The Natural South: Introductions And Definitions

No major east-west mountain ranges prevent the full fury of an Arctic air mass from reaching its cold, harsh hand well into our continent.  Snow, ice, and cold conditions are thus probable during winter months well into the United States and possible into even low elevations in Mexico and Florida during periods of extreme cold.  The Gulf Stream and the Gulf of Mexico, however, are like thermal blankets which lie next to our shores and keep the southeastern portion of her warm and humid.  The result is that upon heading south from the Great Lakes or New England, a new world emerges where leaves remain on trees and shrubs, lush cathedrals of pines and oaks grow towering over carpets of grasses, forbs, palmettos, and even some rhododendrons and azaleas.  The northern traveler leaves behind any remnant of the harder north as spruce, fir, and some pines disappear into deciduous forests which again give way to pines once more and the first hints of a much warmer world in the fan-shaped leaves of the palm family.  New Englanders first saw sandy and rocky shores covered in dune grass and pines and had to face some intense winters.  The first Virginians glided up broad estuaries lined with the majestic flared columns known as Baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum) and Water Tupelo (Nyssa Aquatica) laden with branches covered in Spanish Moss (Tillandsia Usneoides).  Things were still, hot, rich, and seemingly able to stop time itself.

You see, the west boasts landscapes and vegetation which defy the imagination in sheer scale and determination.  Mexico holds us enthralled with snow-capped volcanoes towering over deserts and jungles.  The north has endless stretches of dark forests seated on a foundation of ancient rock and sand resting in turn among serene and powerful lakes.  In between we have the open horizons of the grasslands which seem to go on forever and direct the eye as much to the beauty of the infinite sky as they do to the small world of grasses and forbs covered in butterflies and roamed by majestic ungulates.  There too we have great forests of oaks, hickories, beeches, and maples, which either stretch between grand rivers or on the slopes of smaller mountains covered in rhododendron carpets.  All these places are exotic, grand, and savagely wild (or at least once were).  Yet in one corner nearly touching on all of these places lies a land of comparative tranquility and an altogether different pace, as if almost a country unto itself.  Here has been set aside a land where heat and humidity have produced a feeling best described as high early afternoon, with plants designed not for blowing in eternal winds, being chilled by the Arctic grip, or surviving drought.  The plants here instead simply exist as if to simply thrive. 

There are two such worlds here, however.  One we could call backcountry, and the other lowcountry.  The backcountry retains something of a frontier feel to it, where the features of the north have not yet fully given way to those of the subtropical lands introduced here.  The horizon is often backed by rises in elevation if not mountains.  The people here were once nation-builders and resistance fighters such as the Cherokee and the Shawnee.  The people then counted among them such persons as Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, and those like them, men and women who needed room and cared more for solitude than agendas.  This is the land of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, James Taylor, and Bluegrass.  This is what some of her iconic backyard looks like:

From Congaree National Park, in the higher ground at the edge of the park.  I was going to put up a pure stand of Loblolly Pines, but there are a good mix of trees in the backcountry, so they had to be content with center stage instead.

The lowcountry still retains something of a gateway feeling in another direction, where the influence of the tropics starts to become more apparent.  The horizon is often backed by broad rivers and ocean. The people here were once also nation-builders but tended to be more on the side of diplomats when dealing with the newcomers, with the notable exception of the Seminoles.  They were the Creek, Chocktaw, Powhatans, and the aforementioned Seminoles.  The people who followed them were largely agrarian; some owned slaves, some just wanted a quiet existence lived on the production of the land, and they definitely cared about agendas and connections with the world beyond the seas. This is the land of Bobbie Gentry, Elvis Presley (to be fair Elvis transcends, but he was definitely a lowcountry boy), Mountain, and Delta Blues.  This is what some of her iconic backyard looks like:

From Congaree National Park again, but this time on the floodplain.  Congaree lies close to the place where the lands of the two Souths meet, or the "fall line" at the edge of the Piedmont.

