Don gestured that we should hold hands round the table and he said grace, and included a prayer for our journey. A good dinner, good wine. What do you think about the place of the African-American people round here? I asked.
Different races are made different and have different ways, said Don. There are a lot of black single mothers. Most of our crime is done by black people—most people in jail are black, and it costs a lot to keep them there. You British used to hang people in public in your colonies until quite recently. We should bring back public hanging right away.
You know that's not going to happen, said Pat.
SIX HOURS' BOATING FROM SOUTHPORT—PLAIN sailing on a sunny morning. The canal was fifty yards wide and in the sky Don and Pat on the high bridge waving—they had come to check we had not starved in the night.
Today we would sail out of North Carolina, but the great sounds, the captains, the seas of grass, the dolphins, the beards on stools, the German shepherd, the kindness of strangers, would stay in our memory, in colour with stereophonic sound.
And what did you make of North Carolina, Terence my son? Towards what conclusions did your self-obsessed and drink-sodden brain struggle, what glint of understanding dawned of this great state the size of England of which you have seen but a skimming, but the rind?
I can offer this—one Sunday we left built-up and military Virginia and drove south. As we crossed the border we came on roadside sheds and shops and markets that seemed to say Look you are in North Carolina it is different here, a bit looser, more of a holiday place. In North Carolina there are waterside palaces with quays and fifty-foot boats and there are trailer parks with dinghies. There are forests and sky, seas of grass, the shining ocean—and talking of the shining ocean here we are sailing across the blue estuary of a river, tiny by North Carolina standards, but wider than the Thames at Greenwich, and the air is cool and the ospreys wheeling and the gulls like risen souls and on our left the Atlantic, which has calmed and blazes white as eternity.
The tide pulled under me but I held between the sandbanks and pressed towards the cut on the other side of the estuary and the electric beetle at my elbow crossed the red line into South Carolina, and we crossed with it.
Brent and Michele had warned us that Barefoot Landing was a funny, vulgar place.
Yo ho ho for Barefoot Landing.
IT'S CALLED
BEING FRIENDLY
South Carolina
Santa Claus Is Coming to Town — The New Work of Giants — The Lowcountry — We Don't Care How You Do Things Up North — Message in a Bottle — Verdurous Glooms and Winding Mossy Ways — Three Generations at Thanksgiving — Bum on the Road and Wind in the Hair
BAREFOOT LANDING IS T-SHIRT SHOPS, OUTLET shops and restaurants. I like outlet shops though I don't seem to have any luck with them. Once I became the only man in the civilized world with a flesh-coloured T-shirt that reached down to his knees. Then there was the business shirt made out of deck-chair material.
Not far from us in Stone there is an outlet village off the motorway, but I can never find the way in. An outlet with no inlet. But say, are you listening—it's November, and Santa Claus is coming to town!
He came thirty feet up and twelve o'clock high, with Dancer and Prancer and Donner and Blitzen and Rudolph, bobbing and jingling. The sleigh did a half-circle and landed ten feet away. Ho ho ho, said Santa. A dozen pretty women fell on him and they all danced, including Dancer and Prancer and Donner and Blitzen and Rudolph.
We were in the Alabama Theatre, Barefoot Landing, watching the best show we had seen since the Lyceum, Crewe, thirty years ago, and you should have seen the girl who played Robin Hood in that one.
The audience had trooped in busload by busload, holding on to each other. They became a field of cotton, a thousand white heads row on row. The comedian appeared as a sly slow-talking southern lad and Monica and I thought he was exaggerating, though he wasn't. He mocked the old folk for their Toyota Camrys and how they would stop before turning off a main road. He mocked them for their windcheaters. The old folk laughed and laughed—they enjoyed the attention.
The Christmas Show was two and a half hours and we did not want it to end. Dancing and music, some of it to do with Christmas. One of the dancers was just like Jim the way he jumped and hung there, with his long face and stricken eyes.
The country music, the soul, the bluegrass fiddle—well-fed people with jobs entertaining well-fed people with pensions—but like the songs of Wales the music drew its power from old hunger, and looked to a better land over the river.
