Goodbye, September

 

  Goodbye, September … Hello, October

  The October beach begins to reveal its wilder side while the slightly cooler air still feels soft as summer. The children have gone off to get their education and the beach is left to the dog walkers, sand joggers, shell pickers, migrating birds. 

  

  Sand pails and bright beach umbrellas are gone but all the toys are not put away quite yet. 

  Sailboats await the weekenders returning from the cities, seeking to relax and squeeze a bit more beach time out of the waning year. 

  No red and golden leaf displays yet to wow us here, but still

Nature lavishes color upon us  …

 

  Splashes of royal purple, 

     beauty berry bushes 

         fairly glow 

         along the trail 

             to the beach.

Bright and sunny brown-eyed Susans and morning glories crouch among the dune grasses. 

  And perhaps the most shocking fall color of all … pink!  the color of Roseate spoonbills.  

  A group of this year’s young spoonbills feast on seafood on the tidal flats, then rest on one leg to digest their brunch. Egrets, both Great and Snowy, share their spot, all reflected in the blues of the clear October sky.

  My Northerner’s heart loves and craves the oranges and golds, the yellows and greens, of a cooler autumn while still enjoying a very different but beautiful one here in coastal South Carolina.

One in Five Hundred?

Headline yesterday:

One in Every 500 Americans Dead From Covid.  

  At first we thought …. that can’t be right! 

 

 

  Doing the math, we found it sadly but indisputably correct.  

  Population of the US: 330 million. Deaths from Covid: 670,000.

 

  Just days ago the country remembered the 3,000 deaths on 9/11, marked the loss of lives with all kinds of emotion, patriotism, press, national and local displays, political speeches, memorial services.  

Yet, 670,000 deaths by Covid, 

           preventable, still rising daily, 

                   don’t seem to evoke the same sense of a tragedy 

                            many times larger. 

  I just don’t get it. 

  In 2001, an event that killed 3000 brought out the best in people. In 2021, 670,000 are dead and a vaccine that will save lives, based on the best science, is turned into a shouting match. A 5-inch square of fabric turned into a reason to attack each other with weapons in the grocery store.  

                What’s happened to people? 

  (All original artwork from ArtFields 2021: Numbers Have No Emotion, Stefanie Neuner; Tag! You’re It!, Stacy Bloom Rexrude; Mr. Covid’s Neighborhood, Keith Kennedy; and One, Colleen Galeazzi. 

  

September Morning

  My morning walk by the bay. 

Do you see the recumbent camel?

  It’s my favorite month and I have a favorite September song. 

From the 1960s musical, The Fantasticks.

Enjoy! 

Summer’s Finale: the Fair

  Fairs have been much anticipated highlights of every summer for at least three generations of my family, a grand finale to summer freedom before school starts. 

   Kids worked hard all year on 4-H projects and looked forward to displaying them at the county and state fair, winning ribbons (and prize money!) if we were lucky.

  Then last summer, the summer of 2020, the unthinkable occurred: all over the States, fairs were cancelled, casualties of the Covid epidemic. 

 The frantic carrousel music, barkers chanting, “Step right up! Win a prize every time!”, the screams of teenage girls stuck at the top of the Double-Eight Ferris Wheel: silenced!  

  The aromas of hotdogs, burnt-sugary cotton candy, mini donuts, cattle barns, hot dust and horse sweat: gone!  

  The shivers of fear, rushes of adrenaline engulfing riders of the Zipper, the Hammer, the Riptide: unreachable for another whole year.

In St. Stephens, South Carolina, carnival rides looked lonely 

all last summer in the town park. 

  This week, however, the fun returns. “The Great Minnesota Get-Together 2021”, the Minnesota State Fair, is back. 

  I’m pretty sure I know where my daughters and grandchildren are this weekend. Eating Aunt Martha’s Cookies and drinking chocolate milk in the dairy barn! 

Some People Collect Stamps

   One day we were out for a drive through the Francis Marion National Forest, a wilderness of 260,000 acres near us. A silent labyrinth of narrow, crisscrossing dirt tracks lure you miles and miles, deeper and deeper in, to explore. 

  Only rarely a manicured lawn with a home and an outbuilding or two makes the briefest  break in the vast expanse of pine forests and swamp, tiny oases of private property amongst the federally owned lands.   

  We were driving along slowly, looking for rare orchids, birds, maybe a fox or a bear, when suddenly the tree line broke and revealed … 

      revealed … 

               well, this!

  What on Earth were these things?

  Closer examination revealed a collection of strange vehicles, most of which seemed to belong in the sea, all huge. 

