A Place of Memories

A passage from my Okefenokee journal on Mixon’s Hammock, March 5, 2017:

After tensely navigating through over a mile of the Narrows, the scene expanded forth into a beautiful prairie. A juvenile alligator and a pair of Ibises welcomed us into the opened, bright sky. Yet again, I missed a photo of a colorful male Wood Duck, but captured a sharp shot of a nervously diving Grebe.

It appeared as if we had emerged onto a remote African savannah in another time. Tall brown grasses lined the sides of the canoe trail and stretched far off into the distance. Large green Spatterdock leaves floated in small bays as the canoe channel began to widen.

​This beautiful prairie was a place of solitude, a place of memory; memories of logging and wild fires of centuries gone by. Like passing through jagged dragon’s teeth, the waterway was lined on both banks with large, jagged Cypress stumps, blackened by fire. We passed through a double line of vertical pilings standing five feet out of the water; the remains of a logging train track. ​

iNaturalist observations:

• Grebe: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/32852256
• Alligator: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/32852254
• Ibis: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/32850378