BAREFOOT LANDING IS AT THE NORTH END OF Myrtle Beach, which is an Atlantic leisure city—a linear city with forty miles of beaches—the Grand Strand—and fourteen million visitors a year. The south end of Myrtle Beach was dim gift shops and a rotting funfair and dying clubs: lovely and tacky and flapping in the wind and shut. The north end was exploding—hotels, hotels, hotels, golf courses, fifteen hundred restaurants, and on the waterfront concrete, concrete, scaffolding, steel, piles of gravel, trucks, cranes.
We decided not to interrupt Myrtle Beach in its fury, and left wishing we had come ten years ago. The Atlantic thundered on and the waves had not been developed and the sand was still free to all, and sometimes to dogs, and the Atlantic will be there when this new work of giants lies desolate.
• • •
BUCKSPORT LANDING ON THE WACCAMA RIVER is famous for its sausages. The trees were white and bare and the Waccama was black because it was made of tea so it all looked like the set for The Creature from the Black Lagoon, which like the Waccama River was in black and white and three dimensions.
Five Good Ole Boys came along the quay. In fact they were Young Ole Boys: camouflage and denim, hatted and fat. One of them was African-American. We had turned up in their lunch break. They wanted to know about the Phyllis May and we told them. She's a real neat boat, said the Young Ole Boys, and Is that a greyhound?
Why are all the trees dead? I asked.
They ain't dead sir—they're cypresses—at the first frost they go brown and the leaves fall off—here is one of the leaves, see, like a feather. In the spring they pretty up again.
Why do they call this the Lowcountry? I asked.
Because it's low, they explained.
Jim's thighs bunched up and his ears grew to their full height and turned like radio telescopes. A whippet is one of those animals with focusing ears. He rose on his back legs ready to leap the twenty feet off the boardwalk and into the marina garden to seize the marina cat, whose existence was an unendurable insult. He screamed and screamed—he is six years old now, and at the peak of his strength, but he has always been a good screamer. Stop it, Jim stop it, said Monica—poor cat.
Let him go, ma'am, one of the Young Ole Boys suggested.
Goodness, no, said Monica—he'll kill the poor cat, or the cat will scratch him and scar him for life.
Jim screamed some more and nearly pulled her off the boardwalk.
Let him go, ma'am, said another of the Young Ole Boys—round here it's permitted.
DON HAS COME THROUGH ON THE E-MAIL WITH some tips about the Deep South, said Monica, so we know what we are getting into.
That farm boy at the gas station did more work before breakfast than you do all day at the gym.
We all started hunting and fishing when we were seven years old. Yeah, we saw Bambi. We got over it.
We don't do hurry up well.
No, there's no Vegetarian Special on the menu. You can order the Chef's Salad and pick off the two pounds of ham and turkey.
Tea—yeah, we have tea. It comes in a glass over ice and is really, really sweet. You want it hot—sit in the sun. You want it unsweetened—add a lot of water.
We eat dinner with our families. We pray together before we eat (yeah, even breakfast). We go to church on Wednesdays and Sundays and we go to High School football games on Friday nights. We still address our seniors with Yes, sir, and Yes, ma'am, and we sometimes still take Sunday d
rives around town to see friends and neighbours.
So every person in every pick-up waves? Yeah, it's called being friendly—understand the concept?
No, we don't care how you do things up north.
Bucksport Landing was a wharf with a chandlery and a restaurant, looking over the black Waccama. The famous sausage was full of herbs and very good.
Leila and her mother came to join us at our table. Leila was two and blonde. Monica and I cuddled Leila and missed our grandchildren. Are you part of the marina family? Monica asked Leila's mother.
Yes, in a way—the boss is my stepfather. I am divorced.
My God, I thought, divorced with a daughter of two.
The boss was a thin chap of a certain age who seemed to do everything that was done round here. He came over and took off his apron and told us about the chap who went out fishing on the Waccama with his dog. A light plane came over. A bottle dropped from the plane, and in it there was a message—Your dog has fallen off the boat. The plane led him back and circled round until they found the dog.
