Northward, the modest Southern Appalachians are bounded by the escarpment the Cherokee called the “Blue Wall.” The place not so long ago called the “Dark Corner” still stirs the imagination as gorges rush wild and cool with white water and a few persistent brook trout linger in hidden pools. Moist coves crowded with canopies of hardwoods sit below and among a few granite monoliths that folks flock to see. Within the memory of a three-hundred-year-old poplar this was the backcountry: a wilderness with “panthers,” elk, and wood bison roaming canebrakes and rhododendron hells. Now peregrine falcons and common ravens patrol the skies while black bears grow fat on Allegheny blackberries and the easy pickings in exclusive gated communities.
Sitting on either flank of the broad and broken piedmont, the mountains and the coast harbor opportunities for wildness that the worn-out region in between has lost to easy progress. But Edgefield County, caught in the middle of all the apparent mediocrity of the piedmont, is yet a hidden gem, a source of biodiversity that is easy to pass by on the way to somewhere else.
There are still priceless places where nature hangs on by tooth, talon, and tendril. Most of Edgefield is rural. There are trees everywhere, though most of them reside on private lands, where there is a priority set on pines over pavement. Significant portions of the Sumter National Forest’s Long Cane Ranger District lie in the county, providing public access to places where nature is the first consideration. Farming and forestry provide diversity within the tree-dominated matrix. I grew up in the southwestern outreaches of the county, in a ragged, two-hundred-acre Forest Service inholding. From heaven—or from a high-flying bird’s viewpoint—I imagine it looked like a hole punched into the Long Cane Ranger District. That gap in the wildness was my Home Place.
In the 1970s, when wild turkeys were still trying to establish a clawhold everywhere else, they were common enough on the Home Place as to be almost unremarkable. I’d often surprise a flock as they fed in the bottomland pasture. Most of the big birds would take off running for the nearest wood’s edge, but a couple of gobblers always lifted off, powerfully clearing the tree line while cackling loudly at my intrusion.
Like the wild turkeys, deer weren’t really common in the wider world. But whitetails were abundant in the woods and fields of the Home Place. To Daddy, they were pests. Handsome in their foxy red coats, the deer claimed our bean fields as their own in the summer. They seemed to know that there was security in that season, with worries of hidden hunters forgotten until fall.
Daddy put many of the Home Place acres to work growing produce. Watermelon, cantaloupe, butter beans, purple-hull peas, and an array of other crops grew fast and flavorful on the bottomland terraces and sandy soil up on the hills. Tons of melons and hundreds of bushels of beans were the product of his and Mama’s hard work. The bounty wasn’t just for us, though. Daddy would load up his truck with the fresh vegetables and sell them to city and suburban folks who craved the flavor of locally grown foods not found in grocery stores. The money was an important supplement to the paltry pay he and Mama made as schoolteachers.
The investment in the crops—the plowing, planting, and fertilizing—would all be for naught, though, if the four-legged foraging machines had their way. The garden’s only chance at survival was an eight-foot-high electric fence and a phalanx of scarecrows draped in Daddy’s sweatiest, smelliest clothes. Should the fence fail and the deer’s noses unriddle the scarecrow ruse, the last line of defense was an old British Enfield .303 rifle. Daddy would sit on the roof and try to pick off one or two of the deer but he was seldom successful. Even with his constant attention to defending the garden he’d often find a sizable portion of the new crop gone overnight, the tender seedlings neatly nipped and ruminating in the belly of a whitetail that had figured out how to breach the gauntlet while we slept.
Knowing that the Home Place was surrounded by the deer heaven of the National Forest and that our fields and gardens were open buffets in the midst of it all, a couple of Daddy’s teacher friends—Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Ferguson—asked to hunt the property. Beyond the rooftop plinking Daddy didn’t deer hunt, but he believed that any pressure exerted on the bean eaters couldn’t hurt. He said yes. The two white men became the only people I remember Daddy ever trusting to hunt on the Home Place, free to roam the property and exact the revenge that my father couldn’t. Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Ferguson showed up on Saturday mornings in fall dressed in camouflage and carrying bows or rifles. They sought the whitetails with a dawn-to-dusk fervor, arriving early and leaving late. What did they do out there all day? Where did they go? It was puzzling to see the extraordinary lengths they took—getting up before the sun did and dressing like trees and bushes—just to pursue animals that grazed casually, like so many slender brown cattle, right in our backyard. It seemed to me the hunters were making something that should’ve been easy hard. But while I don’t remember ever seeing any fruits of their labors, they kept coming back and seemed happy just to be “out there.”
Beyond the white-tailed deer and the wild turkeys, wildlife was everywhere. In every natural nook and cranny—a stump hole, a dry creek bed, or a burrow in the ground—there was something furred, feathered, finned, or scaled that scurried, swam, or flew. I was amazed by it all. Curiosity grew as I explored and learned the signs of the wild souls I seldom actually saw: the delicate doglike trace of a fox; the handlike pawprints of raccoons and opossums; mysterious feathers that had floated to earth, gifts from unknown birds.
I craved knowledge about the wildlife that lived around us. I read every book I could about the creatures that shared the Home Place kingdom with me. I pored over encyclopedias and piled up library fines. Field guides were treasure troves of information: pictures stacked side by side with brief descriptions of what, where, and when. I went back outdoors, where I walked, stalked, and waited to see as many wild things as I could. I collected tadpoles to watch them grow into froglets; I caught butterflies and gazed into their thousand-lensed eyes. Birds were everywhere and as I learned to identify them by sight their songs sunk into my psyche, too. Nature was often the first and last thing on my mind, morning to night.
An April morning full of birdsong and the distant rumblings of gobbling longbeards was life in stereo. Bobwhite quail had conversations with one another from weedy ditches and thorny thickets. On my rambles I would usually flush a covey or two. The birds exploded from blackberry brambles, flying scattershot in every direction with wings a-whirring, to find refuge elsewhere. The sudden flurry never failed to push my pulse to pounding. Within a few minutes the reassembly calls—Pearlie! Pearlie!—drifted across the pasture to bring the clan back together again. On warm summer nights, barred owls boomed their eerie calls and cackles back and forth across the creek bottom as the numbing chants of whip-poor-wills and choruses of katydids and crickets lulled me to sleep.
Today, Edgefield is still a rich refuge for wild things. Most of them don’t attract the attention that deer and turkeys do. Hand-standing spotted skunks secret themselves in hedgerows and old fields. Webster’s salamanders hide in the litter of the forest floor. Christmas darters, Carolina heelsplitters, yellow lampmussels, and eastern creekshells won’t win any contests for charisma but the decorative little fish and trio of freshwater mussels survive in Edgefield’s creeks and not many other places. Many rare plants are found there, too. These rooted and leafed things are more often than not overlooked even though their lyrical names demand attention: adder’s tongue, streambank mock orange, shoals spider-lily, yellow sunnybell, Oglethorpe oak, eared goldenrod, Carolina birds-in-a-nest, small skullcap, and enchanter’s nightshade.
Edgefield has been less welcoming of—and less of a refuge for—human diversity. Under regressive and racist governors who fostered and promoted policies aimed squarely at exclusion and violence, the power base in Edgefield kept things stuck in a state of antebellum stagnation, separate and nowhere near equal. While the South has long laid claim to a culture that values manners, loyalty, honor, and a slower pace of living, there are other, less admirable traits that ooze out from between the niceties. A heaping of hypocrisy is often served alongside the southern hospitality. Double standards are as common as ragweed and persistent as kudzu across the region. The “good old