10 Miles Down Highway 38
A lifetime of trips and the trip of a lifetime into one of Earth's last great places.
Mark Roberts was married to my cousin Christy, who was really like an aunt, or older sister, or mother to me. Hard to say. I think technically she is my second cousin, once removed. Her father and my mother are first cousins. You do the math. Mark and Christy welcomed me into their home when I arrived in Annapolis, as my sponsor parents who would let me sleep on their couch or go to the movies to watch The Lorax with their kids. Although I knew them - having seen them at family events from time to time - they weren’t a staple in my life. In fact, I knew Christy’s parents far better and even still Christy was a bit closer to my mother’s age than my own, despite us being the same generation. She and Mark were unbelievably generous to me during my time in Annapolis and I’ve gone on record saying I would not have made it without them. Christy, probably without knowing it, filled a void left behind by my aunt Kathy who had passed away years earlier. Everything that I’ve accomplished in my life, I owe to my experience at the Naval Academy and that experience could not have been earned without their support. I owe them an impossible debt.
We had Mark’s memorial service a couple of weeks ago on the farm. People came from all over and we all had a great time swapping stories and reflecting on Mark’s impact. It didn’t really occur to me the impact he’d had on my life, until I was probably 25 or so. I wish I had been able to recognize it when I was 20, so I could’ve properly thanked him, but that’s one of the curses of youth I suppose. Nonetheless, I was adamant about Mark providing me with a safe haven to escape the stresses of the academy and providing an example of husbandry and fatherhood that I could strive to follow. I’ve always wanted for fatherly figures and male influence and being welcomed into his home gave me some of each. I will miss him dearly. Not every day. But when I see a Virginia Tech score tick across the bottom of my screen, or a boat on its way out for a fishing trip, or a vapor trail cutting across the sky. I don’t know how I could not. So, in that sense, he’ll always find a way to show up.
On the ride home from the farm, it struck me that, among all the many trips that were familiar parts of my life, that this one may be the most regular - the most seared into my memory. 10 miles down Highway 38 from Latta to Marion. Then, I could not help but let my mind wander and ponder the renditions of that trip still to come, for the rest of my life.
I grew up in Marion, South Carolina. The county seat. The ancestral liege to the vassals of Florence and Dillon. My mother grew up in Latta, just a stone’s throw away. She spent the first few years of her life on the farm, before her father died and her mother moved them to town, where she ran the books at DilMar oil company and managed the tobacco farming from a distance. Our family traces its roots in that place, called Gum Swamp, back to 1737, when Stephen Berry first went up the Pee Dee and staked a claim. They’ve been there, in one way or another, ever since.
In reality, there’s about 11 miles from the front door of my childhood home to the farm, but by the time you get out of Marion and onto SC38, it’s a shade under 10.
10 miles that I’ve crossed thousands of times and will cross thousands more. Parcels of the original land have been split up countless times through the centuries and will be, presumably, for the rest of time.
Gum Swamp itself sits on the northern side of the Pee Dee, fed by several tributary creeks and swamps and eventually working its way to the river. The prehistoric river would’ve had a large bend up closer to today’s swamp. You can really see where the bend would’ve been, as it has left behind bottomlands, swampy and filled with mist, that are resistant to the machinations of men and leaves them to scratch out a living only on what would’ve been river banks some thousands or millions of years ago. With time, the river has straightened out and left behind our beloved muddy bottoms.
“Crossroads” Henry Berry, for whom the above crossroads is named, was the family’s high tide, I suppose. He amassed some 20,000 acres and somehow came through the 1850s and 1860s relatively unscathed. His family cemetery, which lies off of Gum Swamp road beside a spring fed tributary flowing towards Gum Swamp (as all things in life seem to do). The story goes, as echoed by family members and this retelling in the Florence Morning News, that Henry was tasked with relocating a few of his deceased relatives when he was a young man. Upon reaching their remains, he was so struck by what he saw, that he resolved to be burned upon his death. He was the first person to so be cremated in then (1876) Marion county and one of the first in the whole state. After allowing his ashes to be cast to the corners of the Earth, he instructed that an obelisk marker be placed in his favorite cotton field, where countless passes with the plow were made around it out of respect for his wishes. Eventually, when the land was sold out of the family, his marker was moved to present day Union cemetery, where his descendants have been entombed since his abandonment of the old cemetery. But this didn’t happen until the 1960s. So men had taken flight and almost reached the moon, and still Henry remained resolute in his field, scowling at the advancements of farm machinery that groveled around him.
