Roads to Quoz

by William Least Heat-Moon

  In colonial days along the Atlantic coast, menhaden kept many people from starvation, and for plantation workers in the Caribbean and elsewhere, it was a staple. Yet Washington Irving, speaking of Knickerbockers eating menhaden, wrote that “no true Dutchman will admit them to his table”; perhaps his view was influenced by the meaning of the word in the tongue of the Narragansett — “that which manures” (you’ll recall Squanto showing the Massachusetts Pilgrims how to fertilize their corn by planting a fish with each kernel).

  At the northwest end of Front Street, we came upon a tall black man in his seniority who spoke in a melodious, precise, and Latinate way — return for come back, appear for show up — yet his pronunciations were fully regional: oyster was arster, yesterday was yahstudy, and they was dey. James Chadwick was resetting a wooden post meant to keep automobiles out of a small public-garden at the end of the street. His shovel chunked hard against old mollusk shells which create a richness in the soil, and that’s what we discussed until I asked about menhaden.

  “We call them mammy shad,” he said. “Mens would split them and remove the interns and then charcoal them.” The female fish provided roe, the real treat, but the flesh too, with the right preparation against the oil and bones, made good eating. The only place for a traveler to find them, he thought, was in season in somebody’s home. “You’ll just have to return,” he said. “We can provide.”

  On the way back to the Bog Trotter, I saw a poster announcing the Blackbeard Fest, a celebration of the pirate who used Beaufort as a haven for his infamous flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. In my home state there’s a celebration of Jesse James, and elsewhere around the country I’ve run into Dillinger Days, D. B. Cooper Days, a cafeteria honoring cannibal Alferd Packer, a Billy the Kid Invitational Fast Draw Shooting Competition. When a Business Sucks Sale isn’t enough, what can a strapped Main Street do but to honor villainy to turn twisted history into a buck?

  As the boat made its way down the coast and deeper into the former marshy retreats of pirates of the early eighteenth century — local historians call it the “Golden Age of Piracy,” which raises the question whether our descendants will one day refer nostalgically to the “Golden Age of Terrorism” — contemporary emblems of the piratical became more evident: T-shirts depicting eye-patched rogues or sporting aphorisms (SURRENDER THE BOOTY), restaurants with names like Pirate’s Cove, AARRHH scratched in ragged letters on a dock, Jolly Rogers flying above luxury yachts. (This latter manifestation may appear incongruous unless one considers where recent looters of retirement plans and education savings accounts and widows’ pensions have spent some of their plunder, all of it accomplished without a single cutlass or musketoon.)

  Somewhere nearby, divers had been working for several years to prove a submerged wreck was indeed Edward Teach’s flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge. Should it in fact be so, we can expect soon thereafter to see a Six Jolly Rogers Over Blackbeard’s World. In another time, attitudes toward piracy on the high seas were different: English pirate Thomas Goldsmith’s tombstone is carved with

  Pray then, ye learned Clergy, show

  Where can this Brute, Tom Goldsmith, go,

  Whose life was one continued evil,

  Striving to cheat God, Man, and Devil?

  Sailing inside a coast of tricky inlets and shoals once providing brigands escape and hideouts, we moved down Bogue Sound, a narrow strip of water behind a skinny barrier island called Bogue Banks (rhymes with rogue ranks). Except for one “state natural area,” it was entirely given over to side-by-side vacation housing that is to a hurricane as a school of mullet to a shark. Q said, “How much do you think it took to trash this place?” Less than it’ll cost after the next Category Three.

  Along that portion of the Waterway, unused pleasure boats hung in hoists, their Jolly Rogers furled for the season. On transoms were their home “ports”: Vail, Las Vegas, Fort Worth, Nashville. For every cruiser or yacht under way, there were a hundred serving mostly to decorate a dock the way two-storey columns may do for a contemporary house, the message the same. I began writing down names I saw on transoms: Good Judgement (except in orthography), Swagger, My Booty, Pay Dirt, and (is there a marina without one?) Wet Dream. I was not likely to see the Preposterocity, or the Good-bye 40l(k), or the Leveraged. Eighteenth-century pirates, not usually noted for a sense of irony, at least had a way with ship names: sailing the high seas were the Most Holy Trinity, or the Childhood, or Happy Delivery, Good Fortune, Black Joke, the Merry Christmas.

