Paddling downstream on the Luxapallila about halfway between Gunshoot Road in Steens and Highway 12, you come to a cypress slough stretching back to the north in the direction of Jemison Mill Road.
Unlike the rushing river, the water of the slough is dark, placid and vaguely mysterious. The cypress trees are far enough apart — at least some of them are — to allow a kayak. The intruding paddler is apt to startle the inhabitants of the slough, who, in their haste to flee, startle the paddler.
Our early morning run seemed to be ending too soon, so my paddling buddy, Ross, and I entered the slough and began to explore its perimeter. Thanks to recent rains, new tributaries trickled out of the surrounding forest.
I turned into a stream not much wider than my kayak and was soon enveloped in fragrant green. Blooms from a mimosa leaning over the stream floated on the water. Ahead was a waist-high beaver dam. The acre or two pool created by the dam was covered with water lilies, their yellow flowers on the verge of blooming.
I got out of my boat and approached the dam; for some reason, the phrase, “Walk to Paradise Garden” popped into my head.
Though it’s the title of a W. Eugene Smith photograph, it seemed to describe the setting.
You may not recognize it by name, but you probably know the photograph, a picture of two small children, taken from behind, holding hands and walking together out of a dark forest into the light. Smith’s picture is emblematic of that time, the immediate aftermath of the Allies victory over the existential threat of the Nazis and Japan.
On this, the eve of Memorial Day, conditions surrounding the making of that photograph give it added relevance.
Smith was the photojournalist who created iconic photo essays for Life magazine on subjects as diverse as Albert Schweitzer to a nurse midwife in South Carolina to life in a Spanish village. He was also a war photographer, who covered action in the Pacific during World War II.
Smith was severely wounded while covering his 13th Pacific invasion during World War II. In 1946, when he made the photograph, he had been convalescing for two years, undergoing multiple surgeries and grappling with an emotional crisis rooted in the horrors he had witnessed at Iwo Jima, Saipan and Okinawa. He wondered if he would ever photograph again.
Here’s Smith’s account of the making of “Walk to Paradise Garden”:
While I followed my children into the undergrowth and the group of taller trees — how they were delighted at every little discovery! — and observed them, I suddenly realized that at this moment, in spite of everything, in spite of all the wars and all I had gone through that day, I wanted to sing a sonnet to life and to the courage to go on living it. …
We portaged the kayaks over the dam and paddled the beaver pond, which, as it happens, was full of submerged stumps and fallen trees. Near the dam, crouched under a bush, a large beaver watched our coming and going, probably anxious to begin work on a leaking dam.
Later, back in town, as we were unloading Ross’ kayak, William “Ham” Roberts pulled up beside the trailer and stopped. William, a charter member of the Tombigbee Stump Jumpers, was legendary for his daredevil antics on water skis. In those days — decades before the Waterway — the Tombigbee was hardly more than an oversized creek harboring all manner of underwater hazards. William’s river exploits were fitting preparation for — if one can prepare for such — his two tours of duty as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
“I wanted to put oars and a rowing shell seat on one of those, and make it into a row boat,” William said from the window of his Jeep. Ever the river rat, William now cruises the Waterway in a pontoon boat with family and friends spying on wildlife.
“You made an old man envious,” he said later.
About his time in Vietnam, William says he stays in touch with several friends he served with.
“I think a lot about my roommate that didn’t come back,” he said.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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