Wisdom, shrimp and palms on Low Country islands

If you love the marshes, creeks, bays and guts of the Great Marsh and Inland Bays, you would be thunderstruck in the South Carolina Low Country. Familiar Spartina spreads out for days in all directions, studded here and there with small and large islands.  The big difference is that on these Low Country islands, the tall swaying loblolly pines keep company with the gracefully spreading branches of Spanish moss-festooned live oak trees and Seuss-like palms.

Heading down the Intracoastal Waterway - many boaters call it The Ditch - between Charleston and Beaufort, we passed another reminder of Delaware coastal living. It was the weekend, very low tide, and we saw three or four green, Carolina-skiff type runabouts perched high and dry on mud flats sloping down from the banks of an island lying in the midst of the marsh, along the waterway.

In a clearing surrounded by live oaks, pines and palms, a haphazard group of tents dried in the morning sun. In the light of the waxing moon the night before, young people probably partied - smoking and drinking, singing and carousing until one by one, in the hours well past midnight, tired and worn out from a long day and longer night, crawled into their tents to let their minds and bodies recover.

Maybe, when the coals of their downfall fires glowed with steady heat, they hung a pot over the pulsing embers and simmered a mixture of short cobs of corn, cut-up red skin potatoes, thick slices of fat and salty kielbasa, shrimp still in their shells and plenty of Old Bay with an extra dose of red pepper flakes to keep the tongue’s attention.  Such Low Country boils do it all and go down exceptionally well with cold beer.

But the Sunday morning after, the fires were cold and the tents were quiet with their sleepers tucked warmly inside against the cold air of mid-March nights and the dewy mornings that come with the season. It reminded me of generations of young people in the Rehoboth area, who as part of their rite of passage, loaded runabouts with camping gear, food and drink and made their way to Thompson Island at the top of Rehoboth Bay for weekend camping trips.

On this Low Country island. no one needed to be in a hurry. At least four or five hours would have to pass before the tide returned enough to float their boats and allow them to motor their way back home.

Wisdom in Bohicket Creek
We pointed Nellie Lankford’s bow toward the fuel dock at Bohicket Creek Marina, just north of the inlet for the North Edisto River, near Seabrook and Kiawah islands. A young man helped us tie up and we took on about 12 gallons of fuel. Not a whole lot of fuel, but at $4 a gallon we still felt the bite. We were averaging about 2.6 miles to the gallon, but we couldn’t complain about the scenery. I paid for the fuel with a credit card and then handed the young man a $10 bill and asked him for $5 back. He reached into the cash register, took out a five and handed it to me.

“What did you do with the other $5?” I asked.

“Put it in the cash drawer,” he answered.

“That’s for you,” I said, “for helping us out.”

“Oh, well thank you very much sir.”

“No problem,” I said, and paused.  “Two pieces of finance wisdom.”

He stayed with me.

“First, a car dealer friend of mine said his grandfather always taught him ‘Grab the cash.’ The second is the old banker’s rule: If you can have your money today or you can have it tomorrow, take it . . . “

“Today,” he said.

“Right on.”  We both smiled.

We told him we were headed to Savannah for St. Patrick’s Day.

“That’s a wild scene there,” he told me. “Just don’t do what I did.”

“What’s that,” I asked.

“I can’t remember.”

I changed the subject.  “What’s an important piece of wisdom that you have picked up?”

The young man thought, but only briefly.

“My mother is an emergency room nurse. We had an unorthodox talk about sex one day. She told me that if I was ever going out in foul weather, make sure to wear a raincoat.”

He wasn’t smiling much, only a little if at all.  The advice meant a lot to him and he took it seriously.

“You have a very wise mother,” I said.

“Yes sir,” he answered.