Oh, blackwater

I swam with at least one eye open the summer I was 12, looking out for alligators. That was the year I spent most of the summer at the houses of my aunts, uncles and cousins in Conway, SC. They lived on high ground at the edge of a blackwater swamp between the Waccamaw and Little Pee Dee Rivers. (They thought it was high ground until a few years later when two or three “100-year” floods hit in a row. One aunt and uncle moved after the first flood, and the other raised their house high on stilts.)

On those summer nights, I’d heard the adults talk of seeing alligators sometimes, so I looked out for them. I saw turtles lined up on logs in the sunshine, and egrets and herons wading the pond’s edges. My nine cousins and two brothers and I swam most of those steamy July and August days, and one or two nights when the moon was out. I remember the dark water feeling thick somehow, and that you could sink below the warm water on top to a layer of very cool water below that we called “the deep.” But I don’t remember ever seeing an alligator that year. Other years, yes, so many times. But not during that first hot summer when I watched the water.

The image is of the Waccamaw, from a late afternoon day earlier this year when I was in Conway again. I stopped by the riverfront walkway to watch the glass-black surface again for a while.

- Sandy Lang, March 2010