Now, there are more divisions, of course.  There is a Deep South where palms and moss are a given, and there are the mountains, which don't really have the same feel as the rest of the South (nor did they wish to fight for the same side in the Civil War), and then there are sea islands, deltas, bayous, cove valleys, the Piedmont... a nice assortment of things that we can keep exploring in detail as the blog keeps on going.  In the meantime, for those who want to start to explore on their own, the backcountry can best be called something that starts in the Virginia Piedmont and wraps around the central Appalachians to the central Ohio River valley, wherein one first encounters on either side an increasing number of Southern Magnolias in cultivation.  The lowcountry extends at the edge of this down to the ocean and Gulf, to perhaps Southern Florida (which is its own animal) and well into Texas and across the bottom of the Ozarks, up back into the sloughs of Illinois and Indiana at their most southerly lands.  Here we can find baldcypress, the range of which best helps to define the area. 

12 Years A Slave In Review

\Last post I promised some palm trees, and I do not intend to disappoint, but I would also like to serve up a review of a film I saw last night, namely 12 Years a Slave.  It's an incredible film with art direction that puts director Steve McQueen into the same artistic pantheon as Rossellini or Bergman and is a much needed dose of reality in an age when popular images of the plantation era are given off as something of slapstick racism at best or a romantic confession at worst.  As we celebrate the victory over chattel slavery won at Vicksburg and Gettysburg this very year, we ought to be mindful that such fighting was far from merely over some sick, twisted defense of States' rights.  Yes, there were many underlying causes of friction between Union and Confederacy, but ultimately, to claim that slavery was not the source and summit of cause for a nation being torn apart is a fundamental disrespect to a very painful and sacred chapter in the history of humanity.  

And oh yes, there are palm trees, and an absolutely incredible look at the American Southern landscape, or at least the low country therein.  In following the kidnapping and enslavement of freedman Solomon Northrup, the film takes us from the upper Hudson Valley in New York down to Washington (past an incredible shot of a human being made into property, fittingly, under the shadow of the temple of the United States Congress.  From then on we get to see quite a bit of the Deep South in low country Louisiana, complete with palms of the Sabal genus, magnolias, baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana), and an absolute TON of Spanish Moss (Tillandsia Usneoides).  Now normally, this is among the most lovely setting of vegetation anywhere on this earth.  Everything is green, lush, luxuriant, and yet not overly confining so as to create an overbearing jungle.  

A street somewhere in Beaufort, SC.  While this is a semi-cultivated landscape (I noticed that among ordinary neighborhoods gardens and planting were allowed to flow without a lot of pruning), you can tell from the trees and shrubs that neither canopy nor sky reign supreme on their own.  We will revisit the general concept in a later post.  Everything just looks organic, flowing, and relaxed really, like much of the South.

Yet for the most part in the film, McQueen has set out to have the camera fix on a focus and lighting that makes the whole thing look sickly and tired.  Instead of incredible drapes of moss, we see trees festered in it along with baldcypresses, tupelos, and magnolias that are defoliated and gangly.  This compliments the plantations where Solomon, now re-named Platt (which can mean, for Louisiana especially, flat in French or alternatively an old word for silver in English), gets pushed around to.  With the exception of Mr. Ford's manse, we hardly see grand, polished estates.  The houses are dirty, the interiors are sparse, and even the masters of the manor are looking a bit disheveled.  There are stomping forced dances rather than graceful ballrooms full of lovely dames and debonair gentlemen.  The whole set up does little to implore the viewer to lament the tragic romance of a soon-to-perish Antebellum South.  Once Mr. Ford is removed from the scene, any semblance of that lovely imaginary world vanishes, house, people, landscape, and all.  

But we did see a little bit of that in this film, which McQueen uses to great effect to prove a point.  Solomon gets treated well, the landscape looks a bit more inviting (even while things are in a swamp along the Red River and we see little of cotton picking, cane gathering, or other typical agricultural ventures).  We see the slaves clearing a little land, constructing buildings, even encountering some of the First Born who were wandering the last vestiges of what they could find before Europeans totally changed their world.  The action is that of exploration, encountering a new, albeit uninvited world.  Things look more exotic than sedate New York or distressingly urban Washington, and definitely more relieved than stressful slave market New Orleans.  We see a decent plantation with a well-mannered Ford and a true-to-form, if insensitive, lady of the house.  Solomon's talents are appreciated, and he sets into survival mode while also thinking about escape.  Overall, it seems as if things could be a lot worse.  We see construction and creation.  Feeling complacent?  We are reminded very sharply that for all his generosity of spirit and apparent gentility, Ford is still a slave owner who treats people as property.  As such, we also see our first overseers and start hearing "Nigger" almost every other line.