  No fence, no ferocious dogs barking when I got out of the car, no one emerging to tell me to move on, so I started taking pictures. Later I tried to identify what I could, hoping to solve the mystery of what these oddities were doing in the middle of a huge National Forest. 

  There were a bunch of these, twelve I think: life boats from the USNS Leroy Grumman. 

  The Leroy Grumman is a replenishment oiler that refuels Navy ships in the water. They carry large amounts of fuel and dry stores in support of naval operations far from port. They are equipped with medical and dental facilities and can resupply and refuel several ships at a time. 

  This ship’s name may ring a bell as it was in the news in May, 2020 when one of its crew became first mariner to die from Covid on a military sealift command ship, just before the ship left port with new lifeboats on board. 

  Apparently, the old lifeboats landed here in the Francis Marion National Forest! 

  A couple of these rested beside among the Grummans  — lifeboats from another replenishment ship, the USNS Kanawha. 

  

The Kanawha was launched in 1991 and is capable of pumping 900,000 gallons of diesel or 540,000 gallons of jet fuel per hour. It has helicopter decks and hangars for the resupply of ships by helicopter. 

  Replenishment ships are “only lightly armed”.

  The last lifeboat is off the Noble Amos Runner oil rig, retired from Mobile, Alabama in 2018.

   At one time the Noble Amos Runner held the record as the deepest “conventionally moored rig” at 7,650 feet under water.  From what I could find out, when it was demolished, the pieces were recycled and remilled into new steel. 

  

 So, the mystery: did someone believe there was a market for big old junked lifeboats? Maybe they, too, can be recycled? 

  There was a variety of other odd vehicles parked in this clearing, mostly emergency vehicles of some kind. This might be a tracking device for communication between life boats in the water.  

  

  Perhaps an inventor works here deep in the woods, with plans for repurposing all these odd things, most of which belong in the sea, maybe someone with great foresight, preparing for the sea rise here along the Atlantic Coast that is already under way. 

  

  By the way, we didn’t find any orchids, few birds, no bears, not even squirrels on this morning. Still an adventure though! 

Sandy Island, Still a Gullah Home

  Once at the epicenter of the colonial South Carolina rice empire, Sandy Island remains a quiet river island, untouched by modern beach developers.  The 12,000-acre sand bar (40 square miles) between the Waccamaw and Great Pee Dee Rivers is still a beloved home of the heart to descendants of enslaved workers from the rice plantations of the South Carolina coast.  

With no other access than by boat, today’s inhabitants have protected a place and a way of life for 300 years.

  A native Sandy Islander, Rommy Pyatt, gave us a tour this week of the island and the Gullah community that still exists there.

The only “road” to Sandy Island

  Africans brought here involuntarily on slave ships from Sierra Leone built and worked the rice fields on the coast and rivers of South Carolina. From many different African tribes, they developed a language to communicate with each other that combined their native dialects and the English of their masters. The language, the people, and their culture became known as Gullah.

 

 “I don’t use the term slaves,” Captain Rommy told us as we puttered through a channel from a mainland boat landing on a small pontoon boat. “It’s demeaning. I call them what they were — expert rice producers, architects and engineers who built the rice plantations. Their free labor created a lot of wealth for this area.”

 “At the peak of rice production, 7-10,000 enslaved workers lived and worked along the Waccamaw River to produce a rice called Carolina Gold,” Rommy said.

 They brought with them from the rice fields in Africa expertise in building rice trunks, flooding rice fields, testing the waters coming into the fields by tasting it for salt.  They knew how to make special boots for the oxen that kept the beasts from sinking into the mud as they plowed the rice fields.

Thanks to them, South Carolina soon boasted some of the wealthiest white men in the world.

Beating the rice stalks to separate the rice grains

  Sandy Island was chosen for its isolation to house enslaved workers and their families from several plantations growing rice along the river. From the island they went out in boats during the day to work in the rice fields. At night they returned to their Sandy Island homes. The boats were locked up to prevent their escape and it was illegal to teach any African person to swim, thus protecting the owners from loss of their large investment in valuable workers. 

Right - pounding the rice to remove the husk.

  

When the enslaved people were freed at the end of the War Between the States, they knew no other home than the land they had worked and lived on for, by then, several generations. Many continued to farm as sharecroppers and live on plantation lands. 

  In 1882 a former slave, Phillip Washington, was able to save enough money from raising rice on Sandy to purchase a piece of land. There, on the highest point in Georgetown County (at 78 feet), he built a church for the island people. Later he was able to purchase about 300 more acres and sell plots to the people who had been sharecropping there since Emancipation. Most were his relatives and they have since passed that land down through generations to their descendants still living there today. Rommy Pyatt is one of those descendants. 

