Greetings from Kudzu Nation

At left: Kudzu colonizes riverside on the Swamp Rabbit Trail.


My profuse apologies for the unannounced blog break. At first, it was a real live recreational break, complete with hiking my favorite section of our beloved Swamp Rabbit Trail ... and then our electricity went FIZZLE... and so did we.

Nightmarish!

After the storm this week, we were without electricity for a whole day. (Some areas got it much worse, too.) If you think that's easy in South Carolina summer heat, think again. We were careful to stay STILL and QUIET ... and I soon figured out the reason for the well-worn stereotype of southerners acting/talking S-L-O-W is likely because they were simply too hot to move for hundreds of years.

Made sick from heat, I barely got the laundry done. Thankfully, I think we've recovered now. (It took me a very nice birthday party to completely recover, but I have!)

Mr Daisy forced me to go see X-MEN FIRST CLASS, which wasn't half-bad. The black man sitting next to me buried his face in his hands when Darwin bought it early. Then he placed his head on the shoulder of the woman next to him, as if to weep. Yeah, the sole black man gets knocked off early, way before the bang-up finale, in which the X-Men stop the Cuban Missile Crisis! (and all this time you thought it was Bobby Kennedy!) I like to think I would have noticed this without my movie-neighbor's reaction, but it is possible I wouldn't have, so my hat is off to him for bringing it to my attention.

Why do they do that? The old Star Trek TV-series used to do that, too... if there was a black guy in the landing party, you could expect the aliens to eat his innards first!

Left: Kudzu eats tree.


Delinquent in blogging, at least I've been collecting some pretty good links, so have at it:

:: Possibly, the blog post title of the year: Republican Senator Says “Fuck It”, Legalize Gay Marriage (Jezebel)

:: Asshole New Jersey governor Christie declares to voters that it's "none of your business" if he sends his kids to private school while enthusiastically gutting public schools... and if you thought otherwise, New Jersey folks, since YOU are paying his salary, well, he sets you straight in no uncertain terms. ((((fumes))))

:: My Ex-Gay Friend (The New York Times) Fascinating article about queer-theory junkie who turns into a fundie. This is the money quote:

It all sounded very much like the Michael I knew at XY, a young man who was fascinated by queer theory — namely, the idea that sexual and gender identities are culturally constructed rather than biologically fixed — and who dreamed of a world without labels like “straight” and “gay,” which he deemed restrictive and designed to “segment and persecute,” as he argued in a 1998 issue of XY. Though he conceded back then that it was important “to stay unified under a ‘Gay’ political umbrella” until equality for gays and lesbians had been achieved, Michael preferred to label himself queer.

As Ben and I reminisced, I couldn’t help wondering if Michael’s new philosophy might, in a strange way, be a logical extension of what he believed back then — that “gay” is a limiting category and that sexual identities can change. Ben nodded. “A radical queer activist and a fundamentalist Christian aren’t always as different as they might seem,” he said, adding that they’re ideologues who can railroad over nuance and claim a monopoly on the truth.

:: I have repeatedly attempted to blog about the whole Boeing fiasco in South Carolina, but every time I start a post, the situation just mushrooms further. I think I have finally found an article that explains it succinctly: 'Boeing retaliated' (Charleston Post and Courier):

Republicans on the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee questioned why the Democrat-controlled National Labor Relations Board sued Boeing over its decision in 2009 to locate the plant in North Charleston.

Democrats questioned if Boeing retaliated against the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers by putting the factory in mostly non-unionized South Carolina to avoid costly labor strikes.

On the hot seat during most of the nearly four-hour hearing was NLRB acting General Counsel Lafe Solomon, who reluctantly agreed to testify after being threatened with a subpoena.

"We believe the evidence will show that Boeing retaliated against its employees," Solomon said. "The decision to build a second line in South Carolina was in retaliation for the employees' right to strike."

And for you geeks who require labor-law details, please check out this post from the SC Green Party blog: NLRB and Labor Law: Discussion on C-Span

At left: Kudzu eats hill.


:: And just in case you wondered why our schools always place last (or near last) nationally? Greedhead Republican swine, especially the current governor:
Haley: $105 million should go for tax cuts, not schools. (The Columbia State)

Gov. Nikki Haley threatened Wednesday to veto a state Senate proposal to add $105 million to the state’s K-12 education funding, saying the money should instead be used for tax cuts or to pay off state debt.

Haley also said that, in the future, anytime a three-member panel of state economists increases its estimates of how much money the state will bring in, as it did last month, that money should go for tax cuts, rebates or to pay off state debt.

That position is certain to endear Haley to her Tea Party supporters, who say they are taxed enough already.

But it will upset others who say that, after cutting billions from the state’s general fund during the just-ended Great Recession, recovering state revenues should be used to restore services that were cut or can justify more support.

:: Announcing a South Carolina demonstration against the Libyan intervention, which our Senator Lindsey Graham thinks is just great great great. This has been organized by the Carolina Peace Resource Center:

Saturday, June 25 · 12:00pm - 1:00pm

Location: Five Points Fountain (Greene & Harden St.)
Columbia, South Carolina.

This is a great location, since you can shop afterwards at Hip-Wa-Zee (Hi Leslie!) and Loose Lucy's. Only a dullard could resist! Be there or be square! (Yes, I sometimes miss living in Columbia, which I did for about 7 months.)

And finally...

NO MORE Law and Order Criminal Intent after this weekend?!? (((screams in agony)))) NOOOOooooOOOO!!!!

They are taking one of my favorite binge-drugs away.

