Saturday, January 21st, 2023
Greenville, SC: Nature is healing
Greenville's claim to fame is the Reedy River, an unremarkable little ditch of a waterway except for the way it tumbles dramatically down a sixty-foot waterfall in the heart of downtown. This makes Greenville one of the very few urban areas of any size in the world to boast such a natural amenity in its central business district.
Greenville is also an industrial city, and while it's now a hub for international business, boasting companies from Germany, France, Korea, and Japan with operations in the area, the city used to be known as the textile capital of the world. It was famous for its cloth, and to make cloth you need textile mills. To color cloth you need dyeing operations, and to keep it white you need bleacheries. And so Greenville had them all, and all of them generated a terrifying amount of sludge... That they all dumped directly into the Reedy River. Now, down at the south end of town was the Conestee (KONN-uh-stee) Mill, which powered itself via a hydroelectric dam across the Reedy, which created Lake Conestee. Over the years sedimentation, including decades of industrial sludge, has built up behind that dam, and the lake itself has shrunk dramatically to a small lake and a series of wetlands that are today preserved in a nature park.
This was mainly because it would cost many tens of millions of dollars to try to clean up the sludge. The better plan, it was decided, was to leave the sludge and shrinking lake alone, preserve it in a natural state, and let nature heal itself. There's good news and bad news in that approach. The good news is that nature is indeed healing itself. The wetlands at Lake Conestee Nature Preserve are home to a bevy of wildlife including migratory birds, beavers, deer, songbirds, and insects. The latter is not especially impressive though, as the rest of the city is also home to roaches big enough to star in a 1960's B-movie, and clouds of mosquitoes that are individually big enough enough to menace commercial aviation, to say nothing of when they get in a swarm. Also, on a personal note, my yard has a terrible problem with an invasive species of worm that produces a neurotoxic slime and are therefore dangerous to handle.
At any rate though, yes. Nature is healing. On the other hand, the sludge behind the dam at Lake Conestee is extremely toxic, full of heavy metals and carcinogens. If the dam ever fails it will pollute the river all the way to Lake Greenwood, two counties away, and will threaten the water supply for the city of Greenwood. Some analyses have said that a failure of the dam at Lake Conestee would be the worst environmental disaster in Upstate South Carolina since the Colonial Pipeline spilled more than a million gallons of diesel fuel into the Reedy River in 1996. And when it comes to the failure of the Conestee dam, it's worth noting that it was built in 1892 and was designed to last about fifty years. It is now over 130 years old.
It's probably nothing. Forget I brought it up. In the meantime, Lake Conestee Nature Preserve is a wonderful place to get back to nature.
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One thing I can't get over is that while Greenville is less than fifty miles away from where I lived in Asheville, that thousand-foot drop in elevation still means that things you could never grow outside there will grow here. Another thing is that even though Greenville gets hotter than Asheville, it still gets cold. Sometimes very cold, such as when nighttime temperatures dropped to 7F this past Christmas. Nevertheless, palmettos, and some palms, grow in Greenville. By the time it's ungodly hot again, in June, these trees will be good as new.
Remember, it's not a parody of sopas ej's thread. It's an homage. He lives in a glamorous alpha world city and eats at glamorous alpha world city restaurants. I live in an up-and-coming Southern boomtown with just enough international diversity to ensure you hear at least three different languages any time you're out in public, and which markets itself as a smaller version of Atlanta and Charlotte, without the insane traffic. As such, I eat at Subway.
(Beaver)
dam it, dam it, dam it!
And again,
dam it, dam it, dam it!
This? That's mistletoe. It was growing in a tree in the parking lot at Conestee Park, which adjoins the nature preserve.