Then there was the chap who advertised for a female companion to go to Florida on his yacht and no one replied. He put in another advertisement saying he was leaving at nine o'clock on Tuesday, so there. Eight ladies turned up and he took them all on board. Two left the boat at the next stop and others dropped off along the way and when he arrived at Florida there were only two ladies left, who decided they fancied each other and went off together.
WE STAYED A COUPLE OF DAYS IN GEORGETOWN alongside the main street with its coloured houses and shops and left in the arms of high tide and banged down Winyah Bay with the wind against the tide and after an hour we turned into a cut and it was sunshine and trees and eagles and the wind at our backs and we turned right and here we are at McClellanville.
We moored to a rotting quay and watched the shrimp boats coming in. Each boat had attendant pelicans sailing behind an inch off the water or sitting on the back talking to the sailors. One pelican was smoking a pipe. What does the cry of the pelican sound like? asked Monica.
It's not so much a cry, I said, it's more of a low laugh.
To reach the quay we had to climb up ladders so greasy that we put old T-shirts on the rungs. We hoisted Jim up in his life jacket and went for a walk, Jim pulling and sniffing and pursuing his mission of pissing on the whole of South Carolina.
McClellanville was founded in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1989 Hurricane Hugo arrived and they found the shrimp boats three miles inland. But McClellanville is still here—wooden houses, dirt roads, trees trees trees—twisted and bloated and corky and branches veiled in Spanish moss, branches growing out and down as if to grasp you off the pavement and carry you into the sky. A plaque says one of the trees is a thousand years old. In McClellanville the mayor is a tree.
The dull evening light did not reach the ground. We stumbled through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Monica told me about a plaque in the church in Georgetown, from the Civil War, for an officer of twenty-eight. His afflicted mother mourns the loss of her only son but resigns herself to the will of God.
In the South the memories hang from the trees like moss, like photos of the dead.
An old wooden chapel lit from inside like a lantern. A lady on her knees fixing flowers to the pews for a wedding. Where y'all from? she asked, and we told her.
If you want a lift anywhere, she said, y'all just come and ask me—I'll go to the supermarket or anywhere you want. Y'all just come and ask me.
They are so generous, said Monica—it's been the same all the way—piloting us across the dangerous bits, airplane flights, dinners and lunches and parties and barbecues, buckets of shellfish, bottles of wine, trips in cars, work on the boat, moonshine, T-shirts, pork scratchings, drinks without number, friendship, advice—and they never want anything back.
Mon, I said, it's just what that French chap de Tocqueville said—As long as you are staying with a Southerner, you are made welcome, and he shares all the pleasures of his house with you.
Good old de Tocqueville, said Monica, got it dead right—when did he say that?
Eighteen thirty-one, I said.
IN THE SOUTH YOU CALL YOUR ELDEST BROTHER Bubba. We had met Bubba at Atlantic Yacht Basin. He was a fit chap in his fifties and his wife, Jeanie, was younger and small and pretty. Jim leaped into Bubba's four-wheel drive with a single bound.
Bubba drove us for an hour into Charleston. He owned a company that put up signs, and he pointed out his white and blue signs, proud against the winter trees along the highway.
Three generations at Thanksgiving—twenty seats at the table. We linked hands and Bubba's brother-in-law gave thanks and prayed for his family and for peace and for a safe journey south for his visitors. I thought What have we done that people are so kind—we brought a boat and a dog to America—was it that big a deal?
A buffet—turkey, ham, stuffing, cranberry fool, sweet potato in a meringue pie, asparagus, carrots, crème brûlée, lemon pie, marshmallows—the lot. Iced tea. Beer and wine but only Monica and I seemed to drink it.
Jim lay next to Bubba on the sofa. Jim was so pleased to be asked. In America he was left behind too much—not like France, where he could go anywhere.
One of the family was a sixteen-year-old girl. It is now widely accepted that Edgar Allan Poe died of rabies, she said.