Swamp Rabbit Trail

This section of Greenville County's Swamp Rabbit Trail runs along the Reedy River, right into the heart of downtown Greenville, South Carolina. The full 13-mile trail is actually a collection of smaller trails, only recently formally connected. I have been hiking the McDaniel section of the trail into (what is now) Reedy River Falls Park, since I first came to Greenville decades ago. I thought I would share the trail with you, which ends up at the bridge behind the West End Market (next-to-last photo, below). You can also take another section of this trail up to Liberty Bridge and the Reedy River Falls, which I also love to do. This trail is one of my favorite spots in the world!

Check out photo #5, where you can see the kudzu climbing the hill and shimmying up the tree. Also, in photo #9, you can see it has totally colonized the hill! It's a real challenge for city employees to beat it back. (In photo #15, note how it has covered both sides of the stone-steps/embankment.)

Photo #6 is a memorial for Major Rudolf Anderson, Greenville native and the only casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I took these photos back in June, when it was so hot, I felt just like a swamp rabbit. :)

~*~

A Waterfall Downtown

Left: The Reedy River falls, downtown Greenville, SC. Photo taken yesterday by your humble narrator. This is from the footbridge, looking down on the falls.

The first time I realized I had moved to a locality with a waterfall downtown, was, I think, 1988. I remember thinking I was hallucinating, circled the block, got out of my car on what was then the Camperdown bridge. Holy shit, Niagara Falls below! I told my husband, who thought I had imagined it. "Probably some water-power system for the old textile mills," he said, and in fact, that is exactly how Greenville became a textile town. I finally took him to the falls, then hidden under a gargantuan, ancient and thoroughly ugly concrete bridge. There is a waterfall downtown!


~*~



Left: The footbridge over the river, taken from the Wyche overlook.



Very, very few cities can claim a downtown waterfall. Certainly, I've never heard of any others.

You just GAPE at it, rather like coming upon a mountain, an orange grove or some other natural wonder in the middle of a town--huh? What?


For years, Greenville was embarrassed by it's pre-electric, pre-TVA past, and hid the waterfall. Like me, newcomers weren't sure they'd even seen it; you could drive right over it. But then came the trendy global-capitalist, latte-town dreams of the Chamber of Commerce. Various rich investor-newbies to Greenville took one look at that waterfall and went--OMIGOD! Dollar signs lit up the eyes. They moved Mr Billy Mitchell out of his famous record store. They built a Hampton Inn, Quiznos, Starbucks, and the rest. But most importantly, the thing they got right? They tore down that nasty old bridge and exposed the beautiful waterfall for the people to see. A $4.5 million suspension bridge, named the Liberty Bridge, went in. Following the natural ravine around the river, a park was landscaped, connecting the new Governor's School for the Arts with downtown.




And what else goes with a lovely new park along the waterfall and river, but pricey restaurants and condos?

I guess you know the rest. Appropriate for tax time: It used to be cheap to live here, and now it isn't.

Edit: Some construction photos of the pedestrian bridge, for engineering geeks and other interested parties.

Photo at left: from the south side of the park.

----------------
Listening to: The Who - Heaven and Hell
via FoxyTunes

Stay out the way of the southern thing

Left: Kudzu (from The Fruit Fly)

I am from a southern mother, and like Rita Mae Brown, I repatriated as an adult. Moving south was like coming home, only it wasn't.


Being an ethnically-displaced person is strange and oddly transcendent. I think of VS Naipaul, an Indian and Hindu, born in Trinidad. No one else makes India more real to me. He loves India as an insider and outsider, and in his writing, he shapes-shifts, back and forth, inside and out.

I never felt like a yankee. My family was looked down on and called hillbillies, but I had never actually lived in the "hills" at all; I grew up in the city. To me, "hillbilly" meant that my family played in a country-and-western band, and we ate certain foods like cornbread and pinto beans. My grandfather said "shit fire!" which shocked my young yankee schoolmates--one of them asked: what is 'shit fire'? (I had to admit I didn't know, but it was reserved for situations that nowadays would call for a response like "Fuck me!") So I was never a proper yankee, but when I first got here, could not in any way feel like a southerner either. I remember being in tears when I couldn't understand about half of my neighbors, so deep were their accents.

After over 20 years of marriage into a deeply-southern family, I feel that I finally belong.

I can still remember when I first saw kudzu, covering everything like a thick, lush, wavy, symmetrical, emerald-green blanket. Upon my arrival in Columbia, SC, I even took photos of it. I have photos of kudzu snaking up telephone poles and electrical wires; enveloping houses, abandoned gas stations and shotgun shacks, turning everything beautiful, as snow does. Transforming the whole world into green leaves. But there are snakes and other varmints in there. Kudzu chokes other plants and kills them. Southerners cuss the kudzu, and here I was, in my neo-southern repatriated ignorance, wanting to plant more.

Kudzu hides things, as southerners tend to hide things. How fitting that it has traditionally been used in herbal medicine as an alcoholism remedy and to detoxify drug addicts; conditions that thrive on what is hidden.

Some people go to war with the kudzu: goddamn shit is gettin outta my yard if it's the last thing I do! And other people resign themselves to it: you can't kill it. Surrender Dorothy! As an herbalist, I am dedicated to understanding the kudzu, but I daresay, it is the way we once tried to "understand" the Soviets. Shades of "we will bury you!" come to mind. Does the kudzu want to co-exist? Or will it take over?

It's indestructible, and will survive the nuclear war, they tell me, just like cockroaches. Probably.

But I can't help it: I love survivors. Particularly southern ones.