AN ANGEL OAK STORY (A LOW COUNTRY FABLE)

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Fable, Low Country, South Carolina

I enjoy writing these little fables. With gratitude I acknowledge the use of the wonderful photo of that magnificent tree, courtesy of AngelOakPhoto.com. I grew up less than a mile from Angel Oak, a short walk through the woods. In those days the tree wasn’t protected, and we kids used to play tag on it, the rule being that you couldn’t touch the ground. For the high school kids, there were many kisses exchanged beneath its branches.

Quersica thought that she was the last of her kind in eastern North America, and maybe all of the continent or even the world, but she supposed that there could be one or two dryads left out there in the far west among the redwoods or some other far place. She had her own name for creatures like herself which neither you nor I could pronounce without difficulty, and it would be meaningless to us. To the Greeks she was a hamadryad, a tree spirit or nymph partial to oak trees. The Greeks had gotten a lot of things right about dryads, but not everything. Quersica had coalesced within the vaporous cocoon of the great primeval forests when plants not animals had dominated the earth. As far as she knew, dryads were not part of some organized pantheon of gods. She had never met an entity that she would consider a god, but in the early days of the earth other creatures more or less like herself had abounded on the earth and in the seas. Yes they had some limited powers and they lived a long long time, but none were immortal or possessed godlike attributes. Quersica had the power to protect herself and her trees if necessary, and she could enhance the health of plants, and to a far lesser degree animals, but she never considered herself or her kind gods. Nevertheless she had witnessed the patterns of life, an evolutionary dance that had passed the dryads by long ago, and she chose to believe that there was a guiding hand somewhere. Many of her friends had chosen the final joining because they believed that they would begin anew on a higher plain of existence. It was a comforting thought, but she knew that sometimes things just ended.

The Greeks had believed that hamadryads died when the trees they inhabited died. It was more complicated than that. Quersica had existed for ages before she’d achieved true self-awareness, and additional ages after that before the non-denominational dryad had felt herself drawn to bond with the live oak trees and become a hamadryad. She supposed that that choice, if it was a choice, represented a dryad’s coming of age, the end of her youth. In that youth she had visited all the great trees of the world: the redwoods, the baobabs of Africa, the towering evergreens of Siberia, the tropical mangroves, the eucalyptus of Australia, and the magnificent bald cypress that were her close neighbors in the swamps of the low country of what would become South Carolina, before she had chosen the live oaks. Her closest dryad friend, Disteechia, had chosen the nearby bald cypresses. Her friend had joined her tree in a moment of elation as the festively festooned canoes of the local Kiawa sub-group of the  Cusabo tribes, celebrating a royal wedding, had paused in the water near her to seek her blessing. Such moments of spiritual elation often precipitated a joining, more so as the passing ages had begun to wear on the dryads. That tree had lived on for over three hundred more years, a tribute to the strength of her friend’s spirit. Quersica had inhabited countless live oaks, and absent that final joining dryads survived their trees. They lived on until they chose to join a tree and surrender their separate identity. From that point on their lives were entwined with the life of the tree. Absent natural disaster or outside intervention, how robust and long the tree lived after that was dependent on the strength of the dryad and her spiritual transcendence at the moment of joining. It was their final gift.

When Quersica had chosen to inhabit her present live oak, it was already two hundred years old and a magnificent specimen. She had lived within its knotted trunk and gnarled branches for nearly a thousand years more, and largely due to her, it was still in excellent health. Several subgroups of the Cusabos, most notably the Stonos and the Kiawas, had venerated and protected that tree because of her presence, and Quersica had saved it from flood and fire time and time again. She allowed the local tribes to gather some of her tree’s acorns to extract a cooking oil used for special feasts, and gather some of the leaves to mix with those from other trees to make a rug for a newborn infant, as well as the bark that her tree shed naturally to make a royal dye. On occasion she had appeared in the flesh before those early Americans, usually to forestall abuse of her tree, but sometimes on festive occasions. Dryads were not nearly as promiscuous as the Greeks had portrayed them, but she had had a few dalliances with handsome young warriors along the way. However all that was far in the past. The utter destruction of the Cusabos by the colonists had cast a depressive pall over her world. She had resolved to join with her tree when the next worthy opportunity presented itself. Therein lay the rub. To the demise of the Cusabo was added the horrors of slavery and warfare, and suddenly, for a Dryad suddenly, there was no room left for great moments of spiritual elation. She was trapped.

Quersica never revealed herself to the colonists, except a couple times as a ghost to frighten away would be teenage vandals. She never forgave them for what they had done to the Cusabos, but she was not a vengeful spirit. She observed with interest when Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, had his ragtag troops rendezvous beneath her tree, but she frankly didn’t care who won that war. However she felt great sympathy for the slaves, and appeared on occasion to do what she could to help a sick child through an illness. Most of the slaves had come from Africa via a few generations on the islands of the Caribbean. Some of them continued to practice their old religions when the colonists weren’t looking, usually at night, and often under her branches. They viewed her and her tree as sacred. Along the way the tree had acquired the name Angel Oak, which the colonists attributed logically to the fact that one of the owners had been named Angel. However to the slaves, she was the angel that lived in the oak.

In July of 1863, the Union Army occupied Johns Island in preparation for an attack on Confederate positions on neighboring James Island, which were part of the fortifications defending Charleston, as recounted, with Hollywood’s usual cavalier attitude toward historical accuracy, in the movie Glory. Colored soldiers bivouacked under Angel Oak, and a young officer had some of his men gather the local slaves. When they had assembled, sitting high on his horse, he read The Emancipation Proclamation to them. When he shouted the words, “Shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free!” there was a tremendous upwelling of joy and celebration. In that great moment of spiritual elation, Quersica joined her tree.

