The cabin where I spent my retreat is in French Camp, MS, which is along the Natchez Trace Parkway. If you aren't familiar with the trace, it roughly follows the route of the Old Natchez Trace which was developed under Thomas Jefferson and connects Nashville, TN with Natchez, MS, a distance of 444 miles. It's a beautiful, quiet, well-maintained road with hardly any traffic, and it's a great place to drive for a while--if you aren't in any hurry. There are several places along the way where you can stop and walk part of the original trace, or take nature walks. My favorite of these is this cedar swamp.
This is the bridge that takes you into the swamp. I'm not sure that any camera, especially not the one on my phone, could capture the atmosphere of this swamp. For one thing it is very green. The water is a kind of lucent green and the air shimmers with greenness. It's almost like being under an emerald sea. As you can see, this doesn't show up in the pictures at all. Also, it is as still as can be. Except for a few snowy days at my home in the middle of nowhere, I've never experienced such silence. No one else was there that day. It was lovely.
I love cypress knees. This bunch makes me think of a tribe of Native Americans on a journey.
Nothing much to say about this one. It's just beautiful.
This little group of cypress knees looked like a nativity scene.
After a while, I came to a sign--why didn't I take a picture--which told about the alligators in the swamp. They mostly just float around and are small and only eat a few fish a week, but we ought not to feed them because they might get aggressive. This made me a bit nervous because I know for sure that some jerk has been down there feeding them, and I don't know how aggressive they may have become to date. So, I saw this in the distance. For some reason, it looked a lot more like an alligator than you can tell in the picture.
Then there was this sign.
Bobcat. Really. After they tell you that, they bar the way out, but I managed to sneak through.
Then the little gathering of peoples came to tell me good-bye.
AMDG
If you click on the pictures, you can see them enlarged.
Very nice pictures, and I'm sure the real thing is really something.
ReplyDeleteI looked at all the pictures when they came up with the first one, so I saw them before I saw your comments on them. It's interesting that you have personalized-anthropomorphic takes on several of them. None of that occurred to me at all.
I noticed that in the bigger pictures they look less anthropomorphic even to me. In person, it was more pronounced, but it might have been the haunted atmosphere of the swamp. I do tend to see things like that though.
ReplyDeleteAMDG
Lovely pictures.
ReplyDeleteThanks.
ReplyDeleteAMDG