Ebenezer Creek

We come to Ebenezer Creek in Georgia in late afternoon and it is already too late and the weather too iffy to assemble Julia and set out. And by now we are hurrying home anyway, aren't we? Or at least we should hurry, rather than poke around some marvelous mud holes and expand our list of very good reasons why we should delay our return to a more predictable life.

I walk along the creek, a tightly twisting tributary of the Savannah River, and move from one fluted tree to another, from a golden patch of hard sand to a bonsai skyline of cypress knees. I also think about a December day in 1864 when the Union soldiers under Brigadier General Jefferson C. Davis crossed the swollen creek on a pontoon bridge and then cut it loose to prevented a large group of newly freed slaves from crossing as well. Caught between their unwilling defenders and the hostile Confederate cavalry riding on their heels, hundreds of ex-slaves, women, men and children, rushed into the icy creek, struggled, and drowned. 

Where did it happen? Maybe right here? Around this bend? This is a vast watery cemetery, now glided over by fishermen in noisy boats and tourists paddling candy-colored kayaks. A nearby family house with clapboard marked by green streaks of mold sports a Confederate flag. A red cardinal, a drop of blood in the thicket, vanishes and reappears. 

The night is coming and John and I drive away, toward tall cypress trees of South Carolina's Congaree National Park. It is now pouring thick dark rain which beats on our windshield. The road almost disappears and the trees flap madly in the wind. Glad we did not go and paddle. Happy to be dry.

But maybe we will come back next spring to this black creek, and pay our respects to the dead by floating really slowly, slowly and quietly? And then go on to the Okefenokee Swamp further west, the place that gave me my first bout of swamp love many years ago, and my first wild snake -- a large Indigo, in shades of midnight blue -- crawling up my warm body while I perched on a dry pine island.

©Yva Momatiuk