Angel Oak now belongs to and is well protected by the City of Charleston. It was severely damaged during Hurricane Hugo. Normally a tree that old wouldn’t recover from that kind of injury, but to everyone’s amazement Angel Oak recovered fully. Perhaps Quersica had something to do with that. There is no charge for visiting Angel Oak, considered one of the world’s great trees now and the oldest living thing east of the Rockies. If you do, say hi to Quersica.

Author’s Note: In addition to my fondness for and familiarity with the tree, the seed for this story was born when I read an account of a young Union officer, a passing mention really, who on one of the sea islands south of Charleston, gathered the local slaves under the branches of a massive oak tree, and read The Emancipation Proclamation to them. The account didn’t say which barrier island, give a specific date, or identify the tree.  My search for additional information proved futile. Frankly it was more likely one of the islands further south in the neighborhood of Hilton Head, which were under Union control for much of the war, including on January 1st, 1863 when The Proclamation was issued. But it could have been Johns Island during that brief Union occupation in July, certainly the tree would qualify, and that is close enough for a storyteller.  

 

 

 

THE PECULIAR SQUIRRELS OF JOHNS ISLAND (A LOW COUNTRY FABLE)

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Animals, Fable, Fiction, Low Country, South Carolina

In the far far past a tribe of squirrels lived in the great forests of the north in what we now call North America. It was a warm time in the history of world, and they fed well on chestnuts, acorns, and pine nuts. They were fat prosperous squirrels. Somewhere along the line they decided that fatness was a sign of prosperity, and prosperity was a sign of superiority. Naturally the fattest squirrels became the leaders, and married the fattest wives, and had the fattest children. Oh they had enemies like owls, hawks, and eagles, but their gray fur blended into the forest nicely and made them hard to find. Also the thinnest squirrels were always the ones that had to do the most dangerous food gathering, and therefore were the ones most likely to be eaten. So over the long passage of years being fat was no longer something that happened after they were born if they ate too much. They were born to be fat. We call that genetics. Eventually they became so different from squirrels in other places that they became their own special kind of squirrel. We call that differentiation of species.

Then over the years the weather became colder. For a long long time the change was slow. Gradually some animals developed white fur or feathers so they could hide in the snow or hunt without being spotted. Those that did survived, but those that didn’t like the squirrels began to dwindle. Many animals moved southward where it was warmer, but not the squirrels. The oak trees and the chestnut trees began to die too, leaving mostly the cold hardy evergreens, which reduced the available food. Then somewhere in the world a narrow part of the ocean froze solid and completely blocked the great ocean current which brought much of the warmth to the north. Then things became much colder, and huge mountains of ice, called glaciers, began to push into the forest, knocking down even the tallest and strongest trees.

For ages the squirrels resisted moving, even as they grew fewer and food became ever harder to find. But now they had no choice but to move south and look for a new home. Over many generations they kept moving south, but other animals had moved there long before them, leaving no place for the squirrel tribe. Over time, as they traveled they changed. The fattest squirrels were no longer the most likely to survive, because they were slow and easy prey for the hunters. The squirrels were often near starvation, and oddly, although they all lost weight, their skin did not shrink. It just became kind of loose and flabby, like a big wrinkly overcoat. To tell the truth, bedraggled, starving, and wrinkled, they were not a pretty sight. They became known as the ugly squirrels, and were chased out of forest after forest.

Finally they came to the swamps and thick forests of the South Carolina low country, and they settled on Johns Island, one of the many barrier islands along the coast. That was not an ideal place for the squirrels to live because it was filled with mosquitoes and ticks  and snakes, and many other dangers. However there were lots and lots of rotting trees with old woodpecker holes that could be easily enlarged to make shelters. Anyway by that time the once-fat-squirrel-now-wrinkled-squirrel tribe was desperate for a home, and Johns Island had room for them.

Most of the other animals shunned the squirrels. However the equally ugly possums welcomed them. That is how a young male squirrel named Abrandadorenta, which in the classical fat squirrel language meant he who climbs trees quickly, became a close friend of a possum named Steve. The squirrels had lost all of their past grandeur except for their grandiose names. So they clung to those. Maybe their pride had supported them through all their troubles. Different things prop us up. However when it came to names, the local possums weren’t so highfalutin.

So one day up high in an old oak tree, Abrandadorenta hunted acorns while Steve hunted insects. Steve’s favorite food was ticks. There is no accounting for tastes. Suddenly a bobcat started climbing up the trunk, trapping them, a bobcat named Bob. All male bobcats are named Bob. That’s how they got the name. Bobcats liked to keep things simple — hunt, kill, eat. Abrandadorenta ran to the thin outer branches. Steve thought about playing dead, but playing dead high in a tree is not recommended. So he tried one of the other possum tricks. He started shaking all over and foaming at the mouth. Bob took one look at Steve and decided to go chase the squirrel. He’d never cared much for possum anyway. That gave Steve his chance to escape.

Unfortunately for Abrandadorenta, Bob was a very agile young bobcat, and thin branches or not, he kept working his way closer and closer. Finally there was no where else for Abrandorenta to go, and Bob was approaching striking distance. Although he was certain he would die from the fall, the brave squirrel leapt from his branch. As he fell he instinctively spread out his four legs. The wind caught his open flabby coat and he glided lower to the trunk of next tree and escaped. Once the rest of the tribe learned that trick, it greatly improved their ability to escape predators. From then on they flourished in their new home. Instead of the ugly squirrels, they became known as flying squirrels. A much nicer name don’t you think?

