Circling Home

The Upper Shoals

Any path can become the path if attended to with care, without preconceptions, informed by knowledge, and open to surprise. chet raymo, The Path The Upper Shoals The upper shoals have a wildness about them—big trees, exposed rock, and falling water. I like to walk down there with the dogs and pretend we live far from town surrounded by nothing but forest. The path along the creek through the floodplain is not ours. It’s owned by the Milliken family, one of the wealthiest in the United States. We find what refuge we can among their abundant acres. One spring Saturday I walked down from our house, and I could hear the upper shoals before I could see them. Two ridges pinch in tight there a quarter mile above Glendale, and most of the creek rushes through a narrow, fifty-yard-long channel blasted in the gray bedrock for an undershot water wheel when the shoals were what was called “a mill seat,” a place where falling water was captured for power. The old man-made channel is a great kayaking spot, and our boys, when younger, loved to float down a half-mile below our house and “run the chute.” The dogs knew exactly where we were going. Ellie Mae was 112 off-leash, and Toby trailed his in the mud. They waited at the shoals while I recovered a big plank I’d stashed in the woods. We use it to bridge some open water flowing on the north side of the rocky expanse. Toby went across easily. Ellie Mae always has to be coaxed across the narrow board. Soon as I walked Toby across I snapped off his leash and turned him loose to run with Ellie Mae on the island of dark gray rock. They ran noses down from edge to edge, plotting their quarter acre of freedom. On the island’s downstream point of sand and rock they waded out belly deep and tested the current pouring through the cut. There the dogs always think about swimming to the other side, but never do. I think they would if I wasn’t present to call them back. They’d be gone to Glendale. Standing on the shoals my focus often shifts quickly from the dogs testing their freedom to the past, to how much local history happened here fifty years before Glendale was founded. The village life that was established downstream by James Bivings in 1835 seems a little human and predictable when I’m standing at the place one early historian called the most important spot in Spartanburg County. How is a place lost in time, its importance forgotten by almost everyone around it? How does it become simply a piece of property, an entry on a tax roll? Maybe the chaos of water falling over rocks hides it. Maybe the way the trees above my head knit the sky and land together makes it difficult to see why this place might matter or why we as a community might want to save it for the future. Something keeps the upper shoals out of the public consciousness of my community, but I’m not sure just what. I know from Manning that the ridge on the west side of the creek above the upper shoals is a subdivision waiting to happen —high, flat land adjacent to the Calhoun Lakes development . I’ve been told local developers have coveted the property The Upper Shoals ° 113 for fifty years. The Milliken family has been a good steward, but how many years will it be before they sell it? If it’s valuable as real estate today, then how much more valuable will it be in fifty years when this end of Spartanburg County “builds out,” as most of the land upstream nearer the city already has? When I stand on the old, worn rocks I don’t want to think much about the time to come out here. It’s too painful. I think instead about history, and it’s easy to imagine when the country around me was still raw, a frontier, not yet settled by anyone. In the late eighteenth century the early colonial settlers traveled south down the Old Georgia Road and crossed the creek. They were looking for land, not “real estate.” They wanted land for growing crops and grazing livestock, and the big floodplain stretching upstream on...