sea islands in summer 2001

September 8

I’m amazed to peer through crusty eyes at a bedside clock showing 10:00 am. It’s late. The heavy hotel drapes have preserved our hibernation, and only when the hot wind through the screen door ruffles the drapes aside does the day creep in. Untangling my legs from the bed sheet, I roll over and find Brian beginning to stir as well.

            “Nice sleep,” I declare, propping my chin on his shoulder.

            He agrees. “I had lots of dreams.”

            “About cockroaches?”

            “About Mark Wahlberg.”

“Hmm, should I be jealous?” He says no with a kiss, then springs out of bed. Okay, that’s it for Myrtle Beach. I follow him, and we are soon in the sunny parking lot, ready to roll. After loading the duffle bags, he goes back into the hotel to check out.

Alone inside the van, I am struck with a disquieting déjà vu. The last time I was waiting for him in a Sheraton parking lot, my forehead was thumping and my cheeks were wet with tears. We were in Universal City visiting friends. For some reason we had to get a hotel room at the eleventh hour and the commotion resulted in a bad fight on which he slammed the car door, leaving me while he secured our room and proceeded to the bar. I don’t remember being in the room at that hotel, or doing anything else on that trip. Sitting now in what looks like the same parking lot, I can’t believe an entire country lies between here and there. Have we gone anywhere? I don’t remember us ever talking all the way to the other side of an obstruction like that one.

I remember drinking high tea and champagne, reeling in sailfish, finding our first perfect house together. But after that my filter catches mostly simmering and snapping, turning company away with loud jabs at each other behind the front door, feeling like I was facing a wall at the end of a long hallway, like I was trapped in a van. I remember eagerly planning this trip, to escape our third and far-from-perfect house together. I remember my head on his shoulder in Pigeon Forge, Cape Hatteras, and on the balcony last night, waking up refreshed an hour ago, wanting to spend a bright new day with him. I know I missed something in Wilmington and Myrtle Beach, but most of South Carolina still lies before us, full of potential and not one planned stop until we’re past the next state line. That should look like freedom, not like a whirlpool for us to slip into.

 “All set.” He opens the door and sits down in his driver’s seat, leans in for another kiss while buckling his seat belt. “Ready for breakfast?”

“Starving,” I say, smiling us away from the rough water.

“Ready for Krispy Kreme?” His smile works better than mine.

Krispe Kreme donuts are as legendary as White Castle burgers, as they are similarly still unavailable on the left coast. In the current territory we expect them to be abundant, but it takes us an hour of rolling by “Elvis was a Southerner” bumper stickers and tedious strip malls off Highway 17 to find one. A stream of soccer mom minivans flows past the drive-thru donut window this Saturday morning. We park and venture inside, where the shop is all polished white and chrome, and offers another sepia photo-history splashed across the walls as we wait in line--had we known that the first Krispy Kremes were sold in Winston-Salem, they might have saved us from the congestion tension there a few days ago. Now an array of puffy treats comes into view behind the glass, but I can’t find my favorite: plain ol' unglazed cake. Brian breaks the news that Mr. Krispy is not known for that category, and then he orders for us. We take chocolate milk and a half dozen shiny donuts to a table. Fresh from the oven, they have potential, but so much sugar coating crinkles on my teeth, like eating tinfoil, and the filling is more like Ready-Whip than the éclairish custard I was hoping for.

            “Thanks for the introduction;” I say after one, “I'm glad to be in the know, but I'll stick with Winchells,” where I would typically eat at least two donuts before stopping to breathe.

            “C’mon!”

"Yeah..." I pass him the milk bottle and contemplate how much more popularity means to him than particulars, how much more he values consolation than critical thinking, while I pride myself on analysis and have a hard time letting even the littlest things go. Back on the road, I’m still wondering how millions of people can prefer this donut trademark, and how Brian can be so apathetic about the difference.

Meanwhile, we are approaching Charleston, a city with tremendous sight-seeing potential. It’s built around a three-armed bay, held together with a lattice of bridges. The speed limit is 50 mph. We should stop and organize if we want to make an afternoon adventure here. When I vocalize this, my pilot says nothing. Do I want to make an afternoon of it, do I insist? Don't we have an obligation to explore such a key Southern venue? I unfold the Charleston brochure I plucked from the hotel lobby last night and try to focus.

America’s “first” museum, founded in 1773, and more antebellum plantations, namely Drayton Hall, Boone Hall and the Aiken-Rhett House. An aquarium, a serpentarium, and a 1400-year-old, 65-foot-tall oak tree. The street that inspired “Porgy and Bess”. Yes, I should have planned for us to stop and spend a whole night here; why was Myrtle Beach a beacon instead? What a waste of time compared to all this luminous history—my throat constricts with stress when I see too late what we’ll miss. A profusion of parks, including Battery, where we could touch cannons and mortars fired 140 years ago on grounds that previously hosted the most famous pirates in history as they swung from the gallows. Forts like Dorchester and Moultrie, and most importantly, the one where the first shots of the Civil War rang out.

