My Lowcountry

Samuel Henry David Alken

We've lived in the South Carolina Lowcountry for almost twenty years and it still pleases us when the real locals note, "You're not from around here, are you?" Truth is, we'll never be from around here, even if we never get to leave. And that's a prospect we struggle to face. 

In Conway, SC, which is the county seat, they don't ask where you live; they ask where you stay. Even someone born and raised in Horry County (French, "aw-ree"), who has never been farther away than to Georgetown, will tell you they stay in Conway, as if it's entirely temporary and accidental, as if they were telling you what motel they're staying in during their vacation..."We're staying in the Hilton. How about you?"

So that's my deal: I stay here. Because I can't leave yet. I stayed here this long for all those complicated reasons having to do with allowing some precious military brats to make friends and keep them all the way through high school; with having jobs that allowed us to pay for college for those same precious kids; with providing an anchor to parents whose health and mental tethers had grown increasingly slack; and with being as profoundly STUCK as every other homeowner in America right now. As fate would have it, we stay in the Lowcountry.

I have a couple of blog friends, whose work I admire, who have figured out that South Carolina is...shall we say, mean and ignunt? DRINKS BEFORE DINNER author Barry Knister uses the state as a reliable source of blog ridicule at least once every six weeks whether he needs to or not.  I always agree with him because he's clever, a terrific ironist, and he's right about SC. In his latest dead-to-rights (pun intended) salvo, Barry wrote,  "Politicians from South Carolina are all vetted before running. The process is rigorous and wide-ranging. If the person wishing to run for office reveals a capacity for higher-order cognitive functions, he’s 'de-selected.'" I wish I'd said that.

And a new friend, Bill Minnich of Nameless Cynic, has named inbreeding as the likely answer to the "timeless question, 'What the hell is wrong with South Carolina?'" He got some classic comments on his post "Something Could Be Finer" involving space women and interspecies conjugation with pigs.  There was even a comment so objectionable that Bill chose to delete it; I'm sorry I missed that one. In his newest lob at the Lowcountry, he brings up the state sport, bear baiting. Listen, Dear Reader, you'd be hard put to tell me something new about SC, and that's the most discouraging thought I've had in a year unprecedented for discouragement. Bear-baiting. I went looking for an image with which to open this post and had to do us both a favor by choosing a very stylized old painting instead of the photos available at Google Images. As Bill unmincingly notes, South Carolina is f*cked.

So how do we stand it? Well, we don't go out much. And we're very careful how we answer questions about where we "church," which is another way of asking whether we're good, God-fearing, right-wing conservatives or nasty heathen, hippie, socialist, Obama-lovers. Things are very, very black and white in this area. We've always chosen our few friends here carefully and we tend to keep an extremely low profile and well-tended, high boundaries. We read heavily. I have you and, increasingly, so does DH, who has come to think of you as friends he's never met. I even have a remarkable new SC friend, DemWit, in the Up-State, who can snark with the best of the progressives.

Charleston Single House

And we seek out the beauty in favorite spots within an easy half-day's drive. This is a beautiful place largely inhabited by unwelcoming, defensive, insular people who have every reason to feel like the rest of us don't understand them. Forget them with me for a moment. [We'll visit a couple of rice plantations. I am painfully aware of the unforgivable horror and sorrow of slavery when I am there. I walk through the buildings and grounds very quietly, trying to honor the victims, black and even some white, of that unpardonable practice.]

Hampton Plantation

Middleton Plantation

Middleton Plantation 

Middleton Plantation Gardens by Esperanto (wunderground.com)

Charleston Battery Homes

Home Garden, Charleston

Bald Head Point

Bald Head Light

Beaufort Inn, Beaufort, SC

You're welcome. I just bought my copy of Pat Conroy's South of Broad, about the street that divides the historic Charleston Battery from the less lovely parts. Charleston is so unimaginably beautiful, I walk its narrow streets, peering into walled gardens and drooling over the simplest window box, drunk on confederate jasmine and magnolia, and wondering how I could ever imagine living anywhere else. The city intoxicates.


I'm going to curl up after supper with overdrawn and passionate prose about The Holy City and try once more to juggle the impossible cognitive dissonance of life in the Lowcountry.

As Conroy says, "You really can't exaggerate the South."