The first summer that I moved to my acreage above the river, I could not get down to the water. Poison ivy stood between me and the shore.
The elderly couple who lived here before me didn't venture outside the house. He had emphysema and she had a bad knee. For years, they had let the neighbor graze his cows all over their land. They had a fenced yard and the cows had the rest. Down at the river was a fence above the high water level. Between the fence and the steep bank was a fairly flat spot that had become Poison Ivy Heaven.
It was the scariest poison ivy I'd ever come across. I gasped when I saw it. It grew four feet high, standing like sapling trees. Where there were trees for it to climb, the stuff snaked up the trunks, branching out on the way to the treetops. The hairy vines were two or three inches thick; quite formidable.
When I lived at the farm, I raised dairy goats. They followed me on long walks, where they ate quantities of poison ivy. It was a delicacy for them, since they are browsers and prefer leaves to grass. Then I drank the goats' milk and became immune to the itchy stuff.
Since then, however, I have not emerged the victor in encounters with poison ivy. So, I was held back at the fence, as if I were one of the herd and not the new owner.
After the frost had killed all foliage, I ventured forth to claim my waterfront property. I was armed with the bolt cutter for the barbed wire and pruners for the poison ivy. I recognized the dormant growth by the wavy stem topped by what looked like a creepy hand. Being careful not to touch them, even with my leather gloves, I cut them down at the base.
Past the undergrowth was the steep river bank. I made a zigzag path down the muddy bank, using the sapling sycamore and willow trees to brace my feet against, stopping their downhill slide.
When I finally stood on the rocky shore, I couldn't have been more proud of myself had I been Lewis or Clark coming at last to the Pacific Ocean. In true explorer style, I named the smallish spot Fishing Beach. Out in the middle of the river was a black rock that looked vaguely like a whale, even though it was only about two feet long. Whale Rock is a good gauge of the water level. Both the rock and the beach are fequently not to be seen.
Upriver was another rocky beach, much bigger. The steep muddy bank made walking to it from Fishing Beach impossible. I scrambled up through the woods to reach it. There I found beautiful freshwater clam shells, iridescent pink inside. That became Clam Beach.
While all this sounds vast, the two beaches are close enough that I could throw a rock from one to the other, if only I weren't such a hopeless pitcher.
At that time, I didn't name my place Hickory Acres. The reason was that I didn't know what a hickory tree looked like or that I had so many of them. It was the nuts that finally were a giveaway. Once I got on my naming spree, even they were to get monikers as I claimed them for my very own.
