Scarecrow Contest

   Our small town had a scarecrow decorating contest for Halloween this year. Here are a few of my favorites. 

“Miss October”

    A mermaid scarecrow? Of course! We live on the coast so why not a mermaid?

  Not sure what Terpsi Turvy means but I like her!

  And my favorite scarecrow — the Gray Man, ghost of Pawleys Island who has been frightening residents of the coast and warning them of impending hurricanes for two centuries.

   Here’s the spooky story, just in time for Halloween.

  In 1822 a young man traveled by ship from Charleston to Georgetown to see his fiancée on Pawleys Island. From Georgetown, he continued to the island on horseback. To his dismay (I’m sure ‘twas a dark and stormy night!)  he and his horse became stuck in the pluff mud and tragically died, leaving his bereft love waiting forever on the island. 

  Since that night a lean young man dressed all in gray and carrying a lantern has walked the beaches, swinging his dim light and moaning for the love he left behind. Gray Man appears to residents of the island before hurricanes, warning them to leave the island. If they take heed, they say their house is always the one left standing when all others are blown to bits.  

  Lots of people in town and on the island will tell you their stories of sighting the Gray Man walking the beach on stormy nights, especially just before each of our major hurricanes. 

  All these scarecrows must have been effective because we did not see one crow in the park! 

Happy Halloween! 🎃

  

Where Am I?

  October has been quite a month for us with medical issues (ours and extended families’) that have not been fun. I will spare you details except to say my 94 year old mom who lives in Florida fell while we happened to be there with her. She is still in the hospital after a week but after some time in rehab is expected to make a full recovery. 

  

  Some happy news is, after two whole years (thanks to Covid) we were finally able to see one of my daughters and her family from Minnesota! Unfortunately Mom fell the day they arrived but we still got to spend a few hours with them. It was so wonderful to be able to hug them and talk to them all in person, I still get teary just thinking about it! 

Last breakfast before they left for the Everglades, and back to Minnesota 

Mason and his mama looking for sharks 

and dolphins in the ocean

  I’ll be back to reading your blogs this week and catching up on all the news. 

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!