The swamps then start looking less luxuriant and more nauseous, those broad-limbed oaks start looking more like little other than convenient lynching posts, and the moss and palmettos start reminding us that this place is hot, uncomfortable, and malarial.  Moving on to the next plantations, we see less of a settlement with slavery-made-possible ornamentation and more of a series of work farms meant to use humans purely for profit.  Notably, in the shabby houses and clothing of the owners, we see very few fruits of such overwhelming profit, as if to say that even could slavery be economically justifiable, it simply has not fit the bill even then.  Speculatively, this makes one question just how much wealth really got passed around at the expense of an entire race.  We see a lot of labor, poverty even in the middle man plantation owners, and the fancy scenes of Gone With the Wind left only in the hands of a select few at the very top.  There is possible political commentary on present economic conditions here, but more than likely, this truly is reaching (this is slavery, a bit more intense than a wage issue...  right?)  Instead we go for less speculation and more reality and see that even the master of the house does not put on his Sunday best every day when things are 95 and dripping.  The house might afford a little mess during the cultivation periods.  See how many different ways things are already being twisted? 

If anything, that is what is supremely brilliant about this film.  Yes, we do see a lot of brutality and a cold bucket of water thrown at us in the face of a disconnect of 150 passing years of fading memory.  More so, however, we also see attempted justification for the rape of not just an entire people, but all peoples.  We get to see peace feelers trying to pave the road for a defeat for humanity.  Even when we see Patsy constantly dragged into the mud and slashed open within an inch of her life, completely broken and crying in some of the most emotionally honest acting ever seen...  we try to rationalize.  We can't though.  The music alone keeps reminding us that we are faced with something first and final about the way things are between people.  In the end we see one human being turn another one into something less than animal.  In the end, we have hope.  The moss looks graceful again and whitewash covers blemishes and dirt.  A man's soul stares into our own through eyes that should cause anyone truly humble to melt onto the floor.  My readers, go see this film.  Take your older children, or any children, that will understand even the mere difference between right and wrong.  I dare say it will awaken in all a new spirit of seeking understanding and exploration into not just North American, but human history in general and sympathy, if not empathy, for the suffering.  Would that there were films of this caliber for the other darker places in our continental history.  

In the meantime, check around here more frequently for a bit more of a look at the better side of the South.  If you do see the film, this might give you an appreciation for how McQueen managed to strip the veneer off the image.  After all, as God created her, the low country is a truly amazing place. 

A Change Of Pace

Over a month ago I pledged a return to regular posting on American Voyages.  I wanted to share with my readers some thoughts on what direction the politics and culture of the continent were headed in, mostly spurred on by a flurry of political commentary from all fronts in the wake of the United States Federal government shutdown.  Then, now, and as I hopefully will remain true to form for, I was and am for keeping this blog free of too much current political commentary.  Why?  Democracy has enough angry voices out there already!  All joking aside, however, in general I try to view current events in light of a broader historical lens.  This is probably due to several factors, notably an academic background in the humanities.  Yes, a philosophy student can direct all possible energy to making bold statements about post-modernism or attempt to disprove everything that came before said student, but my own intellectual journey has found an exploration of the past, with an examination of the organic development of humanity, to be far more helpful in coming to thoughts about things in general. 

That's what I had been trying to accomplish in coming to a statement about where language and the political culture surrounding language have come to.  Why?  The why is simple.  People these days fight about everything from minimum wage to military spending (and yes, most of it revolves around money), but the thing that seems to get people, even people who could care less about all the other issues out there, very riled up.  I say this because time and again I see a mother in a grocery store talking to her kids in Spanish, or some men working together again talking in that apparently taboo language, and nearby listeners almost fly into a red hot rage over the issue!  "Speak English!"  "This is America!"  Then of course, the party in target usually apologizes, in English no less, and moves on, to no avail.  Heck, Spanish is nothing, you should see the reactions I get to when I mumble to myself about how expensive gas is, en Francais, here (or even worse, in some heavily Anglo-centric place in Ontario).  A personal mumble, barely audible to most people, is tantamount to treason for some people.

