Happy Thanksgiving. Today I am thankful for a wonderful childhood.
Sheba, our English Setter, barked incessantly in the drainage ditch behind our house. Investigating, I found her moving around a pocket in the clay wall of the ditch. Draining water created these small caves which were common along the ditch bank.
“What is it girl?” I asked. I rubbed the dog’s head and leaned down to peer inside the hole. A good-sized turtle appeared to be hiding inside. Its head barely stuck out of what seemed to be a black shell. “Good girl,” I said, grabbing a stick. I slid the stick underneath its shell and tried to drag the turtle out when all a sudden its head, fangs flashing, struck the stick just below my hand. Dropping the stick, I jumped back. The snake’s body recoiled. Sheba barked even more frantically. She knew danger lurked.
I was ten years old and had come inches from being bitten by a water moccasin. Leaving the dog to guard the snake, I ran inside and told dad who came out, grabbing a hoe, and killed the snake. It was too dangerous for something that poisonous to be at the edge of our yard. A year or so later, a snake bit Sheba. Her snout swelling twice it’s normal size. The vet drained the poison and she convalesce a few days. Thankfully, she was soon back to normal.
We moved to into a neighborhood called Tanglewood in the Myrtle Grove Sound area when I was nine years old. This was before the big building boom in Wilmington, which started around 1970 and hasn’t yet let up. There were only seven houses on our street, each sitting on a half-acre. Ours was one of the few exceptions. My father brought two lots, not wanting to be “crowded in.” In addition to the woods behind the house, we could cross the street and ramble through more swamps and pine forest until we came to the headwaters of Whiskey Creek, which I thoroughly explored after I purchased my first canoe when I was sixteen.
The woods across the street were the first to go. They built houses up and down the road. By the time I entered Roland Grice Junior High, all the lots had been sold I don’t remember just when the woods behind my parents succumbed to the great urban sprawl of the Southeast. My last trip exploring the bays and pine forest was during a break from college. A few years later, when visiting, I discovered the ditch filled in and houses standing where woods and bays once existed.
The drainage ditch behind our house was a wonderful place to play as a kid. When we first moved here, there was always water flowing. I didn’t realize this being an ominous sign as they were draining the swampy areas to the south of our house. As kids, we played in the ditch, hunting salamanders and turtles, and caught a few small, red-finned pike.
Also exciting were the carnivorous plants, especially the Venus flytrap with trigger-hairs in its cupped hands which snapped shut, imprisoning an unlucky insect as it feasted on its decaying body. The ditch also served us as a trench for us to re-enact Civil War battles. Having moved here from Petersburg, Virginia, I knew trenches played a major role during the Civil War. We fought our battles with friends, unaware that just a mile or so away our ancestors skirmished with Union soldiers. This was early in 1865, in a last ditch effort to delay the fall of Wilmington. Lee’s troops, hunkered down in the trenches around Petersburg, needed the provisions blockade runners brought into the city. They held back the Union soldiers long enough for most of the stockpiles at the city’s wharfs to be transported north.
Behind the drainage ditch were several square miles of woods and swamps. These swamps, known as Carolina Bays, consisted of an oval shaped depression filled with peat moss. In all but extremely dry periods, water filled the mossy depressions. Ringing these oval depressions were thick undergrowth including live oaks bearded with Spanish moss, bay trees, and pond cypress. The rest of the land, which was only inches higher than the bays, consisted of white sandy soil in which grew long-leaf pines. Occasionally, one came upon a patch of winged sumac or blackjack oak. Wiregrass covered the ground.
In ages past, these pine forests of eastern North Carolina supported a thriving industry for naval stores and turpentine. Evidence remained of such industry. Slash marks on the trunks of mature trees indicated someone had drained sap from the tree. There were also mounds, which we at first thought were Indian burial grounds, only to later discover they had something to do with burning pines while extracting pitch. But that was all in the past. By the time I explored the woods and bay, they were waiting development. But for a few years, they made a great playground.