Moral: Not all gifts come gift wrapped, and sometimes they open themselves.

MY STUMBLES THROUGH THE SIXTIES AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA

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Civil Rights, Football, Gloria Steinem, Low Country, Nonfiction, Pat Conroy, South Carolina, That Was The Week That Was, The Sixties

I have a great memory, but fifty years ago is a long time. If some of the people mentioned have different memories, then that is to be expected. I also depended on the valuable memories of my old friend Dicky Strozier and my brother Charlie. Charlie’s differ a bit from mine, but not in any significant way. 

At times I look back on the sixties in the deep south and see a foreign place. I think that sense of alienation may have been enhanced by the fact that I joined the Peace Corps in 1975, and except for a year or so living in DC and a few extended visits, I lived and worked in Africa until the early nineties, and only returned to live in the south in the mid-nineties. When change happens gradually you can adjust almost unnoticed, but after a twenty year absence, I experienced culture shock. In Columbus, Ga. the elderly husband of my neighbor had been rushed to the hospital, a very sweet couple. A few neighbors, including me, had gathered around her when we saw her outside to give her our best wishes. One of them said something about bearing witness for her husband. She started dancing around, flailing her arms and chanting, “He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb! He’s been bathed in the blood of the lamb!” It reminded me of the time I had inadvertently stopped my truck in the middle of a female circumcision ceremony in Chad. This was alien to me, strange ritualistic stuff. Things had changed over the years. There has been a great deal of mythology and revisionist history written about the sixties. Perhaps one personalized account can reset reality for those who read it.

I was born in Charleston, but spent years 2-10 in the outer suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri being my father’s home state. Then we moved back to the Charleston area, to Johns Island, in 1959. Distance wise Johns Island is not far from Charleston, but in those days it was still mostly rural with a 70% black population, many of whom spoke Gullah. Blacks lived right down the road, any road, but there was no mingling of the races. Black kids and white kids never played together, or went to the same churches, or attended the same schools. Blacks and Mexicans harvested the produce, and white kids worked the sheds packing it. There was a palpable sense of arrogance bordering on animosity shown by all white people toward black people. The n-word was commonly used. The only pro civil rights whites were “northern agitators,” often Jews. There were no Jews on Johns Island that I ever heard of; they all lived in downtown Charleston; and I only knew of one Catholic family. As I would learn later, most of the Jews in Charleston shared the prevailing prejudices. In fact some had ancestors who had fought for the Confederacy. I don’t think there were any white liberals on Johns Island. If there were, they kept a very low profile. I remember asking my father why he had voted for Kennedy. He replied, “Because Lincoln was a Republican.”

I’m going to tell a little anecdote here that I have included in another story, because it provides some insight into the times. My mother grew up on a farm in St. George, SC. She had a limited education, sixth grade I think, but she was literate and enjoyed reading newspapers and such. She was ignorant of many things, but she wasn’t stupid. She had a bevy of strange beliefs and superstitions. Now the point of this is not so much the tale itself, but her absolute unawareness that there was any sexual component to it. Of course as a precocious teenage boy I saw the sexual connotations, but I never mentioned them. That was ground best not trod on.

You see there is an actual long, slender, nonpoisonous black snake in the SC low country called the coachwhip. My mother believed it would lie in wait for a young woman to walk by. Then it would rise up, head waving back and forth, and make a perfect wolf whistle, just like a brash construction worker might. When the woman looked toward the sound, the snake would stare into her eyes and hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

The black culture on Johns Island and adjacent Wadmalaw Island was quite different from the white one. Many blacks spoke the Gullah dialect, although almost all of them could and would speak something much closer to regular English to white people. They had their own music and superstitions. I remember the shack like houses with blue panted doors, window trim, and porch ceilings. That color was called haint blue. They believed that ghosts (haints) wouldn’t cross water, so the blue would keep them from entering their homes. One of my great regrets is that I never immersed myself in such an interesting culture. That was impossible for me at that time. I had evolutionary miles to go.

I was a product of my environment. I was just as prejudiced as the other white kids, used the n-word, and generally tried to fit in with everybody else. There was one difference though, I loved to read. No one ever read bedtime stories to me or even encouraged me to read, so I started out reading comic books. I later branched out to kid’s adventure stories, then sports books, and soon I was reading anything I could get my hands on. My one year younger brother and I thirsted for knowledge in a wasteland. How I envy the children of today. In those days encyclopedia publishers would send the first book, the “A” book, to people free, hoping they would go on to buy the set. We could never afford a set, but Charlie and I memorized the “A” book from cover to cover. I still have a warm place in my heart for aardvarks. Also it probably explains why I haul two old encyclopedia sets around with me every time I move. I just like looking at them.

The small sexually censored, but surprisingly philosophically uncensored, school library was my only source of literature. I read anything and everything, Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, just to name a couple. These days I would probably be put on a watch list. What I discovered from reading those books was that even the most abhorrent philosophies have some appealing truths at their core, which are then warped and twisted into something evil. There is an Arabic proverb: “That which is learned in youth is carved in stone.” However, thanks mostly to my voracious reading, gradually, very gradually, I began to question my own beliefs.