  “Fort Sumter is over there;” I look up and point, “see that sign? It’s an island so we have to take a ferry from the museum.”

Brian remains unresponsive in the clutches of the highway. 

“Well?”

            “I guess not,” he says, passing the sign and then the exit.

            “What about the Citadel?” The military college which counts among its distinguished alumni General William Westmoreland, a man born with fortuitous enough timing to serve in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. This campus was home to many of our country’s flying aces, and before that, Citadel cadets were the last armed confederate force in the state when the final shots of the Civil War were fired. Charleston contains a full circle.

            “I don’t really get what's to see.”

            “Okay. You don’t want to do anything here?” I must repeat it out loud to process it.

            “I guess not.” He is the political science major, the military brat, but most days it seems he only wants the country club version. Maybe that’s where Myrtle Beach came from, too. We designed a pleasure cruise, not a historical tour. I have been captivated by the way both opportunities exists down here, but I have yet to make peace with the notion that I must return in another life for a full dose of the latter. I exhale a long "o" of breath and coolly alert Brian to the junction we need to reach coastal Georgia: Interstate 95. Then I switch to the state map and fix an eye on the destination we do have tonight, the one I’ve been waiting for in my gut, above all the others: Savannah. That will be all mine. What else might entice my pilot between here and there?

“How about Hilton Head?” I ask. I recall the name from the Travel Channel, where it took the honor of number one on their Most Luxurious Beach list. “It’s off the road, but I’d say less than an hour from our campground.”

            “And how far from here?” he asks.

            “Maybe an hour and a half.”

            “Hm. Yeah, that sounds good. Let’s chill with the rich people.”

Yes, that’s the trip I have implicitly agreed to in this life: diversions designed according to our gilded personal logic instead of the National Registry’s. So be it, for now.

After the city roadside view is bland. We color it in with talk of the southern experience that we have witnessed so far.

“It’s weird to think about all these towns doing real modern-world business and stuff," I say, "underneath all this confederate pride and preservation of old culture.”

“Well they fought pretty hard to preserve it, and then the place was wrecked during the war.” Brian must be invoking his grandparents. “That engrained some serious resentment in old southerners, on top of however racist they were before. A decade of military occupation, disrespected by Union soldiers, trying to "Northernize" everything, (he makes finger quotes; whose words is he using?) and also not really having a clue what to do with all those free slaves.”

I’m not sure what they eventually managed to figure out. I have already confirmed on this trip that the majority of people living at the poverty line, and hovering above it only through the service industry, are still not white. Every time we wander away from the beach or beyond the front street of a town, we are the minority. But every time we are provided food, gas, transport, cleaning or carrying assistance, we are distinct in our caste. The lines that separate us are more like a messy pile of Pick-Up-Sticks in this part of the country, but they are still here. 

“How many hundred thousand people died in The Civil War?” I ask.

"Six or seven."

“For this? I mean obviously it’s better than slavery or Jim Crow, but it still doesn’t look right, does it?”

“Slavery would have ended anyway.” Brian is lost in someone else's revisionist past, not tracking my concerns about the present. “The more fugitive slaves were allowed in free states, the more their value went down in the South. The war was about Northern government being able to collect Southern tariffs. I read that Lincoln sent troops to Fort Sumter as bait for Charleston to fire on. Our allies in Europe did not support slavery and there was too much money at stake.”

"Okay, you're really feelin' your sentimental Southern roots after a week down here, huh?"

"I've just heard another side to the story. The institution of racism is a complicated system that's not just about backwards ignorant southerners. There's all kinds of shady white people."  

And that conversation has run its course. The local radio is cloying so I turn it off. We drive in silence until a sign announces the Georgia State Line, 10 miles, and before that, the turn off for Hilton Head Island. The road bisects a residential area—long porches with wood-bladed fans spinning from the eaves, palmettos flanking the front steps, plantation shutters. Then the business district—shady avenues with galleries, boutiques, and big shaggy dogs being walked by skinny women on high heeled sandals. This part reminds me of cruising Carmel, California. When the buildings disappear, the east and west lanes of the road split around a greenbelt. Bamboo and pampas grass spread among the palmettos. This part is like riding the tram in the back lots of the LA Zoo.

