What do you call those birds, Bubba? I asked.
On the Intracoastal there is hardly a post without a bird drying his wings, hardly a rail without a row of diving fowl having a chat, never a stretch of water without a half-submersible looking at you—Oh, he's up-ended, never to be seen again.
I don't know, said Bubba. Maybe loons.
Out into Charleston Bay, out and out—Where are the day-marks? I asked.
Forget it, said Bubba—I live here, let's rock and roll!
Straight across the bay, against the tide. Something was going on under the water, which was pooling and swirling and then the fins, the black fins cutting the waves towards us, and turning and coming in again, and the grey bodies flexing and rolling—two, three pairs. The dolphins are happy and they make you feel good too.
Charleston on the skyline—Charleston where the American Civil War began. Just behind us a small island—Fort Sumter. The fort was flying the Union flag and the rebels began to bombard it. After a day and a night Major Anderson surrendered to save his men. The Civil War didn't continue in a spirit of mercy and good sense, alas.
Coming at us all the way from Charleston the line of foam where the rivers meet—thump—Look how she has suddenly slowed in the current from the Ashley—look how the water is brown not blue!
Charleston was just there on White Point but it took forty minutes to get there, and another twenty to push up the Ashley River to the left of the point and arrive at the James Island Connector, which is the bridge that connects the James Island bone to the Charleston bone. Bubba handed me the tiller to take the Phyllis May under the flyovers and into our mooring because I am the steering man, the righteous one, the one who never fails.
There were three flyovers and so many arches and I chose the wrong arch and there was no room and as I turned the current was like a wall and Oh my God here we go I've lost it we will be smashed against the pillars but I got in somehow and you won't tell anyone will you?
EVEN IN ARCADIA
South Carolina
Jim Hit Him Before He Reached the Ground — The Beautiful Hunley Most Like to a Fish — It Effulged with Chrome — Don't Forget the Diver — Old and Mad and Busy and Joyful — A Satisfying and Well — Balanced Meal — They Never Found the Gorilla — The Mine Dropped Off and Started to Tick — Even in Arcadia-We're Not Going to Die — The Marina of the Damned — Ready to Run Across the Room and Dive out of the Window
I ALWAYS LIKE TO CARRY A LOT OF MONEY WITH me when I set out into the world and Monica, without my ever catching her at it, does her best to reduce the amount I can lay my hands on. This evening I managed to liberate twenty bucks and set out into Charleston for a pint with Jim. Bubba had gone—no use asking him out for a pint because he drinks nothing but iced tea, disgracefully sweet. Anyway they don't have pints over here and they don't have pubs and there are not many bars and they are dark and full of drunks and don't allow dogs. A hopeless mission—an old chap and his whippet driven by memories of how they did it at home a long time ago, a long way away, and the beer is no good so why bother.
Under the vaulting flyovers and across car parks and there was a door in the wall and behold a bar. I went straight in with Jim—they can always throw us out. The bar was dark and squalid and everyone was drunk, though it was but six o'clock—the other side of American temperance. There was no draught beer. I asked for a Samuel Adams and got the usual reply—Sorry sir I was sure we had one somewhere but we don't—and I settled for a Red Stripe, which comes from Jamaica and is rather like beer. No one seemed to have noticed Jim.
You are English! said the lady in a black business suit on my right. We went there last year, didn't we, Ethel, we went to the Lemon Minister, and Wark. You know Wark? And the Swolds, with all the fields and the cows and the walls—we liked the Swolds. We quite liked Wark, but we liked the Swolds more. Didn't think much of the Lemon Minister.
Is there somewhere I can get a pizza? I asked the barman. Can you order one in?
Yes, sir, said the barman and picked up the phone. An hour, he said, it's Saturday.
Oh dear, I said.
Next to me was a tall man with raggy blond hair, about thirty. Follow me, he said. You can't take that bottle outside so here is a paper cup. Come on, they'll put the beer on my tab.