Ironically enough, my mother recently instructed me to move some of the headstones from the old cemetery to the new one, in an endeavor that struck me as oddly reminiscent of Crossroads Henry’s instruction from two centuries prior. What’s old is new, etc.
In what I would describe as another family tradition, Crossroads Henry’s granddaughter, my great grandmother, Leila Berry, was appointed the caretaker of the new cemetery and ever since, one of her female descendants has been tasked with the same. Currently, my mother and perhaps one day, a daughter of mine. Either in part, or in whole, I will one day assume a post there as well, to be tended and wondered over by the generations that follow.
My oldest memory of the place is when I was maybe 4, and had just learned to read. All the tombstones say “George” and, for a kid, that was pretty spooky. Since then, I’ve been back more times than I can count and will continue to do so. Each time, making the trip back to Marion in somber reflection, with the feeling that I’ve been there before, knowing that I’ll be back again.
Gum Swamp is a special place to me, in large part because of its significance to my family’s history. Granted, there is nothing intrinsically valuable about it. There are decent timber lands and decent farming. Better than decent people. (In fact, when I moved to Columbia and met a neighbor, an older woman maybe in her 70s, she learned I was from Marion and my family from Latta and told me she didn’t need to know anymore to know that I came from good people.) But nothing sets it apart from any other coastal hardwood bottoms lying on the shoulder of other rivers. Historically, of course, it played host to struggles between Federal and Confederate riverine forces. Before that, our beloved Swamp Fox may have traversed the bottoms in pursuit of his prey. Long before that, it would’ve been home to countless conflicts between various tribes, the evidence of which often turns up on the farm after a good rain during planting season.
But there’s just something about a place being home. Even now, sitting at my desk, I can smell the earth. I know what it tastes like. I can feel the uniquely oppressive heat and humidity that exists only in the deepest reaches of the swamp in July. In those depths, I’ve seen whitetail bucks run effortlessly through knee-high water and a tangle of hardwoods and moss. I’ve seen bobcats stalk silently across a floor of leaf litter without cracking a single one. I’ve seen alligators lazily cruise across ponds and clouds of mosquitoes so thick you’d think the sun was setting. It is a place where turkeys dance in upland clearings and otters play in the lowland creeks. In those depths, there are oak trees with bases too large to describe, who must certainly be older than time itself.
The call to home isn’t an experience uniquely mine. My mother ventured off and has been all over the world doing jobs and collecting stories that most would not believe. My aunt, even more so. In fact, when Kathy was working at the Pentagon and received her promotion to Major General, a newspaper was doing a story on her and - I can’t remember if it was the NY Times or Washington Post - did a quick fluff bio piece on her, since she was the highest ranking woman in the military at the time. In their interview, they asked her favorite restaurant, no doubt expecting some DC bistro or the like. Instead, her answer was Shuler’s Barbecue off Highway 38 outside of Latta, SC. When she retired, she moved home. My mother’s cousin, Christy’s father Percy and his wife Millie made a similar decision. After living in the Bay Area of California for years, where Christy and her brother Greg grew up, Percy and Millie made their way back to the farm (with a pit stop in Conway), where they live still. There are albums full of family photographs of men and women all over, who all made their way back to the farm. My grandfather fought his way across the Pacific only to come back to Gum Swamp. His father attended Clemson, only to do the same. His wife, the aforementioned Leila, made a grand western tour, seeing sights from the Garden of the Gods to Yellowstone on horseback, only to come home to Elberry Road. Countless sons of the Confederacy and the American Revolution marched away from those bottoms only to return home. Something in the water.