Needless to say, this tends to make me irate.  Now, while I have every intention of continuing a historical overview of the history of how we came to this place linguistically on this continent, I might as well come out and say it for all those who were wondering:  Half of this country was speaking Spanish before 1848 and a Mexican presence everywhere from California to Kansas evolved on this soil at about the same time an English-American one did (to say nothing of how many native tongues were around).  For that matter, most of the people who get mad at the "Spanish threat" are buying into an old cultural imperialism despite the fact that their ancestors were probably considered second class to anything even remotely resembling a northern European, if the standards consider even other Germanic languages to be on the same level as beloved English.  There.  I said it.  Now let me say this.  English is not going anywhere.  People around the world consider fluency in it to be desirable or at least profitable (believe it or not, especially in Latin America).  English really is an amazing language with an incredible literary history.  I say this as a person of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian heritage. 

So why put off the history posts?  They take a lot out of me.  I can rant on easily like I did tonight, but I want American Voyages to be a place of learning, not diatribe.  When I write these posts, I like them to be informed, and trust me, the next few posts in this series enter a period of remarkably complex history.  Here we will see French make a thrust to the Canadian shores of the Pacific, Spanish encounter the United States again now in the friendly territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and native tongues get diminished everywhere.  We get to see English change into so many regional variations in both countries, and we have a lot of fact checking to do.  Each and every post, if I try to do it well, takes a lot out of me. 

And let's face it, you all really come here just for the nature photography, right?  Well, maybe not.  It has been a while since I talked about the primary focus of this blog though: the land around us, and not just where the people have gone on it.  The statistics indicate that A.V. has been opened to a much broader reader base even on an hourly basis, probably thanks to social media advertising, but also thanks to botanical and historical organizations out there.  I need to get this thing hopping again, and the heavy posts are going to have to take a backseat until we can get things up and running.  I want to share our wonderful corner of the world, after all, with the world.  In particular I would like to thank The Hardy Palm International journal, based in Vancouver, of taking note not of my diatribes, but of my coverage of fun things like trees growing where they ought not.  Wait a minute, palms, that sounds wonderful, let's go there next.

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part Three, Canada Continued.

These days we tend to hear an annoying little voice calling out for Quebecois liberty.  This voice has shut up a bit ever since it might have come to its senses and realized that things could be much, much worse for the otherwise fine people of Quebec, which probably has something to do with the fact that a decent majority of her people feel that they are being treated well enough as part of a united Canada and all of them know that they have the right to not only speak French and exist as they otherwise wish throughout the nation.  More on this towards the end of the post, along with the other side, which it turns out is just as bitchy as the Francophones are over "my rights".  First, just how did we manage to get to this point, anyway?

Well, the Canada of the 1770's was a very uncertain place, full of French-speaking people expecting deportation/cultural annihilation.  French anything was certainly not in vogue back in London, to say nothing of how it was openly hated and feared in the rest of English-speaking North America.  Think about things from the American perspective, especially from the viewpoint of a backcountry Pennsylvanian or Virginian: the French were the enemy, sending those terrifying Indians to attack you for no other purpose than to either kill you outright or terrorize you into leaving your land to the beavers so they could just... profit.  That's right, they did not even want to settle down in your vacated clearing and cabin.  Maybe their allies would retake some of that property, but even they would be more than likely to return to ancient lifestyles rather than set up shop in your hard-earned dwelling.  1763 was supposed to have changed all that.  1763 was supposed to be the time where London could tell France to pack up and move on and let people freely expand into that desirable western frontier.  New colonies could even spring up along the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes, where they could connect economic opportunities with the distant Hudson's Bay Company. 

Why would the newly appointed authorities of New France, be it in Quebec or Louisiana, want anything else?