Because of the association of the Republican party with Lincoln, as well as being the party of blacks during Reconstruction, almost all whites were Democrats. I never heard of a white Republican on Johns Island. That would have been a curiosity like a two-headed calf. Since blacks were kept from voting by one means or another, that meant that in South Carolina the Republican Party only existed on paper. Oh every now and again some guy with a big ego would run for office as a Republican simply because he could, but it was just token stuff. For all the statewide offices, the general election was a joke. The Democratic primary was the only real election.

During the Kennedy Administration, southern whites became increasingly alarmed and angry with the progressive tendencies of the Democratic Party. The solid south held together one last time for Johnson in 1964, only because he was a fellow southerner. Johnson’s relentless support for civil rights was the killing axe blow among whites to the Democratic Party in the south. Oh the tree didn’t fall immediately, but it was doomed. On the other hand the Republican Party was a blank slate, an empty vessel just waiting to be filled. And fill it they did. The Republican Party in the south was reborn as the party of racism and intolerance. That didn’t mean that the whites who remained in the Democratic Party weren’t racists too, most were, just of a more moderate variety, some of whom were capable of adjusting their beliefs. Also a few hardcore racists remained Democrats for seniority or other personal reasons.

The exodus to the Republicans continued over the years, particularly as the Republicans began to tone down the racist rhetoric. The fight over integration and voting rights was over. They began to couch their policies in terms of states rights, limited federal government, and the pro-life movement. The last time that I looked, around the turn of the century, less than fifteen percent of registered white voters in South Carolina were Democrats. It well might be less today. Even with the exodus of the hardcore racists, it was still difficult for blacks in the sixties, seventies, and eighties to win Democratic primaries. This was the era of Clinton, Carter, the Gores, etc. White Democrats were more progressive than white Republicans, but it was still tough for them to vote for a black person, especially one who had never held a major elected office, and almost none had. Eventually this led to the tacit acceptance by southern blacks of Republican gerrymandering, which assured that fewer Democrats would  be elected, but most of those that were would be black. Also it meant that Republican candidates in gerrymandered districts did not have to moderate their positions in order to get elected, in fact quite the opposite.

MY OWN LITTLE GHOST STORY

Tags

Ghosts, Nonfiction, South Carolina

My mother had a sixth grade education. She was a southern girl raised on a farm in the South Carolina low country. My Uncle George, her brother, died in The Battle of The Bulge. He was my grandmother’s youngest and the apple of her eye. My grandmother was dying from a brain tumor when my mother was pregnant with me, her first child. She told my mother that I was a boy and made her promise to name me George. Mom also said that my grandmother’s ghost visited her the night after she died.

Mom had many superstitions and odd beliefs. She believed that sea shells were bad luck, and that eating a banana after drinking a coke was certain death. Of course I tested that one out. I swear that she never had an inkling that there was anything sexual about this, but she believed the coachwhip snake, a long black snake, would hide in fields and wait for a woman to pass by. Then it would rise up, make a perfect construction worker like wolf whistle. When the woman looked at it, presumably a white woman, it would hypnotize her. Then it would crawl up to her, wrap around her, and squeeze her to death.

I have a brother one year younger and a much younger sister. Our parents loved us and sacrificed a great deal for us, but both were severely flawed, and the family unit deteriorated as the years went by. Mom suffered from ever worsening bipolar depression and dad had an ever worsening drinking problem. If anything mom was overprotective of us when we were young and her mental condition less pronounced. Dad was from Missouri, a child of the great depression, which intelligence aside limited a poor farm boy like him to an eighth grade education. He worked hard all his life at a dirty job, a welder in a naval shipyard. I liked the members of his Missouri family. However from age ten on we lived in the south, and mom’s family always seemed disdainful, almost hostile to us kids. I don’t think they cared for dad, and somehow that extended to us. Often my brother and I were treated like cheap labor. I was a bright kid with good grades, my brother valedictorian of his class, but my Greek uncle by marriage told us on several occasions that we should quit school and get a job washing dishes. When Uncle Jim lay dying, my brother and I had to sit death watch in the hospital in the wee hours.

Eventually our family disintegrated entirely when dad’s alcoholism finally cost him his job. My brother and I were in college, and due to scholarships, government loans and grants, and some work, we were able to get by on our own, if barely. My younger sister went to Missouri to live with her godparents, a wonderful childless couple who eventually adopted her. Perhaps the greatest thing my mother ever did for any of her children was befriend Lee and Nina back when we lived in Missouri and make them my sister’s godparents. I think they were the only non-related friends my parents ever had, and maintaining that friendship would have been impossible had we not moved away to South Carolina. Whether it was divine intervention or just lucky circumstance, I was grateful that she was taken care of. When things fell apart, mom followed my sister up there to Missouri. By that time her mental conditon had made her impossible to live with, and she would have fought institutionalization tooth and nail. Her family would have crucified us as well. As the oldest I experienced a great deal of guilt and anxiety about her, but there just wasn’t much I could do. I keep telling myself that.

A year or two later mom died. We brought the body back down to Charleston. I was working at the time, fresh out of college during a recession, just getting by. My brother stayed with me in a big house I shared with friends. My sister stayed with the family of another friend of mine. Mom’s family blamed us of course. I don’t think they ever acknowledged her mental condition. Even toward the end she could hold things together to some degree for an hour or two when a sister visited. Still it was there if you looked, but family doesn’t always look. I coordinated the arrangements with them but otherwise we didn’t have any face to face contact until the day of the funeral. My main concern was shielding my siblings as much as possible. As expected they were pretty cold toward us, barely civil, but we got through it.

