Once upon a time, that was the bumper sticker slogan advertising Pawley’s Island, a strip of sand located north of Charleston, South Carolina. At that time, the island, accessible by a low bridge across the marshland, embraced and celebrated its age, history, and lack of modern commercial development. Many cottages were little more than shacks, and there were no stores or high-rise condos.
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo came along and just about wiped the place clean. I know, because I was there, before and after. I’ll save the story of that hair-raising experience for another time. The 1930s era rooming house, Rice Cottage, where we paid a grand total of $15 a night, was knocked cock-eyed, never to recover.
Last time I crossed the bridge to the Pawley’s Island beach road, I noticed that “arrogantly shabby” had been replaced by regular arrogant. Shacks gave way to beach mansions. Vacation rents soared way beyond what our $15 budget was accustomed to. We found our way to another beach up the coast, one with a laidback attitude, where I resumed my career as a Shark’s Tooth Hunter (another story for another day). However, I will always remember Pawley’s Island as my first introduction to the joy of seaside leisure–the friends we made there, the redwing blackbirds perched swaying on the sea oats, the huge pile of boiled shrimp spilled out on newspaper laid on the porch floor for “peel and eat” dinner, the scent of saltwater and the shushing of the surf. Year after year, it was worth the two-day drive from Kansas City to the coast.
Life moves on, but thankfully the Muse gave me a way to remember those times.
RICE COTTAGE AT PAWLEY’S ISLAND
For once, a few words cannot draw the scene
as well as, say, a watercolor would.
The late sun crosswise of an afternoon
defines the sleepy drift of solitude
here on a slanted porch where windy ghosts
rock in the chairs. Abandoned, the beach gear–
umbrellas, towels, shoes, deflated rafts–
awaits its lively human engineer.
Napping somewhere? Distinctions scarcely hold
in this happy, haunted cottage by the sea,
between the habits of the young and old,
where time lends credence to eternity,
where autumn light defies the written word
like love, or the variations of a mockingbird.
Barbara Loots
Road Trip