Steps: 3,503,869
Miles: 1465.96
The Virtual Walker is making a side trip by special request!
"Old Folks at Home," also known by the words of its first line, "(Way Down Upon the) Swanee River," is a song written in 1851 by composer Stephen Foster.
Way down upon de Swanee ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere's wha my heart is turning ebber,
Dere's wha de old folks stay.
All up and down de whole creation
Sadly I roam,
Still longing for de old plantation
And for de old folks at home.
All de world am sad and dreary,
Ebry where I roam,
Oh! darkies how my heart grows weary,
Far from de old folks at home.
Foster himself never saw the Suwannee or even visited Florida, but the popularity of the song single handedly started a major tourist movement to Florida to see the river, as travelers from the Northeastern states in particular flocked to the region. Foster was a white New Yorker, pro-Union and anti-slavery.
The Suwannee River drains the Okefenokee Swamp which is a shallow, 438,000 acre, peat-filled wetland straddling the Georgia-Florida border in the United States. The Okefenokee Swamp is considered to be one of the Seven Natural Wonders of Georgia which includes
Amicalola Falls, Providence Canyon, Radium Springs, Stone Mountain, Tallulah Gorge, and Warm Springs (where Franklin D. Roosevelt died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage.)
Some of you may be familiar with the swamp because of Walt Kelly's comic strip Pogo, who's characters made their home in the Okefenokee Swamp.
The name comes from the Hitchiti (an offshoot of the Muskogean language spoken by the Seminoles), meaning "bubbling water", or alternatively "trembling earth", a reference to its spongy bogs. Today, the swamp is under lots of development pressure and parts of it are preserved as the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge.
The Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge website list a huge number wildlife species that can be observed or heard in the swamp, like the noise made by chorus, green tree, pig, carpenter, and over a dozen other species of frogs...
I wonder how many OCHAs (and cell phones) are sunk in the mud in the Okefenokee Swamp?
3 comments:
Good question. When you figure it out, let us know!
Did the Virtual Walker see Gomez and Morticia Addams fishing while at the Okefenokee Swamp?
Oh, we'all had a great outing to the swamp for some moon-bathing!
LOL
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