  I was watching from my favored lookout on the Bog Trotter, a wind-sheltered nook at the stern, a high perch often attended by a passel of laughing gulls elegantly airborne and sweetly graceful until some sort of tidbit rose from our wake; then all aerial hell broke loose as the birds dived for what I think were small fish stunned to the surface by the prop wash. It may be such swarming that has associated gulls with greed. Once filled, the birds would chortle to shore, Hah-ha-ha-ha-ha-hah, more mock than mirth, the fed gulls laughing all the way to the bank, and there they would take up a mooring post or a yacht mast and duly squirt it with digested fish.

  The Waterway passes the eastern edge of Camp Lejeune, a portion of it near the Marines’ firing range which can shut down the Intracoastal but has also kept that stretch free of franchises and vacation housing. A coast anywhere may draw martial operations, and the Atlantic inshore route — itself a product of war — passes numerous historic fortifications and militaried sites, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. At Camp Lejeune, so I heard, weapons “exercises” cease during wildlife breeding seasons. (Were the moratorium applied to humans as well as muskrats and toads, perhaps humans could begin fornicating weapons of war into silence.)

  Our run past the narrow and marshy Topsail Island was, on the west shore, several miles of enlarging Wilmington, but on the east bank a cordgrass marsh had defended itself with squelchy, uliginous ground. Nevertheless, stuck in the morass were a pair of signs in fading letters; from a distance I read one as VIOLATED PROPERTY FOR SALE, and I thought the second was VERITABLE POVERTY FOR SALE. What truth in realty was this? As we closed in on the signs, I raised the binoculars, trying to steady them against the movement of the boat, and then I made out on both: VACATION PROPERTY FOR SALE. (A more accurate offer would be FEMA, HERE I COME.)

  We had reached the country of the Cape Fear River which terminates that long coastal bight and takes its name from a 1588 storm of such ferocity that a ship of hardened English sailors fell into panic. The Bogger left the inshore route and ascended the river for the night, docking under the protection of the old sixteen-inch guns of the battleship North Carolina berthed across the channel. For riverborne travelers, the city had a pleasantly accessible and historic downtown where, on a deck at the edge of the Cape Fear River, we found a pint of handcrafted beer and a bowl of spiced shrimp, sausage, and mushroom stew, but we were too late for the collard soup.

  8

  Ob De Goole-Bug

  DESCENDING THE RIVER AT DAWN and returning to the Waterway, the Bog Trotter turned sharply west at Southport and began a run past forty miles of more vacationers’ shores, notably Long Beach, a lengthy and solidly compacted grid of houses. Q joined me topside and, surprised to see the sudden change in landscape, said, “What fresh hell is this, Dorothy?” Preparation for Myrtle Beach not far distant.

  About midday we entered South Carolina. Horry County (don’t pronounce the H) is the site of the final construction work in 1936 on the Waterway, and difficult work it was, cutting through eighteen miles of fossiliferous-limestone ledges now known as the Rockpile, one of the few places on the route where stone crops up and provides several miles of excellent scenery different from the marshes. But before the Bogger reached the Rockpile, she tied up across from piles of rock of a different sort, three ten-storey condos under construction opposite Barefoot Landing a little west of the beach at Myrtle Beach. It was a good wharf but for the other end being attached to a shopping center of low-end fra
nchises. On the Waterway, it’s a maxim rarely gainsaid: “Sail on the rising tide.” Because of the Rockpile, that’s what the boat was waiting for.

