Golden Sunshine

The end of February brought strange, warm weather to our woods. The rest of the country was swathed in snow, ice, extreme cold, power outages, frozen pipes, and worse. Our relatives in Dallas lost power for days, their goldfish froze, their pool was a solid block of ice. Meanwhile, in the shire, as my Wired colleagues call this place, it was sunny and 75.

We took advantage of the warm dry weather and hiked down to the creek, exploring the woods and river bottoms on the way. The creek isn’t huge, and its flow doesn’t seem to fluctuate much even with rain, but there are some knee deep pools here and there and the water is remarkably clear. The water is so clear that it acts like a magnifying glass for the pebbles and rocks slowly making their way to the sea. What caught my eye one sunny day was the amount of tiny gold sparkles in the water.

It turns out we’re in a geologically interesting area. Normally I am a birdwatcher, I leave the rocks and fossils to Corrinne. But it’s winter, which means bird life is largely limited to the mixed flocks of chickadees, titmice, and wrens that inhabit the southern Appalachian woodlands this time of year. There is a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker that’s been working on the large pecan tree that hangs over the bus for months now, and I saw a flash of yellow I couldn’t identify at the top of the same tree this morning, but the flood of migrants that really gets birdwatchers like me up in the morning hasn’t started yet.

So rocks. In streams. I need a hand lens. And a lot more knowledge about geology than I currently possess. But I do know we’re in a borderland, geologically speaking, which is always the place to be — edges are where everything gets interesting.

We’re between the Appalachian foothills, which you can see on a clear day if you get out of the forest, and what gets called the low country, the part of the state below the Fall Line, where the Piedmont foothills and Atlantic coastal plain meet. We’re technically in the upcountry, but at the very edge of it. We’re where everything washes down to, where the waters slow, meander, and the rocks start to collect.

This is a land of low, rolling hills with geologically complex things going on beneath the foot or so of red clay that’s so hostile to growing carrots. Under that clay layer there’s a mish-mash of schists that bubble up everything from quartz to amphibolite to, ahem, gold.

Alas, it’s tiny specks of gold. Also not our land. But, details.

I always tell the kids they can keep all they can pan, but they never take me up on it. They’re more interested in good-looking rocks with skipping potential.

Originally I didn’t think the shiny golden flecks I saw in the stream bed could be gold because where I grew up anything you thought, hoped, prayed might be gold was absolutely not gold, ever. But then if you grew up in the 1970s and 80s you inevitably watched too many westerns with too many lonely, sun-baked, half-crazed gold miners to ever totally abandon the notion that you too might find some gold one day. If you just kept looking.

One day I spent an hour or two on the SCDNR Geological Survey website and discovered that indeed, there is quite a bit of gold in them thar hills. Enough in fact that the flecks we find in the rocks of our tiny stream probably are gold.

I haven’t been back to the creek since I found out it might actually contain gold. The sunshine and warm weather didn’t last. Well, the warm temperatures did, but the clouds rolled back in and we’ve had a week of rainy, foggy, dreary days. The red clay has turned to red mud, making hiking difficult.

I’m ready for more sunshine. I’ve had to settle for warm rain, which I will take over cold rain, even if it is decidedly odd to have warm rain in the winter. There was a thunderstorm two nights ago. It’s not even March. Strange times in the shire. Maybe Spring will come a little early. Or maybe that’s just a February fantasy, like the gold in the creek.