In the car park there was a black pick-up. Jim and I got in—the cab was full of lead pipe and spanners and I had to sort of put Jim in my pocket. I'm Ed, said the tall man with raggy hair.
I'm Terry, I said, like Teri Hatcher, who used to be Lois Lane in Superman, but I'm straight.
Ed drove me to the centre of Charleston and left me outside a crack den. I have a call to make, he said—I'll be back. It's been a privilege to meet you.
The crack den was derelict, shattered, with a pile of pizza boxes on the counter and foxed posters of Marilyn and Marlon and Elvis. There were wrecked tables and chairs. I ordered a pizza and bought a beer, which turned out to be a sort of draught lager, and sat down. Jim lay down on the patched concrete floor. Jim doesn't lie down on concrete floors but he lay down right in the middle of this one and people walking round him stopped and petted him and he closed his eyes.
I began to realize what was going on—Jim had got the joke before me.
I didn't need to go to the restroom but I went because I had a theory and needed to check it out and there was sparkling porcelain and towels. All the filth and decay was deliberate—this was a sophisticated pizza restaurant and bar in the middle of downtown Charleston and I loved it.
Ed returned. Let's go—your dog must meet Hunley.
Hunley was an uncropped poodle rather bigger than Jim. He looked like a black retriever. He came out of the car like a rat from a drainpipe and Jim hit him before he reached the ground. The noise was terrible. It is very hard to separate two dogs fighting even when they are on leads but Ed and I managed it. When we pulled the furious creatures apart, to our surprise both were alive and unhurt. Ed put Hunley in the front seat on a short leash and I did the same in the back with Jim, where we sat on a heap of electric plugs and wires and Jim and Hunley growled in close harmony as we drove.
I call him Hunley, said Ed. I bought him because a poodle is a good boat dog and they are supposed to love water. He wouldn't go near the water so I chucked him in and he sank. That's why I call him Hunley—after the submarine.
IN EARLY 1864 THE UNION WAS STILL BLOCKADING the coast and the war was going badly for the southern states.
As night fell on 17 February a terrible machine came out of Charleston Harbour. On the 1,200-ton Housatonic Lieutenant Higginson was called from his cabin—
I went on deck immediately, found the Officer of the Deck on the bridge, and asked him the cause of the alarm. He pointed about the starboard beam on the water and said ‘There it is.’ I then saw something resembling a plank moving towards the ship at a rate of three or four knots; it came close alongside, a little forward of the mizzen mast on the starboard side. It then stopped, and appeared to move off slowly … it was entirely awash with water, and there was a glimmer of light through the top of it, as through a dead light.
It was the submarine H. L. Hunley, named after its inventor, who had drowned during its trials. The Hunley stuck a harpoon into the wooden side of the Housatonic. The harpoon was attached to a mine and as the Hunley backed away the mine blew off the starboard stern of the warship and sank it and killed five sailors.
The Hunley and its eight-man crew never returned to base.
In 1997 the submarine was recovered from the sea outside Charleston harbour. The salvage crew had expected a machine stuck together from old boilers, but the Hunley was beautiful, most like to a fish. She was made from three-eighths of an inch steel, and she was forty feet long, four feet wide and four feet high. She was powered by cranks operated by hand and there was no evidence that fresh air could get in when she was underwater.
I thought of the Italian human torpedoes in the Second World War, and the British who came on the Tir
pitz from beneath.
Death should be proud to take such men as these.
ROBERT THE OPTOMETRIST, WHO LIKED THE American prose masters, had called with one of his motor cars. Jim was in the back seat and Monica was next to him, and I was on the front seat with Robert among the levers and the silver.
