THIS LAND
Each week I drive the back roads between my home in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, where I currently teach, byways I have known for as long as I’ve been alive. The plots of trees along them served as landmarks for eight-year-old me, strapped into the back of my parents’ gray Mitsubishi Galant with my little brother, Nicholas, headed for my father’s family farm in Silverstreet. We would skirt the edges of Francis Marion and Sumter National Forests. When we passed the big two-story white house with columns, it meant we’d reached Belfast Wildlife Management Area, about halfway to Grandma’s house. The biggest trees I’d ever seen towered along the Saluda River where we would make a left to reach the Graham land.
Much of that journey passed swaths of contiguous forests of pines and old-growth hardwoods, public and otherwise. Now the scenery teems with gaps, open air where