That night I slept downstairs on the couch, having given my brother my room. I felt drained from the whole experience, sad but relieved that the ordeal was over. Sometime in the night I felt something land on my stomach. I sat up. I suspected that the cat had jumped down from the couch back, but I couldn’t find the cat. I went back to sleep. Sometime later I opened my eyes, and by the light from the street side window, I saw a key on a string twirling around above my head. I quickly closed my eyes. I told myself that understandably I had taken things harder than I thought. So I opened my eyes again and now the key was twirling faster and closer. I was scared. I closed my eyes. I took a few minutes to screw up my courage before I opened them again. Thank God the twirling key was gone. I sat up and took some deep breaths. I lay back down and had just closed my eyes, when I felt two hands touch me firmly three times top to bottom like a body search. At that point I jumped up and started yelling. Lights came on and people rushed down. I think all I said to them was that something strange was going on. That was the end of it. The next morning I noticed a key on a string hanging on the inside of the nearby window frame. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that it was all a dream due to extreme stress, combined with my childhood memories of mom’s superstitious tales. All I can say is that looking back I acted quite rationally in that dream, if indeed it was a dream.

OLD FRIENDS, OLD STORIES, AND A FEW BELLY LAUGHS

Tags

Charleston, Football, Humor, Key West, Nonfiction, South Carolina, Sullivan's Island

A collection of amusing and interesting stories. Enjoy!

I played football in high school. It was a very small school, maybe forty in my graduating class, so they needed every able body who managed to will themselves through brutal two-a-days in August in South Carolina. I was a lousy player, but Coach Biggerstaff liked to give seniors a chance to earn their letter. So he placed me at middle guard on defense, right between the two best players on our team, both linebackers on defense. Donald was the Charleston County Back of The Year and Alton was the Charleston County Lineman of The Year. Both went on to play college ball, Donald started at South Carolina, quite an accomplishment for such a small school. As a result the St. Johns Islanders were a very good team. We were undefeated at the time of our homecoming game against Moultrie, a much larger school. We were favored nonetheless.

It was third and long for Moultrie. Their QB dropped back to pass. For some reason nobody blocked me. I wandered into the Moultrie backfield and flushed the QB. He headed around left end, saw Donald waiting and reversed field. I lunged and missed the tackle as he headed around right end. Alton waited there, so he reversed field again and ran right into my arms for a fifteen yard loss. With fourth down I trotted off the field to the bench. The sizable crowd gave me a standing ovation. The cheerleaders twirled and chanted, “George, George, he’s our man!” The guys on the bench jumped up cheering. That was uncharted territory for me. Coach Bigerstaff looked at the crowd, then the cheerleaders, then my shouting teammates, then out at me trotting in. Then he looked back at the team, and in a slow southern drawl said, “Well boys, it’s like I always said. You give a monkey a typewriter, and sooner or later he’s gonna spell a word.”

For three years during the summer while I was in college I worked for The Post Office. It was one of the few summer jobs in the Charleston area that paid anything. My first year I had to compete with thousands to get the job, after that it was automatic. I would replace regulars while they were on vacation. Usually I would spend a couple days riding with the regular guy, then take over the following week. Sometimes if somebody was sick, I’d do the route cold. Those were long days. The more familiar the route, the faster you could do it. Raised on Johns Island, I only knew the main streets in North Charleston. So when I took over a drop box route in a residential area up there, I just memorized the maze like route. Drop boxes are those big stand alone boxes that you find on corners and in front of malls and such. There was one box that usually had a lot of mail in it, and I would bend down and stick my head in the box to make sure no mail was stuck in the chute. A terrier would sneak up behind me and yap loudly just at the right moment, causing me to jump and bump my head. I swear that dog laughed at me. He got me three times over two weeks.

One day they assigned me cold to a residential route in the St. Andrews area. I came to a house with a mailbox on the porch, 112 something or other. I had mail for 112½ also. There was a trailer in the back, so I headed back there. I heard one “wolf” and saw a bloodhound heading straight for me. That dog meant business, no foreplay. At five feet he leapt for my throat. I dodged to the side and he hit my shoulder knocking us both to the ground. Bloodhounds are big dogs. He rolled a couple times, then headed out in the backyard, made a U-turn, and came back full speed before I could get up. Just then the owner came out and called him off. That was terrifying. Badly shaken I continued the route. Not long after I came upon another house with the mailbox on the porch. This one was fenced in and had a Beware of Dog sign on the gate. I would have skipped it, except I had a certified package that needed a signature. I looked around the vehicle and found a billy club and some pepper spray. So I went to the front door well armed with the package tucked under my arm, one hand holding the club and the other the spray. When I rang the bell, a little white-haired old lady opened the door and her chihuahua came running out. The old woman took one look at me and started shouting, “Don’t hurt Mitsy! Don’t hurt Mitsy!”

I became friends with Dennis near the end of my college years. This is a story he told. He graduated from high school in Charleston in 1965 give or take. He and some classmates rented a house on Sullivan’s Island for an after graduation party. As customary in the low country in those days, they had several bowls of PJ (Purple Jesus), a punch made chiefly with grape juice and grain alcohol, but sometimes with rum, vodka, and fruit slices thrown in. In addition they had one bowl that was laced with LSD. It was still very early days for drugs in the deep south, and Dennis didn’t even know exactly what LSD was, nevertheless he knew he was drinking from the special bowl.