It was a 1951 Buick Roadmaster—the one with the mouth-organ smile, and fake supercharger vents down the side. It was not in a fifties colour—nothing so vulgar—it was thirties apple green, two-toned. The '59 pink Cadillac Eldorado is the very Marilyn of motors, but for style give me a '51 Roadmaster—ninety-three on the Swansboro Scale—no, make that ninety-five. This is the very Marlon—it bulges with muscle and it effulges with chrome. It has white-walled tyres and windows that sink sideways, leaving you in an unglazed summerhouse. It gives you the fifties message before Elvis, before James Dean—Look we won the war and the thirties depression has not come back—in fact I have plenty of money, though you personally may have very little, and I have a car that might not be very graceful but it is solid and helps keep things the way they are and as far as I am concerned they can stay that way for a very long time.
Of course things were not that way for long, and we must all thank God they were not, but Robert's ‘51 Buick is still that way—spotless proof that if you want to make something beautiful it helps to have taste, it helps to have sensitivity, but you should above all have confidence, know where you are heading, be sure you are right.
We drove to the Battery Park and Robert, who was born in Charleston, found a parking space and took Jim for a scream. There are a lot of trees in Battery Park, and a lot of squirrels. Back to the car, with Jim exhausted—and there was an African-American gentleman of a certain age having his photo taken against the car. The black guys love it, said Robert.
We agreed that there is only one thing worse than gongoozlers, and that is having no one take any notice of you.
Robert plucked the fruit of fifty years’ living in Charleston by finding a second parking space and we marvelled at the eighteenth-century coloured wooden houses, narrow-fronted, balconied: and the public buildings with their pillars, and we strolled under the trees. It was a South Carolina November day, like the best English July day you ever remember. Robert told us that in 1951 even a Buick Roadmaster did not have air-conditioning and Goodness it can get hot in the summer.
We walked down the long tourist markets full of grass baskets, cypress bowls and semi-precious jewellery, and I bought a T-shirt with Frankly My Dear I Don't Give a Damn on it and nearly bought a three-foot-high copper frog but Monica stopped me.
More African-American people—Man, that is the best car! I love the car!
How do the races get on in Charleston? I asked Robert—up in Virginia there are a lot of mixed-race couples in the malls and a lot of African-American soldiers but people don't seem to mix so much round here.
Now that's not an easy topic, said Robert—I'd rather write to you about that one. And he did—
Overall, blacks and whites in Charleston get on very well. When problems do arise, it is often not so much related to skin colour as it is to cultural differences. These differences, oftentimes associated with family, political and work values, can add to the division. Many folks in the US have become resentful of anyone, black or white, that places an undue economic burden on government indigent programs that cause the politicians to raise taxes.
Next day I asked an English expatriate—What is the proportion of African-American people in South Carolina?
About 30 per cent. There are no problems—people have had hundreds of years to get used to each other.
Do the races mix?
No, they lead separate lives.
ALL NIGHT LONG THE WIND WAS HOWLING AND half hid under the concrete flyover the Phyllis May swayed and the rigging on the yachts rang like bells. A dull morning and low clouds rushing over and rain. It was one of those days that are hot and cold at the same time—windy and sweaty. When we went out of the boat it rained and when we stayed in it stopped and we stayed in and got depressed.
Our rubber visitor spent the morning under the boat, scraping: his bubbles gargling and rolling up under our windows.
You had a lot of barnacles, he said, pulling up his executioner's mask—and grass too, and you are being eaten away. Your propeller is changing colour. You have rust on your bottom.
You are on salt water, which is a very fine conductor, and the water is full of electricity, from other boats, from marine installations, or generated by the ever-present forces of nature. Your sacrificial zinc anodes under the bow and the stern go first because they are lower on the periodic table and then your prop goes and then you go. Your anodes started a foot long and now they are the size of tennis balls. Only your anodes have saved you from electrolysing away into a handful of fizzing rust.
What can we do? I asked.
There are two boatyards not very far away. They will draw you out and look at your anodes and your bottom. It is possible that you will need English anodes and they won't have those.
At the time of writing, and I would guess at the time of reading, neither yard has rung back.
We mustn't let the buggers get us down Mon—we'll e-mail Pete and Karen at Canal Cruising in Stone, and go for a walk with Jim.