While I am busy anchoring the geography to my own references, we are slowing down, along with what seems to be every resident of the state except those few whizzing by in the westbound lanes. The swoosh of air through the open windows is replaced by horn blaring, like dogs howling all over the neighborhood. We have become wedged, with no time to consider escape, in the worst traffic jam I’m sure I’ve ever seen. Four miles from the beach (according to the marker planted coyly to my right) the Chevy Venture has come to a stop. People lean out their windows and crane their necks in all directions; they swerve onto the grass median for a better view, despite the Keep off Median signs. They throw up their hands, put their foreheads on their steering wheels, or bark into their cellular phones. I struggle to rationalize, and can’t. How did everyone get here? A pair of cop cars ambles by on the narrow shoulder, lights flashing, as if anyone can do anything special in response. Then a tow truck follows them. Accident? How can you have an accident on a straight flat wide dry road on a Saturday afternoon?

“You’ve got to be fucking joking,” Brian insists. The two o’clock sun sneers down at us; there is no shade. I climb into the back and want to dissolve. This accumulation of wasted time agitates me almost beyond my wits.

            “Can I get you anything?” I whimper, looking into the cooler.

            “How ‘bout a beer?” He raises an eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror. I am grateful now for his Krispy Kreme disposition. I open a Corona bottle and pass it up to the front. People are leaving the saunas of their cars, gathering in the road and questioning each other, flapping their arms. A man from the passenger side of the Escalade in front of us steps to the median with a golf club, and practices his putt on whatever pebbles he can find.

“Hilton Head must be really special,” Brian takes a big swig of beer.

I bow my head and raise my eyes to him pleadingly.

“It’s okay,” he says, “we’re on vacation.”

That’s right, our only goal today was to reach Savannah; anything else is gravy.

“And look at this,” says Brian, sounding drunk after half a beer. “Look at the panel on this radio.” It reads out the name of the station, WAVE FM. Then he pushes a button and it reads out the name of the song and artist that’s playing, EVERLONG, FOO FIGHTERS.

“That’s high tech, man.” I already observed this feature three days ago, but I’m glad he loves his van, since he’s stuck with it, immobilized by it, in a worse way than me. I return to my seat, fan myself with a map and nod off until the drivers around us start to inch along. The golfer moseys forward on foot until things move fast enough to climb back into his SUV. By the time we reach whatever caused the jam, there’s no evidence left of it.

The road to the island ends in another collection of shops and eateries, nestled into dense eucalyptus with a creek running through. BMWs and deeply-tanned cyclists glide by as we attempt to park. It takes three slow circles around the public lot to nab a space, and even as we stretch our legs and walk toward the beach, I realize that it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. The Travel Channel must have more nuanced criteria for their top ten lists than I do. There are more rules posted on the metal railing than there are people on the beach, and besides two pairs of teenagers wrestling from each others’ shoulders in the surf, the few people here are doing nothing but lying over their magazines and shimmering against their white towels. The sand is beige, the water is cobalt, it’s a beautiful afternoon; but maybe you have to spend a whole holiday here to appreciate the allure. After 20 minutes of strolling and 20 more sitting with our legs swinging off the boardwalk, we wander back into the Eucalyptus to the town pub, where Brian has another beer and a we split a steak sandwich, and then to the pharmacy, where he buys a spray bottle with a plastic fan on the nozzle, so as not to list the afternoon as a total loss. 

The Georgia state line eludes us; I guess today we have a one track mind (though the track is vaporous). We stop for gas on the outskirts of The Hostess City and then pass right across its edge, on purpose—I insist that we don't stop because I want to save Savannah's interior for a totally thorough walking tour tomorrow. We proceed instead to the campsite that awaits us on Tybee Island, the most visitor-friendly of the cadre of islands that clutter the edge of this state. The others require ferrying, but Tybee has a connecting road that dips into marshland. Not merely a patch of marsh, but acres and acres. Brittle piers slant into the brackish water as it turns purple in the afternoon light. Pelicans flock; herons poke at the boisterous frogs hidden in the reeds.

I make waves with my arm out the open window and breathe deeply. Solace. This is the low country scenery I anticipated; this is what I could not miss. For some reason it feels like home. The road rises back out of the marsh and more reliable piers are visible in the water to the north, with rusty fishing boats moored to them or floating further out, their many nets and traps collected neatly on the bows. As we get closer to town, the boats look less business, more pleasure, and now the docks are attached to big houses built on thick stilts.

“For hurricanes?” I ask.

“And cockroaches,” says Brian with a smile. But I know he would like to live in one of these houses for a whole summer anyway, as much as I think I would. I say so, and he agrees.

“Yeah, Tybee's looking good.”

Most of its businesses appear to be arranged on a single main street, with only screen doors for security. Within one block are the post office, town hall, grocery store, tavern, tackle shop, fish market and mechanic. We pass our campground just before the street turns to parallel the ocean. After the turn it's all vast blue sky and cute hotels--no adjoining fun parks, no brassy franchises or crumbly dumps. Most are just two stories high and split by a stucco archway that frames the beach, which is strewn with umbrellas, sandcastles and scampering children. Here's the real deal holiday.