At some point he wandered down to the beach. It was a calm night and the mosquitoes were out in force. To get away from them, he decided to take off his clothes and get into the water. It was pleasant out there. As everybody who has been there knows, if you don’t fight it the current will take you down the beach. When he exited the ocean, his clothes were nowhere in sight. He started walking down the beach. In his fuddled mind about the only thing he was certain of was that he was very hungry. He had an epiphany. Houses have food in them. So he climbed the steps of the nearest beach house, jiggled the handle to the screen door, and walked right in. When he opened the frig, he found treasure — a platter of fried chicken. Now Dennis is about six three. The dentist and his wife who lived there heard noise and found Dennis in all his glory illuminated by the frig light. They yelled something. Dennis took the drumstick out of his mouth and said, “Sometimes life is like that.” Soon he realized he wasn’t welcome and left.

There followed several hours of phone calls to the police reporting “a naked stranger” wandering the streets of Sullivan’s Island. They finally cornered him, handcuffed him behind his back, and put him in the back seat of a patrol car. Dennis is double-jointed or whatever they call it and has really long arms. He had a trick he could do. When a cop looked back, Dennis had his hands in front of him and a smile on his face. They stopped and repeated the procedure, this time telling Dennis not to do that again. They threw him in the drunk tank. Dennis said that when he awoke the next morning still naked, the other guys in the communal cell had been betting on his story, most favoring the unexpected return of a boyfriend or husband. The police out there were used to drunk students, but they didn’t know much about drugs yet. Also things were looser in those days. So when the dentist didn’t press charges, they let him go. It didn’t hurt that his father was well respected.

Another friend of mine, Stanley, ran a delivery service for a while. A bunch of us used to meet at Kitty’s Fine Foods for breakfast. The best breakfast in Charleston. Miss Kitty was a plump matronly woman. Her menus had cat pictures and cats wandered around the tables from time to time. The front of Kitty’s was all plate glass. Apparently Stanley had had a rough previous night. He missed the brake on his van and it made contact with Kitty’s window, not hard contact, but enough. The window shattered spraying half her place with glass. Fortunately no one was hurt. Stanly calmly walked in, looked around, sat at a table, raked the glass off with his elbow, and said, “Could I have a cup of coffee please?”

After college for a time I shared a house with Dennis and some other Charleston buddies. It was just across the street from Johnson-Hagood Stadium, the Citadel stadium, a nice old house that had seen better days. As one would expect in a bachelor house, our furniture was improvised. Dennis had “found” some old railroad ties and fashioned a long rough coffee table, kind of neat really if you didn’t mind a whiff of creosote. Dennis had a German shepard named Bigfoot, a very smart dog. When Bigfoot did something wrong like winkle the butter wrapper out of the garbage, I would scold him and tell him to go stand in the corner and put his nose on the floor. He would do it, and then look up from time to time with remorseful eyes to see when his punishment was up. For a time we were acquainted with a Russian defector named Oleg or Oleck (I think), a sailor who had jumped overboard in Charleston harbor. At least that’s what he claimed. We never really trusted the guy. Bigfoot hated him, some deep-seated racial animosity at play no doubt. Bigfoot would spend hours slowly working his way closer and closer to Oleg, a stretch here a roll over there. Finally when he was within range Bigfoot would leap at him. It was amusing to watch, maybe not for Oleg.

In those days our favorite bar was The Three Nags, close to and later claimed by the College of Charleston. It was one of the great college bars of bygone days, ranking with The Opus at the University of SC and Chukkers in Tuscaloosa. Now we liked to throw the occasional party. We knew a guy who spent his spare time in the summer seining for little creek shrimp. They were delicious but there wasn’t much of a market for them. If you were into pre-shelling and deveining, they were a lot of work. We didn’t bother with those niceties. So we made an arrangement for him to catch and freeze shrimp all summer long. Then we’d buy the lot and throw a party. I don’t remember the exact price, but it was well under a dollar a pound for two to three hundred pounds of shrimp. We would invite friends, and also drop by The Three Nags and tell everybody to come by. The party amounted to boiled shrimp and beer and dancing to Martha And The Vandellas. By the end of the night there would be shrimp shells piled everywhere.

At one point when I was Heat Waved out, I was chatting with Nancy Barnwell, with whom I had been dancing, kudos to her bravery. She related the following story. Recently she had been jogging down Folly Beach where she and her husband had a house. She wasn’t really thinking, just sort of registering things as she passed — crab, dog, waves, gulls, peanut butter foam. Suddenly for the first time in her life, she realized that the light brown foam on the beach couldn’t possibly be peanut butter foam. Turns out as a little girl she had asked her grandmother about it. No doubt with a smile, her grandmother had explained that it came from ships at sea washing out their peanut butter jars. She had never questioned it.

Ben and I became friends at the tail end of college and beyond, since we were both from Charleston. One day he asked me if I would hitchhike with him up to Lake George, New York for the Fourth. He said we could stay with his friends there and in New York City, so off we went. The trip was pretty much a bust. His friends were not all that delighted to put us up, especially the new boyfriend of Ben’s former girlfriend. Also I think we were coming to the end of the yeah sure crash on the floor era, perhaps more so in high traffic places like NYC. One modest highlight of the trip was being picked up by two mafia guys in a Lincoln Continental. They were going to Saratoga for the races and spoke pretty freely around us, nothing incriminating of course, but a lot of “family” politics. The most interesting event happened on the way back to Charleston. We were dumped in Columbia at the USC campus just a little before midnight. That being our old stomping grounds, we both had nearby places we could crash, and we split up.

