I admit to being conflicted. I grew up in the North Carolina Piedmont, the mountains were never far away. The Blue Ridge Parkway was in my backyard. We spent the summer vacations that we didn’t go to the beach in the Smoky Mountains. The beach was always North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Just after I turned sixteen, I drove across the country with a friend only a couple years older than me. My favorite part of the trip was Montana and a quick trip to Glacier National Park. The summer of 1969, a college roommate and I took a road trip to Alaska. We wandered through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, up through western Canada to the Alcan Highway which was still gravel at the time and finally to Alaska. I saw plenty mountains and loved most of them, especially the towering Tetons and the nameless ones in Alaska.
John Muir once said the following.
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings, Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you and the storms their energy, while cares will drop off like autumn leaves.”
I wish that I could have invited John Muir to join me in a walk along the salt marshes of North Carolina. I have seen my share of mountains from those in Alaska to the Canadian Rockies, the Tetons, the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and the Alps of Austria and Switzerland.
Though I have lived on side of a mountain, no mountain has ever brought me the peace that I feel walking or paddling the edges of the salt marshes, sounds, and beaches of North Carolina. I do not disagree that the redwoods and the tall mountains of the world are wonderful cathedrals to nature. However, I think marshes are even more important to our lives and what they give back to those who treasure them is priceless. Maybe if I could have lived along a mountain stream, I would feel differently, because I loved the streams in the deep dark woods of my youth.
The wonderful thing about the salt marshes and the waters that touch them is that they are alive with creatures that touch our existence in so many ways.
It is easy to fall in love with the beautiful feathered friends that I find on my trips through the marshes. However, it goes far beyond that. The other day I saw a fox chasing something along a marsh pond. I have watched river otters play on the shores of the marsh. I have been lucky enough to have an osprey dive straight into the water just yards from my kayak. I have caught fish in the marsh. I have seen ospreys eat mullet in the trees along the marsh edges. I have watched in awe as fish and crabs fight over scraps we have fed them.
The marsh is a world in itself. Birds and fishes live and die in the marsh. Nothing is wasted in the marsh. Whatever falls there is always recycled. An area of marsh which has been either undisturbed or repaired is a powerful source of life, food, and healing for the soul.
Walking through the marsh, I see swirls of bait fish, ducks and other birds feeding in the marsh, hawks and ospreys hunting for food, and sometimes from the edge of the marsh I can even see bottle nosed dolphins feeding on fish that were born in the marsh.
Somehow I worry about the marshes more than the mountains. I know mountains get developed but marshes get destroyed. Marshes seem so fragile. The Raymond’s Gut marsh where we lived for fifteen years is now under full assault. A neighboring tract of land of land has been completely cleared of trees. A fine, sandy silt now covers everything according to former neighbors. I have heard the Great Blue Herons, Great Egrets, and River Otters have disappeared from Raymond’s Gut. The cycle of life in the marsh is breaking down.
Maybe the sometimes hostile mountains built on granite will be around when we are all gone and the marshes are filled in with silt.
All my life I have sought those places on the edge of civilization where the wilderness and humans touch each other. One of the reasons is that those edges are the places where the interactions between our world and the wilderness are the easiest to see.
Years of working far too inside the world of wall to wall humans has made me leery of living where all the trees are in a park and the rest of the land has been paved over into parking lots.
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