“This beach is even better than The Outer Banks in a way.” I think he means because of the cute hotels. It will be hard to go back to sleeping in the van after last night.

“We should check out our campsite.” I sound disappointed.

“Yeah. I kind of wish we were staying over here.”

“Totally.” I glance at him, head cocked and eyes wide. “Can we?” How many calls will he make; how much will he indulge?

“We can check it out at least.” He winks.

He pulls into three different hotel parking lots, goes into three different lobbies while I wait in the van, and comes out all three times shaking his head. All the rooms are prohibitively expensive, maybe because they’re scrapping the end of the high season. And maybe Brian is also, in unspoken tandem with me, quietly assessing our connection today, and decides at some point that he doesn’t want to rely on indulgences. Maybe if we are partners, neither of us will care how we spend the night or where we spend it, as long as we are together.

So we return to the campground, The River’s End. Its slogan is where the river meets the sea, but it looks more like where the forest meets the swamp. There’s none of that big blue sky to be seen. We’re weaving through a bunch of warrens; most camp sites are enclosed by a curtain of box hedges and feature nothing but a muddy fire pit. Near the office in the middle of the campground there are six wood framed tents though, on platforms, inviting with their verandas and soft light glowing through the canvas. The signs outside the office say the tents even have their own bathrooms. Brian goes in to get a map and see about an upgrade, and comes out shaking his head once more. $100 and sold out anyway.

“Seriously, for tents?”

He nods and drives the van into the back of the campground, to spot 105. I turn to watch the tents fade away. “Do they have satin sheets or something?”

“I don’t know but here we are. Can we make the best of it?”

"We can try." Our spot, as usual, backs right up to the water. Unfortunately, we only know it this time because of the hieroglyph waves on the site map; the entire twenty-foot square we’re parked in is swathed in ten-foot high shrubbery. On the long walk to the lone public bathroom, I obtain two mosquito bites, and Brian gets a few of his own while inside.  

“No showers,” I add. We return to the van and sit down in the back. Just sit there and stare at each other. It’s quiet, and it’s not even dark yet. We are ridiculous.

“You don’t want to drive anywhere else.”

“No, I don’t. But maybe we make the best of it by geting a great dinner and not come back until we’re ready for bed,” he says.

“No. You think?”

“Let’s go before I change my mind. I heard a desk guy at one of the hotels talking about a cool sounding place. I think I can find it.”

I brush out my hair and put on the only skirt I packed. I say “I love you” as we drive back over the bridge and turn deeper into the marshes, to a place I can’t believe he really does find. It brings to mind Disney again, but this time like my very favorite spot in all of Disneyland: the bayou restaurant inside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

It is The Crab Shack, and it is a magnificent call. The moss-clad oak trees, twinkling with white lights in the red dirt parking lot, are worth the extra driving. He could not have designed this restaurant to better fit our wishes. It is spread across three split levels of open-air deck, strewn with paper lanterns, sheltered by wood beams and willows that grow through the wooden floorboards. Miles of reedy marsh spread out from under the wide planks. Every table and has a hole in the center with a trash can underneath for scraps; over the hole is a platform holding a roll of paper towels and a basket of plastic utensils. The menu is a paper placemat with cartoons of crabs and crayfish who speak the dinner selections in dialogue bubbles. Overwhelmed by the choices, I just order a rum drink served in a carved coconut, a bowl of clam chowder and a slice of key lime pie. Brian goes all in and gets the low country boil. As we eat leisurely, with much reflective pausing and and napkin patting, flocks of terns dive among the stars that materialize in the sky and reflect in the ripples of water below us. 

We discuss the almost desperate need to return with friends and family, to order the bucket of beers and spend all night sampling from the massive mixed platter we spy at the table next to us. Everyone on the deck seems to be having a party; The Crab Shack is an event. Never mind that the ephemeral surprise may in fact be the crux of its charm, it is absurd to think this could be the only night of our lives spent here. We draw it out, according to plan, for almost three hours: idling in the gift shop, by the alligator lagoon (where I'm not sad that it's too dark to see much), on the porch swing and on the paths made of broken oyster shells, which branch out of the parking lot and lead into black woods on both sides of the restaurant.

Red dirt cakes the soles of my flip-flops as we leave, and back at camp, I study the color fondly before sliding the shoes under the van's front seat. It's extremely muggy outside, and though it’s not even ten pm, there’s nothing left to do but try and hurry along tomorrow. We set up the bed and play dominoes by flashlight. Brian wins, but I’m still not a sore loser because we are making the best of things. We keep the windows rolled halfway down in spite of the hard rain that begins to batter the roof. Hopefully it will keep the mosquitoes away.