It was not until 2020 that I began to appreciate just how deeply we were dug in. At an 80th birthday party for Percy - who had eclipsed the record for oldest George male some decade prior - there was a memorable quote. For some context, the party was held at Abingdon Manor, a 5-star bed and breakfast in Latta, of all places. Despite my highest ideas of myself, I have never made it for a dinner. I digress. So, this was a big to-do and people had come in from all over. As the evening wound down, someone prompted a few words from the man of the hour. Percy, quick with his wit, exclaimed “It has been a long way from the muddy bottoms of Gum Swamp to the front steps of Abingdon Manor, but here we are.”
The irony, of course, is that there are fewer than 4 miles from Berry’s Crossroads to the center of town, yet it took Percy, and the whole George clan on his coattails, 80 years and however many detours around the globe to accomplish the feat.
Before arriving at Abingdon manor, they stood against the British and the Yankees, they deployed to the Mexican border, and they landed in Japan to end WWII. They stopped in the Red Square in Winter, had drunken escapades with Breshnev in Vienna, made it into the Imperial Palace at Tokyo, took part in the destruction of the wall in Berlin, had lunch with the Panamanian President, and rejected phone calls from the White House to Dorothy Jean’s house in Latta. The George family had lived, if nothing else. Somehow, the call to Gum Swamp stuck to them as if the mud itself was manifest in their mind.
Of all the hours spent in Gum Swamp, I would wager that about 95% of them I’ve spent alone, with my thoughts. I am not an overly religious person, though I try my best to be good. But there, on a cold November morning, watching the sun rise over the misty pools and sprinkle its light through the canopies of sweet gums, water oaks, and cypress, it is hard to not feel part of something greater than yourself. That’s what Gum Swamp means to me.
It is where I learned to work, where I learned the land ethic, long before I’d ever heard of Aldo Leopold. It is a place that I will pilgrimage to every few weeks or so, so that I can bathe in whatever it is that the air holds there that fills my soul. One day, I’ll teach my children the values I learned there, and theirs after them. They may never farm for a living, but they’ll learn how. They’ll know the smell and taste of the earth in Gum Swamp and they’ll learn what the silence of its woods can tell them. They may spend days searching for an elusive buck with bone-white antlers or listen to hounds baying, hot on the trail of old Mr. Ringtail. Presumably, as children playing in the woods, they’ll mistake a bug sound for a rattlesnake, until they hear the real thing and all doubt is removed. They’ll undoubtedly find that sleeping on the couch in the old sharecropper’s house off Elberry Road, with rain pattering on the tin roof above, is one of the best naps they’ll ever have, as if the toils of so many tobacco farmers before them took them off to a dreamless slumber. In time, they will appreciate it and understand that they can be one with the land and it will take care of them. I hope so. It is truly one of Earth’s great places.
I know that one day, hopefully many years from now, I’ll unknowingly take my last trip into the depths of the swamp. Maybe I’ll find a rub made by a buck too wily for me to hunt for the last time or a possum will do his best acting job for me, not knowing that it’s the last one for which I will be an audience. The land will continue and, when I’m too old to participate, I’ll just watch and remember. I’ll tell tall tales and give bad advice, as if the years somehow magically made me wiser. I’m sure, as with things I’ve experienced so far in life, time will bring new perspectives and different kinds of beauty I have not yet recognized. I hope so. That would certainly be something to look forward to.
Regardless, one day I’ll find myself in Union Cemetery off of Gum Swamp road, just a couple of hundred yards from where Crossroads Henry spent his life and a couple hundred in the other direction from where his forebears lay. About a mile from where my mother spent the first years of her life and within shouting distance of all the Georges and Berrys that came before her. With time, I’ll become part of that dirt I keep talking about.
When that day comes, some folks will gather around and say some words. They’ll sing Old Rugged Cross or the Navy Hymn. Maybe they’ll swap stories and laugh about all the lies I told them. Some from out of town will make fun of the accents around them - the same that coats my tongue, though the years away have worn it down. Hopefully at least one or two understand the significance of the place they’re in and its place in my heart. Then, just maybe, one of them will turn off of Gum Swamp road onto Highway 38, make those 10 miles back to Marion, and get the feeling they’ve been there before.
Anybody interested in learning more about this remarkable place, or anybody who would be up to seeing the wonders in its depths, please don’t hesitate to ask. It would be an honor.
Exceptional.