Extremely tired, I walked down Green St. past fraternity row to John Arthur’s house, another Charleston friend. It was exam time for summer classes, and he was conked out in a chair. Cat Stevens’ Tea For The Tillerman album was playing over and over with the arm up. The main door was open, but the screen door was latched. I pounded on the door and yelled, but he was out for the count. I decided to walk back through campus to the Opus Bar, my favorite watering hole. So at two in the morning, now exhausted and drunk, I decided to give it another try. At one point I passed a lone coed going the other way, then two males a hair young for college students going the same direction. I took note of the situation. Almost home I heard the faint patter of running feet and a muffled yelp. Damn. I wasn’t up for this. I turned and ran back. I got there as they were dragging her into the bushes about thirty yards from the road where I stood. She appeared to be limp, probably unconscious. I started yelling for help. They turned to face me. One guy actually smiled and pulled a knife. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to end well. Finally lights started coming on and people exited the houses. The two assailants disappeared down the hill. I went to the coed. She was semi-conscious, incoherent, her glasses broken, and her face bloody, but she still had clothes on. When the first fraternity looking guy reached me, I passed her off and got out of there. I admit one part of me was a little angry that she put herself and me at risk like that. Another part of me said maybe she had a good reason. I never found out. The second time I managed to get John Arthur’s attention.

A year or two later, Ben was working in Key West as an educational counselor on a military base. A nice gig. His father had connections. Dennis and I and my brother Charlie decided to drive down to visit him. During the last leg we picked up an attractive young lady hitchhiking to Key West. We were average decent looking guys, and we behaved like perfect gentlemen. In fact Dennis was tall, dark, reasonably handsome, and a bit of a chick magnet. So you would think she would be at least distantly pleasant. She spent the whole two hours subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, insulting us in one form or another. She wasn’t a native Conch, having lived there a couple of years, but you would have thought she went back three generations. With all the zeal of the newly converted, she made it plain that tourists like us were the lowest form of creation. I think she was terrified that we might run into her and presume friendship. It got so bad that Dennis and I were making eye contact and chuckling. When we dropped her off, I told Dennis that if we ran into her hopefully with her friends, we had to run up and give her big hugs. Unfortunately the opportunity never presented itself.

We couldn’t have picked a worse week weather-wise. A stalled tropical depression took up residence. It would wobble away and then wobble back. The locals began to call it a neutercaine. In addition to near constant rain, the storm spun out mini-tornadoes from time to time. No snorkeling, sailing or fishing for us. Mostly we hung out in bars and ate good seafood. We spent many hours listening to the not yet famous Jimmy Buffet, an acquaintance of Ben’s. He seemed like a nice guy. Ben had rented an old weathered house with plenty of character. I loved the huge arched double doors that separated the upstairs master bedroom from the living room. Space wasn’t a problem, but lack of furniture was, namely guest beds. Ben had his bedroom, and we made do with the couch, chairs and the rug in the living room.

I’ve never been fond of airport bars, but that is where we would close out every night. Ben was hitting on the lady bartender. Now to be fair this wasn’t a modern sterile chrome and glass airport bar, and security guys didn’t have to examine our tonsils before we were allowed in. In fact I don’t remember any security at all. It looked like it was in an old wooden hangar or maybe a warehouse. It had a high ceiling with fans, wooden tables and a neat long curved bar. That said, transients spoiled the ambiance. Airport bars are airport bars. Ben was a likable fellow, decent looking, good sense of humor, nice job, nice house, a pretty little sports car (unfortunately one of those British ones that were always breaking down), and most importantly for the women of Key West he lived there. The lady in question seemed friendly enough, but then lady bartenders are paid to be friendly. I had to admire Ben’s persistence. Night after night he would dance his little dance and go home with just us guys.

Then on our last night in Key West, the lady relented. Good for Ben. While the two of them disappeared into Ben’s bedroom, the rest of us tried to get some sleep there in the adjacent living room. It wasn’t easy. They were pretty noisy. I was just about to sleep when she yelled, “Careful Ben you’ll break your neck!” At that I gave up the ghost and turned on the TV. The late night movie was that Errol Flynn movie, The Charge of The Light Brigade. It was reaching its climax, with the star rising in his stirrups to shout “Charge!”, when a mini-tornado hit the house next to us, Ben’s side of the house, and completely took it off of its foundation. Transformers exploded with sparks like Roman candles as the electricity went off in a flash. The tornado shattered Ben’s window and sent his bed crashing through the double doors into the living room, with Ben and his lady sitting up naked as if they were riding a magic carpet. Quite a show.

BOTANY ISLAND

Tags

Fishing, Humor, Low Country, Nature, Non-Fiction, South Carolina

Stories of my youth in the low country of South Carolina in a bygone time and place.

Botany Island as the locals know it, officially Botany Bay Island, is a little tidal island south of Charleston. I’m not one to wax nostalgic about those days. My childhood was no walk in the park. I never met the Cleavers or the Waltons or any family that even vaguely resembled them. Johns Island was a hard scrabble place, albeit girded with natural beauty. I remember waving to Lady Bird when she came through on a poverty tour. I would think of her later in life when I saw a painting showing a queen riding out on a flawless white horse to magnanimously dispense mint to lepers so they wouldn’t smell. Struck by the same image, Pat Conroy mentions that painting in one of his novels. Poverty and mean prejudice aside, there were places, ancient live oaks, infinite marshes, that possessed fairyland quality beauty. Chief among those places were the as of yet underdeveloped islands of Kiawah, Seabrook, and most pristine of all – Botany.