OUT INTO THE DAY THAT WAS TOO HOT AND TOO cold at the same time and through filthy vacant lots past the big hotel. Oh my Gard, said the uniformed doorman—what a pretty little dog, and what a lovely colour, like a little deer.
He pulled Jim's ears and then he went inside and came out with a box of lemon biscuits which he gave us and we thanked him and wished him well and walked on.
I thought you are supposed to tip the doorman, I said to Monica, not the other way round.
This is the South, said Monica.
A mile later a park by the river. A pier, with a courting couple and an African-American fisherman from Central Casting. Under the trees dozens of tents and camper vans and bikes—a group sitting round, men and women, all ages. Excuse me, said Monica, is it a race?
No, said the dominant male, a large old man in a camping chair—we are cyclists. That's the beer wagon—get a beer, sit down. You folks from England? Why is your dog so thin?
The group explained that they came from all corners of the United States to ride their bikes—not race them, just ride out together round a course maybe thirty, forty miles long. Then they come back to their campground and drink beer. You are a club? asked Monica.
No, we aren't a club—we just turn up to the events that are organized. This lady came from Seattle, I came from California. The events are usually organized very badly.
The large man showed me his motor home—it was one of those that goes out at the sides like a bellows and it was like your front room but bigger, with a steering wheel in the corner. He showed me his bike, which was a pedal version of the ones in Easy Rider— you sit down low with your knees up and the handlebars out in front. I rode this one from Miami to San Francisco last winter, he said. We have a tandem too like this and my wife and I ride together—she is a new wife—my first wife died eighteen months ago. I am seventy-four.
We chatted a long time with these people and they were so happy they made Monica feel happy too and they made Jim feel happy and he lay around and they petted him and they made me feel happy because one of the taps on the beer wagon gave forth a liquid very like beer. These people were not rich—they were mad and busy and joyful—they were the best.
When we got back to the boat there was an e-mail from Karen—she had taken advice of Brian at the other boatyard who knew about such things and they thought we had a good chance of making it to the Gulf of Mexico just before we fizzed away into half a pint of Diet Coke.
MONNIE HAS GONE TO THE MALL, SO YOU AND I CAN dine together in Charleston, gentle reader, my dear old chap, and how kind of you to join me. I will show you a typical American dinner—it's not the same as back home you know.
Jim can't come. Don'
t look at him—it will spoil your evening—the betrayed eyes.
We'll go in your car. It's only a hundred yards but there are no pavements and there are the fire ants and you can get arrested for walking on the side of the road with a funny accent.
Here we are—next to the fourteen black pick-ups. See that shed—the rusty one with smoked windows? Up those wooden steps with the dirty carpet and the people waiting in line. It's six o'clock-we've left it a bit late.
Inside already—you can't see? You must have poor night vision—take my hand and come over here by the T-shirts.
Hi, my name is Ellie Mae and I will be looking after y'all. Our specials tonight are shrimp and grits and she—crab soup. Can I get y'all a drink?
I'll have a bottle of Palmetto Ale, please, Ellie Mae—that's the local IPA, isn't it? My friend will have the same.
Something the matter? Oh, I see. Relax, man-they are all likethat—they are students working their way through college and yes they are gorgeous but I would have thought the fires had died down a bit by your age. Calm down—she's coming back.
Here are the drinks and the iced water—are y'all ready to order yet?
Yes Ellie Mae, I'll have the shrimp and grits and a house salad and collard greens, and my friend will have the ribs and a salad and fried green tomatoes.
Balsamic vinegar dressing, Italian, basil, thousand island, vinaigrette, Greek, ranch, creamy dill, or blue cheese? And are y'all having another drink?
One basil, one ranch please, and two more beers.
See how they hustle drinks—I had eight glasses of white wine here one night with no effort at all. But most people drink water or Coke or, God forgive them, iced tea. The calorific value of a bottle of sweet tea is the same as a pint of London Pride—a narrow choice, eh? Take you a while to make your decision about that one—could lie awake all night, har har.
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