  We went ashore to walk. I was just killing time when I stepped into the Bible Factory Outlet, because I wasn’t interested in buying a Bible factory. Assuming an outlet store sells only merchandise discontinued, overstocked, or damaged, I told the polite clerk I was looking for a discontinued Bible. He considered and said, “All our stock is current, but we have a New American Bible for Catholics that’s a little shopworn.” I said being a fellow of old-time religion, I really couldn’t settle for anything less than a discontinued Bible. “I have one with the Book of Revelation torn out,” he said. “Would that do?”

  I also passed up a T-shirt with a big yellow Smiley-face and the proclamation I LOVE GOD! as well as GOD BUYS UGLY LIVES, because I was sorry to learn at long last the face of God was the Great Smiley (although relieved to hear about His checking account). Next door was a shop offering Ts with a different cast: EVER RIDE A FAT BOY? And for the ladies: GIVE HORSES A BREAK — RIDE A COWGIRL. And: MESS WITH ME — MESS WITH THE WHOLE TRAILER PARK.

  The Rockpile, though appearing dim in the darkness by the time the Bog Trotter reached it, came as relief. When night overtook us, I went to the cabin to read a book lent by a fellow traveler, a memoir about South Carolina rice farming, once the major crop of the Low Country. In his Seed from Madagascar, Duncan Clinch Heyward wrote in the late ’30s of a ripening rice field:

  Some days it changed as constantly as the colors change on the surface of the sea. . . . Over the fields a breeze often blew, thus the crop was kept in constant motion, swaying in one direction and then in another [and] the whole field, as far as one could see, appeared to be alive, shifting with the wind, the sunshine, and the shadows of passing clouds.

  By first light, the boat was beyond the Waccamaw River, an especially beautiful (said the captain) if short stretch of the Waterway we’d traveled in darkness in order to catch the tide. The Bogger passed Georgetown and left Winyah Bay to enter the Minim Creek Canal and its subsequent cuts that link with rivers and gutters and marsh, forty-five miles through the unbroken beauty of wildlife refuges all the way to the outskirts of Charleston. Even the shrimpers’ opolis of McClellanville did no disservice to the beauty thereabouts. When I travel, I have a phrase I hope to utter at least a couple of times: It’s for this I’ve come, and I said it along that stretch of the magenta line.

  The most rigorous definition I know of the South Carolina Low Country says it runs from about Winyah Bay to the Savannah River and as far west as the tidal reach, some thirty miles broad in places. On westward lies a portion of the great coastal plain, an area that in previous travels has led me almost to despair over the poverty of the people and the consequent degradation of their land and resources. Along the Waterway in South Carolina, almost none of that impoverishment appeared, and a voyager might erroneously conclude that the remnants of slavery and sharecropping were at last gone, but the truth was that the fallout of human-chattel history was still quite visible from highways west of the tidal waters.

  Several times I’d talked with a chipper woman of pith and vinegar, born a North Carolinian but long a resident of South Carolina. Frances Pierson answered my questions, her responses informed by eighty years of experience, never afraid to say she didn’t have an answer, often showing wit touched with irony. We talked as we approached Charleston where development became heavier but appeared less conspicuous than what we’d been seeing. She said, “We know the value of a tree here. We don’t cut down all the trees to build a house,” her implication being there were fewer vulgarian places. And true it was that the adventive homes and the natural selvage along the Waterway fused in lovely accord and with less ostentation. She said, “Since air conditioners, some people have forgotten about trees.”

  Despite its name, the sylvan harmony vanished with the Isle of Palms, a barrier island adjoining Sullivan’s Island, the setting for Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” a story about finding Captain Kidd’s buried treasure. From 1827 to 1828, Poe was stationed there at Fort Moultrie and spent time in walking the open land, saunters he drew upon when he later wrote the story and described the place with a pile of negations now having a positive ring:

  This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a scarcely perceptible creek oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands and where are some miserable frame buildings tenanted during summer by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard, white beach on the sea-coast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle so much prized by the horticulturists of England. The shrub here often attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burthening the air with its fragrance.

