Postcard from Hiwassee Island

A slightly different version of "Postcard from Hiwassee Island" appeared in the online journal Cagibi: A Literary Space.

Postcard from Hiwassee Island

If you come to Tennessee to see cranes, come in winter. January is best. And bring warm clothing—the hills of southeast Tennessee have occasional snow, ice, and frost. Hiwassee Refuge is a large property with access limited to specific locations. Bring a telescope or a friend with a telescope if you can.

Past, present, and future intersect in this place, and you will see geography scarred by time. In the distance, Hiwassee Island is visible, right at the confluence of the Hiwassee and Tennessee Rivers. The island has a long archaeological history going beyond the Mississippian Era to the Woodland and Archaic.

Scholars believe the Mississippian people of these lands were ancestors of the Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, and Chickasaw tribes. The Muskogee-speaking Creeks left around 1700, and the Cherokee, who speak an Iroquoian language, moved westward into Tennessee when settlers occupied Appalachia. The US Government later removed the other tribes to Oklahoma, just as the Cherokee suffered removal on the Trail of Tears.

Perhaps as many as two-thirds of the Cherokee passed through here, removed by a growing nation whose ways they had emulated. They had printing presses, the Phoenix newspaper, log cabins, a constitution, and treaties. Their assimilation did not save them.

A series of walls at the Cherokee Removal Memorial bears these travelers' names. Replicas of implements common to Cherokee life are also part of the memorial, and a small museum in a log structure holds displays illustrating local wildlife and Cherokee culture.

Loaded onto boats
One-fourth of them died en route.
Westward Trail of Tears

When the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency planted corn on Hiwassee Wildlife Refuge to attract Canada geese and goose hunters, they may not have foreseen the arrival of cranes, a bird sacred to some tribes. As many as 20,000 sandhill cranes now pass through each winter.

The refuge is a staging area, a stopover for the birds to rest before heading further south. On any given day, you may see 5,000 sandhill cranes and even an endangered whooping crane. Only about six hundred stately whooping cranes remain in the wild today. They are pure white, except for their black-tipped wings, and stand over five feet tall.

On a foggy day, you may hear the rattling call of the sandhill cranes and imagine thousands passing through. The mystic call of a whooping crane may make you imagine an ancient village on Hiwassee Island or a line of Cherokee people boarding boats for a long westward trip.

Aldo Leopold said he could imagine the Pleistocene when he heard the cranes’ calls.

Lately, pelicans have begun overwintering here—the large white ones, not the smaller brown ones. I have seen as many as three hundred. They always passed close by on route to Yellowstone in the spring and the Gulf Coast in the fall, but warmer winters now encourage them to stay.

In 2017, we rode a shuttle bus to the refuge and the school. We parked the car at the Cherokee Removal Memorial, hoping to avoid the parking issue at Birchwood School.

Sandhills from Michigan.

Cranes overhead wing southward, 
call my thoughts to fly with them 
to Okefenokee or the Gulf Coast of Florida.

The cranes arrive, 
bring their news of winter, 
their voice compared to barking geese, 
to the bugling of wild elks.

These are no geese, 
their words, no honk, 
no barnyard bark for them. 
It is a rattling coo, 
doves amplified one thousand times.

Arrows shot from a bow, 
they neither swoop nor slow, 
they rocket southward, 
abandon me here,  
rooted to the ground.

This poem was previously published in Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets.