November 18, 2007

The March of the Escargot

While awaiting our arrival in Charleston, Bill S. looked down from his hotel room on the morning parade of boats leaving Charleston Harbor and reported to us later that assorted craft ponderously queuing up to enter into Wapoo Creek looked like the “march of the escargot.” It’s disconcerting to think of graceful Journey as a lowly mollusk, but it reflects this odd parade of geezers, dropouts, boat bums, and the newly liberated from work crewing motor yachts and sail boats, sliding at a glacial pace through the twists and turns of South Carolina marsh.

The four of us spent two days in Charleston being tourists: buggy ride with too many canned jokes from the driver that weren’t that funny if not downright insulting to we Yankees, a visit to a spectacularly restored 1700’s mansion, two good restaurant meals, pleasant walks in lovely neighborhoods, and a day spent at Middleton Plantation. Journey was docked at the Charleston Harbor Marina that has a 1500 foot face dock on the Ashley River. We walked two full city blocks on floats to go from Journey’s slip to the showers, then another two blocks on floats to get ashore. Lots of amenities, but a marina is a marina is a marina.

The guides prattle about ghosts in Charleston among the 11,000 whites who lived in the late eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. They hawk nighttime ghost tours – but the real ghosts that lurk within their federalist oval parlors, sweeping staircases, sculptured gardens, canopied beds and the exquisite doll furniture – the shades that must always make us quake – are the spirits of slaves. This antebellum aristocracy of refinement, civility, agriculture and trade was a parasite of 70,000 slaves. One home we visited, Russell mansion, was staffed by eighteen slaves. Their skilled craftsmanship in gardening, carpentry and sculpting crown molding and mantelpieces, so evident in the grandeur of this home, was also a money maker. Slaves were rented out to others when the Russell’s couldn’t keep them busy. The Middleton’s several rice plantations made them rich because the hundreds of Africans, listed in a ledger by single English assigned name and their purchase price, brought with them rice from Africa and their hands, arms, legs, feet and backs to cultivate it in the flooded, infested soft mud of the tidal marsh lands of the Waccamaw, Ashley and other coastal rivers. When slavery ended, rice cultivation ended in South Carolina. The mucky soil could support only the soles of slaves in the fields, not machines needed to make cultivation economically viable.

Today, the homes and often the people within them descend from antebellum times that they preserve with zeal for class and history. For me, their shiny, Georgian-silver world is permanently tarnished by the ghost of slavery.

Last night we diverted six miles off of the ICW down the Edisto (ED’-is-toe) River to Bohicket Creek to visit Tom and Janet F., acquaintances of Bill and Judy who took us on a tour of Johns Island and Kiawah Island, bought by the Kuwaitis in the 1970’s, and was thus preserved from the big-condo model of development. It went through a few developer bankruptcies and now is a huge gated enclave of homes, condominiums, golf clubs and beach front. It was our first shore side look at shore front and marsh front properties. Tom and Janet were generous hosts and guides.

Tonight Beaufort, SC, this one pronounced, BEAU-fer.

November 20, 2007

We spent only one night in Beaufort, enough to walk the streets, see the homes and for Bill and I to sit at a sports bar to watch the Patriots slaughter the Bills. Beaufort’s pretty, but we’re a bit saturated with antebellum so moved on after a great breakfast in a café that was a shrine of college, military and confederacy pennants and corn beef hash, grits, and biscuits: fat and starch to provide Journey with more ballast. We motored south on the Beaufort River with Paris Island’s water tower painted 1-800-MARINES to our east, rounded Parish Island Spit at its southern tip, angled across the flood tide of Port Royal Sound and the Chechessee River, getting in a hour or so of sailing in light air, motored into Skull Creek that flows into Call Bougue Sound, a passage with some width that gave us a close reach at the end of the day to Harbour Town Marina.

This has been an atmospheric high pressure voyage with blue skies and light winds that yields low pressure days of motoring primarily through the marsh grass and Palmetto palms. I asked a ranger in Charleston whether palms were indigenous to South Carolina, to which he replied kindly that “we are the Palm Tree State,” which I have since observed on everything from license plates to the local brew.

The ICW in southeast South Carolina and Georgia has fewer man made cuts. Those that are there are kind of nasty so far: shoal and strong currents. Rivers and sounds have some width and depth, twenty to thirty feet at times, which now seems deep, and they give some sailing room. Boat traffic is greatly diminished. We speculate that after Beaufort, NC boats are jumping outside for Atlantic passage with the more numerous outlets to the sea, a strategy that looks attractive for the return north if prevailing southwesterly winds kick in.