At Georgia’s ragged edge stands a causeway made of earth piled by hand atop bricks and tires, long grown over with grass and sandspur and sea oxeye. It is a tenuous ribbon of stability cutting through mud and salt and spartina, connecting land and river in a place that is neither, perpetually a tidal shift away from becoming more of one or the other. Looking down its sandy length, I imagine all the footprints laid upon it slowly becoming manifest, one hundred years of emerging soles and toes. There are mine, of course—once tiny and tentative, then confident and bold, now hindered by age and injury. But far more of them belong to people who have meant the most to me, and who made the most of me. In this place, save for mine, they belong entirely to women who wore a path through the outdoors I’ve been trying to follow for fifty years.
Laura Powers Campbell was a waterwoman, living by moon phase and season as much as clock or calendar. She was my great-great-great-aunt by marriage, a connection that seems too remote for a woman whose cackling laugh I still hear decades after cancer silenced it. But family has always been a mutable concept in the South, where questions of provenance are easily lost amid love and dedication. I never thought of her as anything but permanent, as much a part of the ecology of the coast as gray-black mud and oyster shells, and I do not consider it naivete that I assumed I would always be able to run into her tanned and sun-spotted arms to be pronounced her “precious angel in this world.” Ordinary mortality gave the lie to the main of my belief, but because she said it, I still
