Padgett’s need to be comfortable hits him just before we start walking the final half-mile to the abandoned quarry, so he changes clothes with the pickup’s door open between David’s sister, Betsy, and Padgett’s boxer shorts and bare legs. The blue rain jacket borrowed from me is the first to go, draped over the open passenger door. It’s finally stopped raining, and the May sun is out.

When Padgett emerges from behind the dark blue door he is dressed for Southern summer already, in the long khaki shorts he had worn on the flight the day before. He has on a khaki shirt and a wide, brown leather belt cinched up a notch more than seems necessary. I look down and he is also wearing what he calls his “coachwhip catching shoes,” a well-worn set of Docksiders with no socks.

Then Padgett takes off down the trail behind Ab, David, and Betsy. His mood seems reflective, even somber. Maybe he is expectant, as a visitor is often expectant in a new landscape. For me, these young Piedmont woods are home base, the furniture of a deep, psychic comfort. Something lined up in me thirty years earlier when I first visited this abandoned quarry. When I stepped out of the truck I felt like I was suddenly rooted as deeply as a white oak. I wrote my first poem, “Collecting Snakes at the Abandoned Granite Quarry,” after visiting this quarry. David and I caught a coachwhip on that visit, an elusive snake known for its bad temper. When I first saw the place, I passed like some insect through metamorphosis, from college student to poet, though that student poem did not make me famous, as Padgett’s first novel, Edisto, had made him.

In the decades that followed there were many more poems for me, but I also began writing essays—long and short—about places like this abandoned quarry. I am interested in speaking for places that have become sanctuary through neglect, abandonment, or abuse. In other words, I became interested in most of the old South—abandoned rice fields, old canals, Piedmont quarries, collapsed mountain house sites deep in recovering woods. What interests me is that I imagine and encounter creatures in these places that don’t seem affected by the world closing in around them. There are snakes, lizards, salamanders, frogs, and toads living their lives untroubled—or so it seems on the surface—by the sprawl and spread of urban comfort zones. Even though populations may be endangered, individuals of a particular species are carrying on. It is in these places I have always practiced a “catch and release” sort of amateur herpetology learned in college from true scientists David and Ab, and today I’m returning to it.

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