The Indians and The Savannah River
I've had an unusual affinity for "Indians" my entire life. The notion may have originated with the family excursions we took to the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the Smokey Mountains when I was very young, but, for some reason I had been pretty darned sure I was a "Cherokee Indian" until an elementary school classmate burst my bubble with a genealogy lesson I couldn't argue. He had known both my parents and grandparents because we went to the same church.
The odd sense of kinship faded a little after that only to return a few years later as friends and I began to make daily use of an old trail we discovered in the woods running behind our houses. The narrow path spanned the entire neighborhood and meandered through the forest alongside a little creek reaching an embankment where the creek spilled into the Savannah River and the trail took a sharp left following the Carolina bank. Just before the trail turned seaward, an ancient Indian mound stood sentinal over the cluster of rapids below.
It was there on The Mound that a motley group of teenagers from all walks of life became "family" and were transformed into the region's newest tribe, The River Rats, and where we staked our unofficial claim to The Rapids where, for many years it would be our near-exclusive swimming hole, perpetual campground and, for some, a sanctuary from an ever-growing number of broken homes. The forest and the River consoled and took its care with us and we, in turn, took care if it. And for a while, it really was ours.
A sublime air of the sacred permeated that sizeable patch of old-growth forest that connected our homes to the River and we felt protected within its bounds. It was the kind of place that could give a lost kid the first inkling that perhaps there was a benevolent, higher-presence that might actually exist after all.
"The long fight to save wild beauty represents democracy at its best. It requires citizens to practice the hardest of virtues—self-restraint."
--Edwin Way Teale (1899 - 1980)
