Cotton Echoes the Sky

When driving through rural Calhoun or Orangeburg county, places and objects repeat themselves like the rear-projection screens in old movies. Cotton field, evergreens, tobacco field, mobile home, church, cotton field, farm house, cotton field, evergreens, church, corn field, mobile home, cotton field, corn field, church, development, cotton field. The flat land yields a limited perspective on anything not visible from the main road. V-shaped gashes cut through copses of evergreen trees are the beginnings of roads and hint at the vast sameness throughout.

On this exploratory drive, I passed a racetrack. Like a row of changing huts on a beach, the stalls spread out along a hill. Below lay a raised hub of greenery with an outer ring of dark, upturned earth where the horses learned to compete. A couple of dozen chocolate-coloured thoroughbreds grazed in a nearby pasture quite content for the moment to stand and eat without pause.

Past the racetrack, a pack of hounds scrambled away from men in fluorescent red caps and across a harvested corn field. Between bouts of sniffing, yelping and scurrying, one of the faster dogs paused and circled back to make sure his slower compatriots caught up with the chase. I’m surprised such compact creatures didn’t scrape their bellies on the hacked-off stalks of corn. With tails pointedly stirring the air, the hounds circled a battered blue Dodge Charger. A jowly man in overalls leant out of the driver’s side window and waved his hand with pleasure much like the dogs and their tails. Farther along the road, two tanned men in fatigues paused in their pre-hunt bullshitting to tip their red caps as I passed. The hunters’ fingers formed a little half-wave as they gripped the shotguns on their shoulders and smiled.

Fields of cotton, both on rising corner plots and massive plains, stitch the rolling tableaux together. The cotton plant is a waist-high shrub with white plumes of lint at the tips of its branches. Dark seeds remain trapped in the fibres and need to be separated out after harvest. The white litter in the gutters by the side of the road comes from excess tufts of cotton. When I stop the car to take a photograph, I notice the reflective properties of the stuff. Fields of cotton echo the look of the sky. A blurred horizon of white bleeds into a steely blue overhead. Distinct plumes of clouds bunch up in the afternoon. The massive fields of white cotton absorb colours from the air and glow pink, hazel or a gentle blueish-grey as the daylight shifts from morning to noon to dusk. This is the beauty of the place in late October.