Vibrant Village ™

How easy to take for granted wonderful things when we live with them day after day.

I speak of the marsh just outside my door. When I came into possession of a small spit of land bumping out into the Newport River, I also became an owner of a fringe of Spartina marsh, roughly one hundred yards wide and thousands of feet long.

My intention was to build a home on the land and just watch the marsh. In North Carolina, and I expect in all states now, one can own marsh, but not do much to it other than leave it alone.

This is a good thing.

Ibis

Marshes, as we’ve come to learn, are the nurseries of dozens of species of fish and shell fish. They also provide superior habitat for wading birds like egrets, herons, and ibises. Just as significant to my mind is that they are beautiful. They turn emerald green in the spring and wheat gold in the fall.

One day, when I was building my house, a stranger from New Jersey came down my lane, just ‘snooping around’, as they say. He cast his eye about the place, and offered the opinion that it took a strange person to want to live “in a swamp”.

Well, each to his own, I guess, but I found him to be an ignorant fellow and jaded to the point of blinkered stupidity. A swamp, indeed! Nothing against swamps, mind you, but setting one’s home next to a marsh is a fine choice. But I go back to my original point--how easy to take it for granted.

My little hump of land which an acquaintance once called “a sand pile covered with a thin frosting of soil,” is protected from storms by my marsh and a rim of luxuriant greenery called wax myrtle.

This wax myrtle is a miraculous shrub.

It stays green all year, thrives in the harshest of places with poor soil, blowing winds, salt spray, and weeks and weeks of drought. And it smells wonderful, a sent as fresh as salt air and as beguiling as jasmine. Not only that, the locals say the oil from the crushed leaves will repel mosquitoes and ward off fleas. (My dog does not vouch for the flea repellent qualities, however.)

Turn over a myrtle leaf, look through a magnifying glass (or the wrong end of a pair of binoculars), and note all the tiny yellow dots. Nature has provided these leaves with little glands that produce a protective wax, the yellow dots, to prevent them from drying out in the hot sun, blowing wind, and sparse moisture. Plus, the volatile oils of the wax give myrtle its delightful odor.

There is a fly in this ointment, however.

Wax myrtle proud as a tree

Wax myrtle is one of nature’s most rambunctious plants. It wants to grow-and grow-and grow, until it reaches 30 feet high and looks as proud as a tree. Though I treasure my protective fringe between the storm-churned river and solid land, I desire a marsh and river view out my windows and must keep this shrub trimmed down to waist height.

This effort gets harder and harder each year as the myrtle keeps pushing higher and my physical trimming equipment seems to get heavier.

Facing the prospect of another tiring assault on the myrtle thickets, I went to my local hardware store and inquired about a tool I'd noticed being used by a Department of Transportation crew in the neighborhood. Essentially, it was a gas powered weed whacker, but instead of the string trimmer, it had a saw blade mounted on the end of the pole.

The blade was about the size of a circular saw blade and the teeth were the size of a limb pruner saw. I already owned a weed whacker, so all I 'd need to do was  install this blade.  I felt this tool could easily tear into a myrtle thicket and aid in some major height reduction.

Describing what I wanted to the clerk, he promptly said, “Sure, you want a ‘merkle’ blade.

“Merkle blade, what the heck is a merkle blade?"  I asked.

“Just what you asked for,” he replied.

“Ah ha,” it dawned on me that ‘myrtle’ got transmuted to ‘merkle,’ somehow, and I am now in possession of one of the most common tools of the North Carolina coast.

The end of this story is not pretty

My efforts with my 'merkle blade' were too troubling to continue. This nasty, aggressive saw tore my magnificent thicket into weeping stumps and left an ugly mess. Either my control of this tool was poor (probably) or my technique crude (probably), but I was doing violence to one of nature’s most amazing plants.

So I’m back to using a hedge trimmer, heavy and wearying, but I leave the myrtle nicely trimmed off the top and ready to push ever higher the next year. By the time it overwhelms my ability to control its height, I will be beyond caring, and the myrtle will win, if you will, and seal off my little piece of land with an impenetrable, thirty foot high wall of fragrant greenery.

Sunset over Scallop Island, Beaufort, NC

But before I age beyond caring, I remind myself: never take the beauty and natural wonder of this place--marsh, myrtle, birds and all--for granted.

The Marshdoc in his hand-built kayak

"Marshdoc" is the handle of Bruce McCutcheon, educator, scientist, and naturalist. He proudly claims to be caretaker of "Scallop Island Estuary Preserve," his old dog Boon's little piece of heaven on the Newport River, in Beaufort, North Carolina.