Feeling like fall: September means better days ahead

September is a time for spiders — and spider lilies.
It’s a month for cool breezes on hot days.
Soft wildflowers and hard-hitting football.
Salty boiled peanuts and sweet Oriental persimmons.
Flickers of color in green woods.
Hummingbirds and butterflies, fall gardens and food plots.
September is not a perfect month. It’s hot and dry and love-buggy. But it plays a crucial role.
It’s the John the Baptist of months, ushering in the perfection of fall.
* * *
September woods are full of spiders.
If you go walking, break off a sweetgum limb to wave in front of you.
There are big black spiders with vivid yellow markings, big yellow spiders with vivid black markings, and strange little crab-like fellers with white blotches. All of them display more intricacy than anything created by human hands.
Cicadas hum louder and more rhythmically than they have all year. Spicebush and tiger swallowtail butterflies swarm blossoms, hunting nectar.
Love bugs thicken the air, gumming up windshields, grills and front bumpers.
Mosquitoes are scarce, thanks to dry conditions. But gnats are biting, and wood ticks still roam.
* * *
Dry?
The beaver lake at Ethel Vance Natural Area has become a weed bed. Sandbars on local streams sprout grass where water used to lap. Bare orange clay rims pond edges.
Farmers take advantage of these conditions to bale hay. Gardeners sow tiny seeds of mustard, turnip and collard. Hunters disk up food plots when they’re not blasting away at doves or scouting for deer.
In the woods, black gum trees are the first species to flicker with yellow and orange, followed by sweet gum. Green cypress needles turn to rust.
But the color changes remain slight. Though fall arrived last week, this isn’t New England.
* * *
September is when naked ladies appear. That’s the slang term for spider lilies, so called because they lack leaves.
The slender green stalks appear in yards and sprout glorious coral-red flowers on top.
Roadsides and creek banks inkle with wildflowers, morning glories and goldenrod and purple asters.
Hummingbirds spear flowers as they get ready for the long migration south across the Gulf of Mexico.
Crops like muscadines and pawpaws have waned, but giant Oriental persimmons and jumbo green peanuts are coming in.
The persimmons dangle like soft orange baseballs, and when you bite into one the juice smears your chin with the taste of candied fall.
Boiled peanuts, a Deep South delicacy strangely unknown in other regions, yield to the teeth and melt on the tongue, salty and juicy. Once you’re addicted there’s just no stopping.
* * *
Football season might start in August, but it’s not until the cool breezes of September arrive that the fever really hits.
There’s probably no rational explanation for the ecstatic feeling that comes from the thought of sitting on uncomfortable bleachers while a bunch of young men in uniforms and plastic helmets dart back and forth after an inflated piece of pigskin.
But the joy is real, as real as the smell of popcorn and the fizz of cold cola, the whiff of a distant cigar, the drum rolls and blare of brass bands, the cheer of crowds, the chatter of friends.
* * *
September is not the best month, not in the Deep South anyway.
Afternoons still reach into the 90s. If mosquitoes don’t get you, biting gnats will.
You’re fooling yourself if you think it’s time to go camping.
But September is what it is.
It’s the transition from summer to fall. It’s a breath of relief after the relentless heat of August. It washes over us like cool water.
September reminds us that things aren’t as bad as we thought, and they’re going to get better.
Count on it.

Mississippi kayak trip illustrates issues facing streams

I didn’t get to make Thursday’s meeting of the Southwest Streams Association, but I did the next best thing — went floating with a couple of people who did.
We got to hash out river issues and see firsthand why they matter.
Association founder and Topisaw Creek landowner Drew Parker invited me to join him, Dale Hughes, and Patrick and Sheri Gibson, all of McComb, on a kayak trip from Brent Road to Leatherwood Road on the Topisaw.
Parker and Hughes had attended the meeting and would fill me in on the gist of it. And as it turned out, the float was a textbook illustration of some of the problems besetting our streams and why we should do everything we can to solve them.
The gravel bar under Brent bridge was churned with four-wheeler tracks and dotted with litter. Parker picked up everything except dirty diapers.
We launched our kayaks in the clear, inches-deep water and glided downstream. In short order Hughes, the only one fishing, pulled up a thrashing 1-pound bass. He admired it, showed it off and released it.
Elsewhere in the aquarium-clear water, schools of fish flitted through the shallows, from minnows to fat carp.
For most of our 41/2-mile, four-hour float, the Topisaw was lined with towering hardwoods — a textbook example of what landowners are supposed to do, namely leave a buffer zone to protect the banks. The big trees grip the soil, preventing erosion, and shade the stream, keeping it cool — the way fish need it to be.
In the few places that had been cleared to the water’s edge, the banks were collapsing.
Also in a few spots, landowners had dumped rubbish — appliances, tires, tin — down steep banks in vain attempts to halt erosion.
Birds filled the woods with music, including songbirds, pileated woodpeckers and hawks.
We interrupted a gang of black vultures feeding on the carcass of a fawn that had become entangled in a trotline and drowned — a good reminder that trotliners should remove their lines when they’re through fishing.
Litter overall was scarce. The main paddling season is over with, and this stretch of the Topisaw isn’t floated much anyway due to its shallowness.
I’m not a kayaker — I had to borrow the sit-on-top I was using — but I have to admit kayaks are ideal boats for the Topisaw. They’re lightweight, skim along in inches of water and are easy to maneuver.
They’re not ideal for my back, though. Next time I’ll use a canoe or borrow a pirogue.
As we approached the take-out, we saw a tuber rounding the bend and an empty beer can bobbing just behind him. Hughes paddled up to the guy and his pals.
“Hey,” the young man said. “Want a beer?”
“No, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t throw yours in the water,” Hughes said.
“Oh, sorry, man,” the guy said.
I hope he meant it.
At the end of the float, we ate lunch in the shade, and Parker and Hughes summarized Thursday’s association meeting.
Nearly 30 people attended, discussing possible solutions to problems like litter and drunkenness. They batted around such ideas as outlawing alcohol, limiting public access to streams, charging inner tube user fees and banning disposable containers.
The group hopes to come up with some workable ideas to present to the Pike County Board of Supervisors.
Also at Thursday’s meeting, Bobby McGinnis of Tylertown spoke out against a proposed gravel mine on the Bogue Chitto River in Walthall County.
McGinnis said a number of Walthall citizens are concerned about the proposed mine, which would reportedly go in an old river channel off the Bogue Chitto.
Parker said the association can’t take a position against the mine if it meets Department of Environmental Quality guidelines, but individual members certainly can.
The DEQ plans to hold a public hearing on the issue at some point.
As I drove away after the float, the main thing that stuck out in my mind was the incredible beauty of the creek.
It’s just hard for me to comprehend that we have such God-given wonders in our area. At their best, our rivers are as beautiful as any scenery anywhere.
With trees so high you can strain your neck looking and water as clear as chablis, it’s easy to get drunk on our rivers without ever imbibing anything stronger than water.