Sense of Place Contest

I’ve been so busy since getting back home last weekend. I have stories to tell and book reviews to write (at the very least, I"ll write reviews for The Journey of Crazy Horse and Sentimental, Brokenhearted Rednecks). But I’m so tired by the end of the day. I’ve been in meetings every night this week—tonight I was at a contentious school board meeting, last night I was with construction managers and the meeting dragged on to nearly 10 o’clock. Needless to say, I’ve not had a lot of time to write or even do the 3WW… But I really want to win an autograph copy of Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound (which comes highly recommended, so I am going to again enter Maggie’s “sense of place” contest). The rules are to pick a passage out of book that qualifies for the Southern Reading Challenge and then choose a picture that illustrates it. This was an easy assignment as I’ve just returned from my parent’s, and while there I took a lot of photographs of longleaf pines. I’m posting to two pictures to illustrate two quotes from Janisse Ray’s book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. The first shot shows the crown of the trees (and if you look closely you’ll see a large number of green cones on them). The second shows the trees thick bark along with a scar on a tree. It’s not unusual to see these scars long after the trees were tapped for turpentine (this tree was probably tapped 75 years ago).

"The trees grow spaced so far apart in pine savannas, sunshine bathing the ground, that you can see forever; they are much grassland as forest. The limbs of longleaf pine are gray and scaly and drape as the trees matures, and its needles are very long, up to seventeen inches, like a piano player’s fingers, and held upright at ends of the limbs, like a bride holds her bouquet. In 1791, naturalist and explorer William Bartram, in his Travels, called the Southern pinelands a “vast forest of the most stately pine trees that can be imagined.” (page 66)

"Pine plantations dishearten God. In them he aches for blooming things, and he misses the sun trickling through the tree crowns, and he pines for the crawling, spotted, scale-backed, bushy-tailed, leaf-hopping, chattering creatures. Most of all he misses the bright-winged, singing beings he cast as angels…. "(page 125)

In this last quote, Ray refers to the pine plantations (normally of loblolly or slash pine) that have replaced nearly 98% of the longleaf pine in the Southeast. The longleaf cannot survive a clear-cut, and when trees are cut, “tree-farmers” often replace them with other types of pines, with different bark and a thicker canopy. This replacement of pince has caused a loss of habitat for birds that like to nest within the bark and cavities of the longleaf pines as well as animals and plants that flourish under the thinly veiled canopy of the longleaf.