  Most of the island is owned today by the Department of Natural Resources and protected by the Nature Conservancy. There are beautiful wild areas and trails that are open to the public but accessible only by boat. 

Captain Rommy brought us to one of several old graveyards on the island with burials dating back to the early 1700s.

  “The tradition was to bring the deceased to a natural area like this,” he explained. There were no tombstones or markers for remembering the dead. “Any sentimental things they had were just put on the ground,” he added, and when those things had disappeared the belief was that the person’s spirit had gone up into the trees, the Spanish moss, the ferns above. “It was never meant for loved ones to come and visit the graves,” he said, because their spirits were always around in nature. 

  Graves in the island cemeteries have recently been mapped with sonar and a number even identified. Rommy has begun marking them with anonymous identical white crosses. 

  There are still no paved roads on the island and no development other than homes and a very small store. Electricity was brought across the water in 1967 and running water in 2001. While there are a few cars on the island, there are only primitive sand trails to drive them on. Most residents leave their cars at the boat landing on the mainland, crossing the water by boat and driving to work from there.

  A local philanthropist, Archer Huntington, built a two-room schoolhouse for the island children in 1932. It remained in use through 1965 when a school boat was purchased to take the children across the water to the boat landing to be met by a school bus that took them to mainland schools. This continues today, and last year the old boat was replaced by a new one on the right in the photo below. 

  The school now serves as a library and community center where computers are made available for residents’ use. 

The old school boat (left) and the new one. In the foreground, a pair of amateur archaeologists search for artifacts from a boat. They found an ax head and several pottery shards which they turned over to Rommy for display in the store. On the hill behind is a brick house, built from bricks used as ballast on the boats that transported the rice crops to market. 

  Today only 32 families live on Sandy full time but hundreds more keep their ties to the island by coming to the Sandy Island New Bethel Church on Sundays. The most recent Homecoming Day service drew over 600 descendants!  

  Today, with access so limited, Sandy Island remains a singular and tangible tribute to the African Americans of South Carolina, honoring the old Gullah way of life. 

All black and white photos are the property of  Brookgreen Gardens,

taken by photographer Bayard  Wootten on Sandy Island in 1930 for Archer Huntington. 

Memories Are Made of This

Happy Birthday,

USA!

    Fourth of July Memories

  A Midwestern child of the 1950s and 60s, my Fourth of July holiday was about picnics, parades, fireworks, and mostly, lots of family. Aunts and uncles, great aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins — it was a happy excuse to get us all together.

My sweetest memories are of the picnics that were held either at a cousin’s farm or another cousin’s home on a big river. 

  At the farm, most families arrived the evening before and pitched a tent somewhere in the vicinity of the farmhouse to be close at hand and not miss any of the fun. The children checked out cousins we hadn’t seen in months, ran wildly around catching lightning bugs, throwing sticks into a big bonfire that lit the night. Finally, exhausted, we went to sleep listening to the soft, deep voices of the men tending to a whole hog roasting in the glowing embers of a trench freshly dug in the ground. 

  On the morning of the 4th, the women fried dozens of eggs fresh from the chicken coop in giant frying pans, with bacon, sausages, and pancakes, for breakfast. Coffee was served from big blue enameled coffee pots all morning. Then, while mothers and the older generation rested in lawn chairs and cheered us on, dads and children played baseball in the smoky aroma from the roasting pig. When the dads tired and declared the game over, the children took up croquet, lawn darts, and hide-and-seek until finally, at last, the big dinner bell was rung. Long tables of salads and desserts, watermelon and icy soda pop appeared to accompany the centerpiece — that huge pile of fragrant, juicy pork.

  When we were sated with food, naps were taken until we gathered in the evening in a long line of lawn chairs placed along the edge of a cornfield. Here the Big Boys (as we called the older cousins) and a few dads brought out the fireworks while the grandmothers and mothers tut-tutted about safety, the silliness of boys and noise, and rumors of ear drums ruptured from just such doings, cautioned the children to stay back from the action. Two rusty barrels with lids sat at the ready. The show began. 

  There were no beautiful fireworks with colored fountains raining from the sky, only the loud banging sort and little white sparklers we children held. A favorite scheme of the Big Boys was to drop firecrackers into the barrels, magnifying the sound and blowing the lids off the cans. Oohs and aahs would follow and the boys would race into the corn to find the lids for the next round. 

  One memorable Fourth, talked about for years since, was the one when several boys threw lit firecrackers into a barrel at the same time and ran away. All heads bent far back and our eyes followed the lid, up up up into the sky like a flipped nickel, floating back down and 

   Landing

     Right 

        Square 

           On the barrel 

              From which it had been launched!!!!!! 

  It’s the truth. I saw it with my own eyes.