Water

I’ve been to the South before, when the kids were young. We had a trip to Disney World, a camping trip in South Carolina, and later I had a business trip to Orlando and other parts of Florida, plus a good deal of time spent in Charleston. Often I was driving, or flying in the dark or into less coastal areas.

When I took my ‘find-a-house-in-three-days’ trip to Jacksonville, this was the first time I’d had a daytime flight to a coastal area where I was looking at the landscape through the eyes of the soon-to-be resident.

There are rivulets, brooks, creeks, streams, and rivers, creating marshes, swamps, and deltas. There is little like it in the Great Lakes area. Now there are rivers and swamps in the north (we call them ‘wetlands’) and there are lakes in the south, but the coastal marsh-y swamp-y areas are unique in the south. They make the bayous and the Everglades. If you go to a lake up north there is often a clear delineation between land and water. Often the border is muddy, but it is far less clear in the coastal South, where you will have spongy wet areas for miles between solid ground and a definite body of water.

 

Lakes up north tend to be created by glacial action – they are distinct, carved by rock and ice, and scattered about in clumps.  Lakes in the South more frequently form in a low-lying area, like a marsh that has sunk. There are also many springs in the South, more than I recall knowing about up North.

Water defines both the Great Lakes Region and the Coastal South. But it has shaped life in very different ways. Living in the coastal areas often means dealing with brackish water (salt) whereas if one is lucky enough to be far enough north to be away from towns, one can often drink straight from the lake (yes, filters are advised). 

Water is one of the first differences I noticed about the land itself from North to South. There’s lots more to come.