  Pieces of his description are still recognizable, and the fort yet stands, but much of the island today is driven by a commercialism that makes the words (in coastal dialect) of Poe’s character, the manumitted Negro servant Jupiter, seem prophetic: “Dis all cum ob de goole-bug!”

  As the Bog Trotter motored around the hooked point of the island, Fort Sumter appeared a mile distant, a narrow shadow on the horizon. In April of 1861, secessionist troops of General P. G. T. Beauregard began bombarding Sumter before dawn, but Union soldiers inside the fort didn’t engage until after sunrise when the first Federal shot of the war was fired by none other than Abner Doubleday of later baseball renown. One report says Doubleday succeeded in putting two rounds into a hotel near Fort Moultrie. (Charleston itself just then took no Union shells, a good thing since men in top hats and ladies in crinolines were cheering cavalierly from the waterfront.) Doubleday, in his Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–61, says, “Our own guns were very defective, as they had no breech-sights. In place of these, Seymour and myself were obliged to devise notched sticks, which answered the purpose, but were necessarily very imperfect.”

  With the surrender of Sumter thirty-four hours and four-thousand rebel shells later, Federal commander Robert Anderson ordered a hundred-cannon salute before lowering the flag; exactly halfway through, the cannon discharging the fiftieth round exploded, a “friendly fire” that killed a Union soldier who became the first of more than six-hundred-thousand casualties, the color of their uniforms of no consequence.

  Not far east of Sumter, three years later in 1864, a contraption made of an old boiler became the first submarine to sink an enemy ship when the Confederate Hunley took down the Housatonic — and somehow itself — in another history-remaking battle between ships of alliterating names. Like the Monitor, the Hunley had been found recently and retrieved, its entombed sailors reburied, and was being readied for display. Such was the topic as we entered Charleston harbor. A North Carolinian, who had lent me several books, said, “Warships on display and prettified battlefields feed warmongering, but if instead we put up wax replicas of dead and mutilated people, maybe the history of wars would have less jingoism. Let kids see the reality of blood and spilled intestines. Don’t show a bronze soldier charging forward — show him bloated and rotting in the mud, his eyes pecked out by vultures.”

  Five miles up the harbor, on the Ashley River, the Bog Trotter tied to a dock at the city marina not far from the heart of the old town, and there most of our fellow passengers departed to be replaced the next day by some new, happy lubbers. We were six-hundred-fifty miles out of Baltimore, the upper South now above us, and below lay the nether Southland of Low Country cooking, tidal rivers, cabbage palmettos, yaupon holly, and those invisible biting insects called flyi
ng teeth.

  9

  The Oysters of Folly Creek

  OF THE PASSENGERS DEPARTING were two South Carolinians, both attorneys, who shared our interests in history and good food and, by happy chance, had an apartment overlooking the city dock. When I first saw the passenger manifest, I reversed their genders, not a difficult error to commit in the South. Garland McWhirter, the daughter of Frances Pierson, was married to Pat McWhirter whose given name, Harrie, also didn’t clarify at first who was who. When I learned Garland was named after her grandfather and he after an aunt, my error seemed less Yankee. For our layover in Charleston, the McWhirters and “Miz P” offered a long excursion from Sullivan’s Island to Folly Beach, in pursuit of the place historically and culinarily.

  Just before sunset, they drove us southward out of the city. I had hopes of at last finding some Low Country pine-bark stew. At an END COUNTY MAINTENANCE sign, we ran out of paved road and followed a packed-dirt lane to a lumpy parking lot, where leaving one’s car in the wrong place while inside the eatery could mean returning to find the tide had turned your vehicle into an aquarium.

  Behind large heaps of bleached oyster shells was a consecution of connected, low structures, hodgepodge sheds looking more like a transmission shop or recycling center than a restaurant. A few yards distant, Folly Creek was ebbing. A splintery, ramshackle pier wobbled over marsh grass to the edge of the redolent gumbo, a substance here called plough (pronounced pluff), a Land of Cockaigne for oysters.