Sit and sip. Or in other words, drink tea. This was the only drink found in my grandmother’s house as far as I recall. I’m sure she had milk and juice but that was not on my menu. There was nothing puny about my grandmother’s tea. It was steeped and sweet. Very.

Years ago no one asked for sweet tea. It just was. That was the only way it was made. Now the modifier is used universally.

Sciway suggests taking your sweet tea, inviting someone over and sitting in rocking chairs for some conversation. Days at Grandma’s generally ended up this way. She never had central air so outside offered the coolest spot. The older folks would gather in her effusively landscaped backyard to sit on metal shell chairs and recount the events of the day.

The young ones would nest on her wrap-around porch, usually spying on the neighbors, some of who were actually quite interesting. One man shunned his front door for a window. We never figured out why he left and entered his house that way.

It occurs to me many of Sciway’s suggestions trade on a stereotypical view of the South. But then stereotypes would not be without some basis in fact.

Bookmark and Share