There were no roads beyond Rockville, a small hamlet on the harbor end of Wadmalaw Island, semi famous locally for its annual regatta. Wadmalaw Island and Johns Island shared the same schools, but Wadmalaw was a step up, not a big step, but a step, a little less working class and a little more old blood land owner. You had to go by boat from Rockville. The back end of Botany, the nearest part, was guarded by countless acres of marsh and twisty tidal creeks, which could only be navigated at high tide, and even then it was a tricky maze, and of course never by sail. The best way to to get there was down river (or maybe call it a big creek), then across the harbor, then out into the ocean, and around to the front side, the beach side, to land your boat. So while as the crow flies it wasn’t a great distance away, it took significant effort, which no doubt helped to keep it unspoiled. To this day I say if you could package it and put a price on it, a weekend spent out there would be worth a fortune. It was an experience that is simply no longer replicable.

A little later on a Friday than normal, Dennis, Al and I loaded up a modest sailboat and headed off. Pretty much all we took out there was our camping gear, fishing gear, seining nets, a few pots and pans, bread, seasonings, a little cooking oil, and stuff to drink, mostly beer. Even so, we were low in the water with little clearance. We didn’t get far before the wind freshened against us. It was tight tacking up the little river, and by the time we hit open water we were in a full-blown storm. It was a long hard night and we almost sank several times. We needed to lessen the load and raise our clearance, but jettisoning beer was unthinkable, so we employed alternative methods. Usually storms like that blow through quickly, not that one. When we finally pulled the boat up on the beach sometime in the middle of the night, exhausted and drunk, the winds were still howling. We staggered up the beach some and then just passed out on the sand. We woke up the next morning and the boat was gone. Eventually we found it halfway around the island, six feet above the ground, wedged in a dead tree, still loaded and largely undamaged. Hard to believe you could sleep in the open through a storm that could do that, but we did. We must have cleared a lot of ballast.

As usual we set up our tent on a rise in the nearest woods to the beach. That site had the advantages of shade and usually enough wind from the ocean to keep the bugs down. Also it was next to a little tidal creek with all you could eat oysters, crabs, and the little shrimp we called poppers, from the sounds they made. Of course we didn’t eat oysters during the dog days of summer, adhering to the old saw to avoid months that didn’t have an R in them, but there was plenty else to eat. We rarely saw anybody else the whole weekend, although once in awhile we’d encounter one grizzled old islander or another, come out to enjoy  nature. When we did, we’d share our camp, and food, and beer, and tall tales. We’d seine the ocean shallows for the big shrimp, not always a sure thing, and crabs. We’d brought our preferred bait fish with us, dead mullet, but sometimes we’d add a few more seining.

The unquestioned main event was surf fishing for what we called spottail bass, because of the dark spot on the tail. I’d later learn that the real name for the fish is red drum, later to gain culinary fame as Louisiana redfish or blackened redfish (and be severely over fished as a consequence). We’d honed our skills to the point that fishing for spottail bass was almost a performance piece. We’d affix a big hook to a metal wire leader, then tie the leader to the line using a new improved fisherman’s knot, with a few small plastic protectors above to keep the sinker from sliding down and worrying the knot. We used a heavy pyramid shaped 6 to 8 ounce sinker to grab the bottom in the surf, but we wouldn’t tie it, letting it slide free. That way the fish could take the bait and go without feeling the considerable weight of the sinker. When you felt him take that second gulp, you’d set the hook with a hard jerk. We fished the incoming tide. Wading out into the warm surf on a moonlit night and casting into the white foam of incoming waves is one of the more relaxing things a human being can do. Our bait was a big bloody hunk of mullet, preferably with some guts hanging out. We’d punch the hook through both sides of the tough skin, making sure the barb was clear through and unimpeded. Almost all the fish we caught were between five and thirty-five pounds. It was quite a moment to pull a thirty pound fish out of the surf. They were delicious. I’ve eaten fresh caught salmon in Washington and barracuda I caught trolling off the coast of Guinea (where they are edible because there are no coral reefs with poisonous fish), both delicious, but nothing equals fresh red drum out of the surf. We didn’t catch them every time we went, fishing doesn’t work that way, but the fishing gods usually favored us. As the Arab proverb goes: “Allah does not subtract from man’s allotted time, those hours which are spent fishing.”

The ocean side of the island was quickly eroding, the beach eating into the tree line. This resulted in a line of dead trees along the beach and lots of driftwood. By moonlight the luminescent white wood formed an eerily beautiful art gallery. Just one of the island’s visual treats. Sometimes we would see wild goats or porpoises chasing fish up onto the pluff mud banks, a fascinating to watch hunting strategy called strand feeding that, at least as a daily activity, is apparently unique to the low country porpoises of South Carolina and Georgia. I remember standing on our rise and looking south in the distance to Edisto, the next big island. Then I panned back and noticed that the little marsh island just south of us had a few feet of beach covered with great mounds of beautiful shells, like jewels piled in a treasure chest. Had I discovered one lovely shell on an empty beach, I would have felt compelled to take it, but I felt no desire to disturb that abundance. I remember one night watching the huge sea turtles lumber up to lay their eggs. At night we ate and drank and told stories. Once Al was waxing on about the thirty-two pounder he had pulled out of the surf that day. Dennis leaned over toward him: “Come on Al, everybody knows Jews can’t fish!” I burst out laughing at the shear absurdity of that statement. I still smile. Funny the memories that stick.