FIRST ON THE WATER

Today may be "Black Friday" for many of us, the unofficial opening of the Christmas gift shopping season, but a less commercial designation also belongs to this day after Thanksgiving - Native American Heritage Day, proclaimed in 2008 by President George W. Bush to commemorate the role of pre-European peoples in shaping American history.

Here in the Lowcountry, evidence of pre-Colonial and prehistoric peoples are still present in the shell rings and middens scattered among the barrier islands (see our earlier post on shell rings), while more fragile traces of these early peoples are occasionally discovered, including a 4,000-year old dugout canoe found buried in the pluff mud of the Cooper River. As reported by the Post & Courier's Adam Parker, the canoe has become a rallying point for Lowcountry and Upstate Native Americans from the Wassamasaw, Catawba, Waccamaw and Yemassee Indian Nations.

The canoe was discovered in 1997 by an amateur diver who illegally removed it before it was confiscated under state law and put into storage for nearly two decades before serious restoration efforts began at Clemson University's Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston (where the CSS Hunley is also undergoing preservation).

Members of the Yemassee Indian Nation touch part of their history, Photo courtesy The Post & Courier

Only fragments of the canoe remain, mostly pieces of its bow and stern, but even with these few pieces radiocarbon dating has yielded an age of about 4,200 years, known to archeologists as the Late Archaic period, contemporary with the dating of shell rings like Fig Island. Fashioned from a hollowed-out cypress log, the fragments show clear signs of scraping and firing to create a watercraft that was the common means of transportation for these early peoples, who migrated seasonally between the Upstate and the coast.

The preservation process will be a long one. The canoe currently resides in a trough of fresh water at the conservation center as preparations are made to soak it in a solution of glue-like polyethylene glycol to stiffen the wood, a process that can take up to a year to complete. The canoe will then be freeze-dried before consultations with southeastern Indian nations for a permanent and respectful display site. As Chief Lamar Nelson of the Eastern Cherokee, Southern Iroquois and United Tribes of South Carolina told the Post & Courier, "Any Native descendants in South Carolina, or North Carolina, could be related to the people who built that canoe."

BEWARE THE BOO HAG

No Lowcountry Halloween would be complete without a warning about the Boo Hag, a troublesome vampire-like creature that features in Gullah/Geechee folklore. More than a mere "haint", or ghost, a Boo Hag visits in the night to perch on its sleeping victim and steal the air from the sleeper's lungs before disappearing at sunrise. Feeling tired and drained in the morning, despite eight hours' sleep? A Boo Hag may have come in the night to "ride" you!

A Boo Hag "rides" a victim

According to Gullah/Geechee belief, humans have both a soul and a spirit. The soul leaves the body at death, but the spirit remains behind to guard the people to whom it was close in life. But an evil life leaves an evil spirit behind to become a Boo Hag - a skinless being that can walk among the living during the day cloaked in the skin of its last victim, who made the mistake of waking and trying to fight off the demon. At night, the Boo Hag sheds the skin and begins the search for a new victim.

How to avoid a visit from a Boo Hag? You could place a broom outside the door to your bedroom, because Boo Hags are inordinately fond of counting and will stop to count the broom's bristles long enough for the sun to come up, which will cause the Boo Hag, left defenseless without a stolen skin. to disintegrate. (You can also try hanging a colander or a strainer on your room's doorknob. The holes are just as irresistible at the broom bristles.) If brooms or colanders aren't available and you are unfortunate enough to find a Boo Hag in your bed, throw salt at it. Boo Hags hate salt, which also makes them disintegrate.

Even better is to paint your outside window frames, doors and porch ceilings with "Haint Blue", the robins-egg blue said to have first been made by enslaved workers on indigo plantations, who mixed the residue from dying vats with lime. The color confuses Boo Hags and other troublesome haints who think it's water, which they are unable to cross. As added protection, hang blue glass bottles from a nearby tree or make your own bottle tree. Curious haints slip inside the bottles and become trapped.

So this Halloween, beware! As the Gullah/Geechee warning goes, "Don't let de Boo Hag ride ya!"

BUGS IN LOVE

Love is in the air, at least if you're a Plecia nearctica, commonly known as the love bug, which appears in great numbers this time of year in the Lowcountry. First described in detail only in the 1940's along the Texas Gulf Coast, this species of fly has since followed warming temperatures across Florida and up the southeast coast and is now well-established throughout Georgia and South Carolina. Males and females remain mated tail-to-tail as they hover in the millions during two flight periods in the late spring and late summer, each lasting up to five weeks and giving the species its other common name, the honeymoon bug. (In the photo above, the male is on the right.) Adult life spans are only several days long, so to ensure maximum fertility, the pair remains bonded for two or three days until the female disengages to deposit her eggs, up to 300 of them.

Feel the love: chrome is one magnet for love bugs

Love bug larvae feed out of sight throughout the year on decayed vegetable matter before pupating for about a week into adults. Males emerge first, hovering until females appear and nuptial flights begin, which may reach altitudes as high as a thousand feet. But the insects are attracted to light-colored surfaces, and so share space with us on our decks, patios and most annoyingly, our cars, when white road markings and signs beckon the insects. Because their body chemistry is slightly acidic, expired love bugs who met their ends in collisions with cars once caused pitting in chrome and paint, although modern coatings have mostly eliminated that difficulty. Love bugs are otherwise non-threatening. They don't bite and are not known to be vectors for disease of any kind; and because the larvae feed on decaying matter, they are among nature's important recyclers. Adults, who feed on flower nectar, serve as pollinators.

Because the bugs seemed to appear in the largest numbers in Florida, a popular myth once making the rounds speculated that the bugs were accidentally released from a University of Florida laboratory experimenting with genetically engineered methods of reducing mosquito populations. But research clearly indicates that warmer air temperatures have encouraged northward migrations since the mid-twentieth century, bringing the season of love (bugs) to our backyards.