I suppose he went out of doors and the chiggers brought him down and a fox got him, I said.
Bubba's brother Robert was an optometrist. He enjoyed the mid-century American masters—Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Hemingway. Like others I had met, he had not heard of Raymond Chandler. I asked him about his favourite American poem and he explained people didn't read much poetry in the US.
Bubba's mother told us it had snowed on Tuesday and it never snowed in Charleston and if it did it never snowed in November and she had not seen anything like it and she was eighty-four. I did not tell her what Monica and I do to the weather.
Bubba's nephew, who was nine, told us about the Civil War—a quarter of a million soldiers killed, he said, and that was just on our side.
With twenty people from the same family I expected argument, conflict, threats, perhaps violence, but this was an un-defiled Thanksgiving—expected, pure, loving.
It was a Norman Rockwell painting. That's me in the corner, the big chap holding a beer, and there is Monica on the sofa showing our photo album and everyone is looking really interested and Jim is snuggled up to Bubba but the painting is not about us; it is about celebration, and freedom from want. It is about family, about America, about happiness.
And suddenly they were all gone—in England everyone would have been drunk by now and would have stayed half the night arguing, but the Americans don't do things that way. They vanish, sober, into aery nothing.
IN FEBRUARY I HAD LOOKED DOWN AT CHARLESTON Bay from thirty-five thousand feet and today with a bit of luck we would arrive at that bay and cross it at sea level and sail up to Charleston, on the point where the Ashley River meets the Cooper River. We were going to stay a couple of weeks—Charleston is Mile 475 on the Intracoastal—we had been haulin'. McClellanville to Charleston is forty miles, and Bubba came to help us drive the boat.
Monica and I always spend an hour on the tiller and an hour off, so we don't have to hold a board meeting every time we change over. I decided Bubba would have the first hour and went up on the back and showed him how to drive.
First you start your engine by turning a key deep inside the engine room, and you climb out on to the back counter. Then you pull a little flap thing which is a sort of a safety catch—now when you drop into gear the engine will be connected to the propeller, which is very important because (all together now)—
The engine bone's connected to the Gear bone
The gear bone's connected to the Shaft bone
The shaft bone's connected to the Prop bone
Oh hear the word of the Lord!
There is a handle just here at y
our left hand called a Morse handle, but that is to confuse the Germans—it has nothing to do with Morse code. You push the Morse handle down and the gears engage and the propeller goes round and round and you move forward. The more you push the handle down the faster the propeller goes and the more noise you make. Pull the Morse handle back—here is the clever bit—and the gears disengage and the propeller stops and keep pulling it back and back and the gears click in again and the prop goes round and round the other way and you go backwards, though not in any particular direction.
The tiller is more tricky. It's too late to do anything about the front of the boat, which has already arrived, but you can have some effect on the back of the boat by pushing the tiller in the direction you want the back to go. The boat swings on its centre point and keeps on swinging until you find your new direction or hit something. Of course the propeller is not helping—always walking the back of the boat to the left in forward and to the right in reverse.
That prop, that prop's gonna
Walk you round
That prop, that prop …
(Look, that's enough, Terence my son) Just a quick point finally—if you get near the shallows the banks drag your stern in and you need the strength of a man possessed to get back into the channel but we don't want to upset ourselves with all that.
A blue day, a new day, the cut fifty yards wide, small waves chasing us, yellow marsh grass to the sky. Sometimes houses and jetties, all fully stilted. Now and then a boat coming from behind: always slowing, always waving—Bubba in full cry with the Morse on the metal and the engine roaring and the boat shaking and the tide behind us and the beetle scampering along the little screen at eight miles an hour.
I gave up trying to enforce our steering regime—like Brent, Bubba is not an easy man to get off the tiller. These chaps are used to the four-storeyed plastic boats they call trawlers—to them driving a narrowboat is a Frog-eye Sprite instead of a Ford pick-up—bum on the road, wind in the hair, a girl and a pint waiting at the end of the afternoon, and you are eighteen again.
Narrow Dog to Indian River Page 15