Well, for one, London wanted control.  Liberty was all well and good, but imagine how it looked from an office overlooking the Thames when confronted by the image of a set of colonies slowly growing into something far more expansive than merry old England.  If nothing else, imagine how the people in such offices viewed the revenue potential of such a vast enterprise.  Such income could easily pay for any war that these colonies would get into in the future, let alone what they had already cost the motherland in that war leading up to the victory of 1763.  Now, imagine that if the colonists got their every wish and could expand as far they wanted to across the continent.  Levying a tax on such a vast population would be difficult, and the freedom-minded people might even say no...  In fact, they already had been not even 10 years after that victory had been achieved.  More than this though, mother Britain knew that she could not indefinitely keep the winning streak she was on without a nation getting a bit overwhelmed by almost constant fighting.  She needed to keep large reserves of the American prize open as potential bargaining chips down the road.  After all, Canada was won only at the cost of turning down an even more profitable prize: Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean.  Canada was just an option, and not a trophy or a purpose, for London.

So for control, for an open hand to play, for so many things, Canada was not just given to the Americans in its entirety.  Provided that they give allegiance to a new crown, the French-Canadians could remain as they were, and this was, and has ever since been, because of the vision of one man:  Lord Guy Carleton.

Unknown artist, public domain, reference number C-002833 from the National Archives of Canada.

As I said, he is the savior of the entire concept of French-Canada, and next to George Etienne Cartier is probably the only reason that there are any French-speakers left on the continent.  He made the Quebec Act of 1774 possible, and he also saved our behinds from being taken over by the Americans during the invasion of Quebec that was one of the first strategic offensive moves of the American War for Independence and the first official take-over attempt by Americans to dominate Canada.  You would not figure Guy to be fond of anything foreign, however.

You see, Guy was Protestant, and he was Anglo-Irish, meaning that he was the product of centuries of an imperial attempt to impose English dominance over the island next door.  He was also a veteran of the Jacobite wars over in Scotland, yet another exercise in said imperialism.  By all accounts, nothing French or especially Catholic should have been in any way appealing to him to let live.  That said, we know little of his earlier conviction and personal beliefs regarding English cultural sentiments, but we do know that he was a social climber and cared very much about his military career.  Even if he was not interested in an imperialistic patriotism, he was very much interested in making the right moves.  To speak out on behalf of the conquered French-Canadians was a risky move that one would not expect of a career obsessed officer.  In the end, however, he did just that.  In the end, the Protestant Anglo-Irishman asked London to let the French-Canadians not only speak French and be Catholic, but even to judge themselves according to their own civil laws.  He also put his life on the line to defend Quebec from American attack.

Now the next part is very important.

But wait, you say, Americans of the period soon learned to love the French, especially after they would come to save the day at Yorktown and later even embrace a revolution of their own.  True, but also remember that prejudice built up over generations and hundreds of years is not something to be so easily reversed.  For anyone of British, and then by extension, American, heritage, things French were the rival at best and the enemy at worst.  When we get to language in the United States, we will also cover feelings about things Spanish, but rest assured that in Anglo-American history, both cultures were not exactly well-loved ever since the reign of Henry VIII, and yes, religion complicated matters further.  Why bring this up in a topic about language in Canada?  Well, the battleground on the topic has already existed there for much longer, and now to look at the results, we turn back to Canada.

One can pretty much be certain that loyalty was almost then guaranteed in this new Canada.  In 1775 and again in 1812, any notion of joining the crusade for freedom with the Americans was pretty much junked.  Why take chances with, at best, an unknown foreign government in the colonies, and at worst, a government that would echo the sentiments of her citizens and expunge anything French from the land?  Guy offered security and potential profit: whereas Paris once controlled the economic destiny of New France, she was now joined into a network of free-enterprise with an empire that spanned the globe.  If we consider the Quebec Act to be the political birth of Canada, then we would also have to say that the Quebecois of 1775 where positively thrilled to be Canadian, and in 1812, they pretty much confirmed that notion to curious Americans.  By 1867, when Canada came into an official existence more along the lines of what we know her to be today, French was alive and well in a Canada that had since come to also embrace English and manage to somehow not extinguish languages spoken by her native peoples.

As I have rambled on a bit in this post, we will continue down this track, which does get a bit bumpy, next post.