Another American Adventure: another drive south

Friday, January 27, 2012

another drive south

I drug my feet long enough, so Thursday after the freezing rain seemed less threatening, I set out.

Hated to leave, somehow.

Rained through most of West Virginia.

My rock wall ...

Into Virginia ... still more than 300 miles from Kiawah ... Turned the car air conditioner on in Virginia; put on sunglasses in SC.

Coming through Charleston (you should click on this photo and blow it up some so that you can read the writing on the side of the building!)

Bridges and trees ...

Made it to Kiawah about 1:30pm Friday. Next up, the beach ...

1 comment:

BarbaraJanuary 27, 2012 at 4:13 PM
Such a difference from the snow, freezing rain, regular rain and snow we have had since last night. Beach ... what a word!
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.