As I noted in 7 Quick Takes…and have probably noted elsewhere, either passive-aggressively or outright grumpily, because of the 16-year old’s work schedule, this summer won’t have quite the travel theme as previous years…
But that’s fine. He needs to work and I’m already stupidly amazed at the difference in my bank account between now and last summer.
But just because three-week long trips are impossible this year, that doesn’t mean we’ll stay put. So this weekend…
Saturday was taken up with things around the house, then the earliest Vigil Mass to be found in town, since son had to work from 5:30-10:15 Saturday night and 9:30-6 on Sunday. The alternative would have been a 7 am Sunday Mass…and no one was really in favor of that, so a 4pm Mass it was, followed by dropping one off at work and then the other off at the movies and…what the house to myself for a couple of hours? Gee, when this school year ended, I didn’t think that was going to happen again until 2021 or thereabouts….
On Sunday, after dropping Working Man off (we only have one car at the moment – I have no plans to get another one until closer to the beginning of school), the 12-year old and I headed south and west a little to the Cahaba River National Wildlife Refuge.
We’d been there a couple of years ago, but didn’t return last summer, and so here we were.
The location is noted for the blooming of Cahaba Lilies:
The lily requires a very specialized habitat—swift-flowing water over rocks and lots of sun—and thus is restricted to shoal areas at or above the fall line. In Alabama, the Cahaba lily is restricted to the Black Warrior, Cahaba, Coosa, Tallapoosa, and Chattahoochee river systems. Plant bulbs and seeds spend the winter buried in the rocky riverbed. There the water’s current securely wedges the seeds and bulbs into the rock crevices. Leaves begin to emerge above the water line in mid-April, following the spring floods (dates are approximately two weeks later in eastern Georgia and South Carolina). Flower stalks develop after the leaves are fully emerged, with each stalk capped by six to nine buds surrounded by protective casings called bracts. Flowering commences in mid-May, reaching its peak in late May and early June, with sporadic flowering until late June.
There were still some in bloom (I didn’t get any closeups), although they are clearly at the end of the season.
The water was cold, but it was not crowded, and a little over an hour was enough for a beginning of the season sort-of-wild-swim.
I was a little nervous because the last time we were there, M had spotted a water moccasin in a rock crevice…but none this time made themselves seen.
But this fellow did:
It was sort of amazing. We were driving down the gravel road that led to the river, when M said, “Wait…is that an owl?” When he spotted it, it wasn’t as obvious as in this photo – it was lower, and on a log across some water, in the midst of forest. I really don’t know how he saw it, but he did, and since there were no other cars coming or going, we just sat there for a few minutes, watching him – and him watching us, which he clearly was, flying up to a higher branch to get a closer look, and never taking his very large eyes of us. I had the window open, but something told me I might want to close it – he was that intent on us.
Just a couple of miles down the road, after the river, we stopped at this park – the West Blocton Coke Ovens Historic Park. It’s just what it says.
“Blocton” was so named because of a huge block of coal found at some point in the 19th century. The area – all of this part of Alabama, really – had, for a time, a large coal industry, even after the Yankees came through. All of this industry (including in Birmingham, of course) produced the foundation of many of the ethnic communities in this area – the Jewish, Greek, Eastern European and Italian roots of Birmingham are as deep as any other and go right back to the beginnings of commerce and industry here.
So, as one of the historic markers I read along the way said, at some point there was a synagogue in this small town, on the street that is now lined with empty storefronts – and there’s an Italian Catholic cemetery in the area. I didn’t have time on Sunday to look for it, but I will definitely be back at some point this summer for the search for it and for the sign that marks the location of the synagogue.
(Rabbit hole warning – here’s an article from the Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities about the West Blocton Jewish community…with a connection to famed Yankees announcer Mel Allen…)
The coke ovens park was simple and well done – the walkway runs in between two now overgrown ovens (go to the webpage to see what they would originally have looked like), where train tracks would have been. Ruins of any sort are always so intriguing to me – ruins of 5th century Rome or 19th century American industry. They are a continual reminder to me not to get too attached to my own endeavors…
After that, we stopped at a roadside barbecue place – it was decent, although way to saucy for me. I generally like my pulled pork dry and let me sauce it up myself as I see fit, thanks!
Today, the Working Man had a day off, so after a decent sleep, we headed north this time, to Hurricane Creek Park. M and I had tried to go there a year ago or so, I think, but at the time it was only open weekends, which I didn’t know at the time. It’s now open every day.
It’s pretty interesting – north of Cullman, here’s the history:
In 1961, Buddy Rogers purchased 120 acres of land in Cullman County and got to work making a dream come true. Buddy was a decorated fighter pilot in World War II who spent time after the war studying aerial photography near Denver. There, he spotted and then fell in love with a place called Seven Falls. After returning to his home in Alabama he joined the Air National Guard and it was when he was doing some aerial photography for them that he spotted an area that reminded him of his beloved Seven Falls. He went back later on foot to explore and found another natural area to fall in love with. Just off what was then the new Highway 31, a narrow gorge dropped 500 feet through massive rock walls, cut by a clear little creek that reached its widest point at the very bottom. All around were the rock walls of the gorge, only slightly obscured by virgin hardwood forest, pine trees, and wildflowers. He decided right then and there that he would make it his life’s work to create a park out of the land.
And he did – even constructing a cable car system, I presume, to get to the creek at the bottom.
The park is now owned by the county, and only minimally maintained, although whatever happens seems to get the job done. I wish I’d read that blog post cited before we went, so we could have looked for the remnants of the cable car – more ruins!
But that’s okay – we’ll be back. It was a gorgeous, gorgeous spot – one of the more beautiful and easily accessible spots in an hour radius of Birmingham.
The rest of the week? Busy stuff. All those kinds of appointments that you put off during the school year that then get piled up either right after school ends or right before it begins again in August because you have all summer to take care of it, you know. And then a trip to Atlanta for…argh…the National History Bee….and..I can’t even with that, it’s so ridiculous.
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Charlotte was Both 