in the stillness
lowcountry reverie
“At sunset we watch the saltwater tides rising with perfect congruence to the rising moon. No matter the time of day, the creek spreads out in the thrown coinage of sunset, bright as a centerpiece in the transcendental green of the great salt marsh. Everything we notice is a timepiece calling out the muffled drumroll of our own mortal days. I’ve come home to the place I was always writing about. Fishermen wave as they come in with their catches of sheepshead or triggerfish. Battery Creek returns to the sea, passing Parris Island, where Marines on the rifle range are practicing their accuracy skills. The Beaufort River sweetens the flow as it moves through the town where the mansions look like the summer homes of the creatures of a misused tarot deck. Born homeless, I’ve tried to make Beaufort, South Carolina, my own. To me, these islands didn’t exist until I found them. I invented the marshes, the oyster banks, and the ink-dark creeks that divide the marshes until salt water runs up against solid land … in the distance, the air fills with warplanes. The sound is soothing to me, the chamber music of my boyhood. I embrace it as something that belongs to me.”
That’s Pat Conroy, a Southern boy who spent a significant chunk of his life in the South Carolina low country. I spent relatively little of my life there — a few years, off and on — but I’ve never been as happy and relaxed and free as I was as a boy noodling around for crab and shrimp in the low country tidal marshes.
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