October 10, 2022

On a nice day, Conastee Nature Preserve is a pretty place. It consists of 640 acres of parkland in Mauldin, S.C., honeycombed with trails, including a murky 130-acre lake. Who has heard of it outside the county? Not many, most likely. Who has heard of Mauldin? People who live there or once lived there.

The Preserve is run by a non-profit foundation. Admission is free but donations are welcomed. The park’s website notes that Conastee Lake has been rescued, more or less, from years of dumping of toxic chemicals by industries in nearby Greenville. The Reedy River, which is more of a sandy, shallow stream, carried the pollutants to the Conastee area, hence the name “Co-Nasty.” The website reports that “the pollution rests inert beneath the scenic woods and waters.” But no swimming or wading in the lake or the river.

Hundreds of miles north, the Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge lies along the Potomac River in Woodbridge, Va., at the end of Dawson Beach Road, which runs through the industrial end of town from the commuter rail station. It’s part of a larger system, the Potomac River National Wildlife Refuge Complex, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Like Conastee, the Occoquan park offers trails, mostly unpaved roads through low-lying wetlands. The trails wind for a couple of miles to the river shore.

The site once was the home of Native Americans who in the 17th century were driven away by white farmers. The farmers transformed the forest into fields and pastures. In 1950 the Army set up a radio transmitting station at the site, which then shifted to electromagnetic pulse testing, requiring cutting down more trees. In 1994 the Army shut the facility down. Local people then pushed for creation of a wildlife refuge.

The Potomac is close to a half-mile wide where it touches the Refuge. The narrow beach is cluttered with logs, tires, discarded lumber, broken bottles, and other trash half-sunk in thick mud. Like the Reedy, the Potomac carries the stigma of past pollution.

Neither Conastee nor Occoquan Bay offer eye-catching scenery, no majestic, snow-capped peaks, breathtaking canyons, or thundering waterfalls. Yellowstone or Yosemite they’re not. Mainly they’re patches of woods left untouched by the onslaught of suburbia in communities near large cities. You don’t see much wildlife in either, a few squirrels, a few birds. On one visit to the Refuge I thought I saw—someone pointed out—what looked like an eagle’s nest in a far-off tree. But no eagles.

Apart from its tainted past, Conastee is a pleasant spot to wander on an autumn afternoon. Couples, moms with strollers, dogwalkers, and joggers frequent the place. The woodsy trails are tame and level, manicured for the casual walker, not the mountain hiker. On certain stretches the whine of traffic rises from nearby busy streets. Still, you can look over the bridge or across the marsh near the lake and see turtles perched on logs sunning themselves.

The Occoquan Refuge doesn’t have the woodland trails nor the human traffic. Whenever I went it was nearly deserted. In the years we lived nearby I always had the impression the Fish and Wildlife Service added the patch of shore in 1998 because it had not been exploited by the auto repair garages, machine shops, recycling sites, and other industrial businesses that stretch from U.S. 1 along Dawson Beach Road. And yes, people have spotted birds in the area.

As a kid I spent many hours exploring a long stretch of woods behind the Bergen County, N. J., subdivision where my family lived. New Jersey is another place better known, although unfairly, for pollution, than natural beauty. Anyway, those woods were much the same as Conastee and Occoquan, a patch of untouched land, nothing special or unique. At some point local officials decreed those woods off-limits to building, protecting them from the stampede by developers to throw up giant new homes and subdivisions. 

Both Conastee and Occoquan are more of the same, accidental parks. My last visit to the Occoquan Refuge was just before we moved away. I trudged the dirt roads, feeling the after-effects of radiation and chemotherapy. The sun shone, the road wound past the woods and marshland, back from the cluttered beach and out through the humming industry of the suburbs. I thought: The Fish and Wildlife people did well to save this spot from more metalworking, more car repair, more retail. But yet it seemed to be a stark, unbeautiful, not quite successful stab at nature at its purest.

Conastee, with its big “Lake Conastee” marquee, the detailed trail directions, the kids’ playground, shows the local, single-minded focus on turning a polluted lake into a park. The trail network is a maze of interlocking paths around and the lake and across the sandbar-clogged Reedy. The underbrush is swampy and lush, hinting at nearness to the Carolina Low Country.

The forest, even with no mountains or waterfalls, may—just may—summon great thoughts, as they have for special people whose lives resonate from different worlds. St. Francis of Assisi lived the life of a penitent and beggar and found God in the natural world. Henry David Thoreau, in his two years at Walden Pond, worked out his idiosyncratic philosophy of a simple life, distrust of government, and respect for nature. Thoreau, both admired and dismissed as a cranky eccentric, stood fast in his abolitionist convictions, which would not go well in 1861 in South Carolina.

Walking these woods and others like them doesn’t immediately lift the spirit. But when we do we may find ourselves starting a search for something higher, for the object of our faith if we have faith, or maybe just a moment of precious calm. An hour or two out on these humble trails puts distance, physical and even spiritual, between our lives and whatever darkness afflicts us. Nearness to the natural world, which is God’s domain, draws us to closer to goodness. The forest may not transform your soul or make your heart sing. But then, it may.