A Colonial road, a looted grave and a deathbed promise.
You don’t want to fall off your horse in the middle of Prospect Road. It might look like dirt, but it’s hard as concrete, paved with shell, packed solid by 250-odd years of feet, hooves and wagon wheels. A canopied road like a long green tunnel, oaks on either side reaching out ’til their branches touched, intertwined, like the fingers of lovers holding hands. Spanish moss hung like God’s own tears and deer ghosted beneath it all. From Jolly Shores, the 1950s juke joint on the Cooper River, two miles to the old Indian War battleground at Bloody Point, it’s been closed only once, when the Yankee Army built a fort across it in 1862.
More recently, two corporations tried to close it and failed. When this High Roller from Savannah bought the land on both sides, the last LLC, to keep their corporate ass out of a sling, presented the High Roller with the following addition to the deed. After describing the meets and bounds of 200 acres, it read, “Except for the Exclusions Noted in Exhibit A.” Exhibit A outlined the public’s right to Prospect Road. More simply put, High Roller owned the road, but the public owned the rights to it. Didn’t seem to matter. High Roller dropped two monumental pines, one at the west end, another at the east. We called the law.
Daufuskie Island, South Carolina, 6,000 acres of maritime jungle, five miles of beach, 14 miles from the nearest traffic light, a sore thumb against the sea. No bridge, no yoga, no yogurt, no problem, but suddenly discovered by men with dollar signs for eyeballs. Halfway between New York and Miami, the logical Martha’s Vineyard of the South.
But the river was deep, wide, dangerous and expensive. Three-hundred million dollars was not enough, their Gucci shoes could not save them and they went down, down, down like Pharoah’s host in the old Negro spiritual, drowning in a sea of red ink, hallelujah, amen, lawsuits and voodoo curses flying. We took wry but scant notice and kept to our ways, butchering deer, hooking fish, netting shrimp, catching crabs, picking oysters and clams. We sawed lumber, burned wood, grew vegetables and marijuana.
There were sundry offenses and sundry challenges raised, successful mostly, but then came Prospect Road.
Poets, painters and potters here, drawn to this beautiful, wild and sparsely settled place. But Bobby Burn wasn’t just drawn to Daufuskie, it was his home. His folks ran Jolly Shores, his grandpappy was the keeper of the Bloody Point Light and, as a child, he would barefoot it up and down Prospect Road between the two places. He went off to Germany in the 1960s as a helicopter mechanic for the U.S. Army. When his tour was up, he was recruited by the CIA to patch up planes for Air America, the clandestine airline running arms and ammo into Laos and Cambodia and, some say, heroin back out. But Bobby claimed to know nothing of the cargo on those return trips. He did two tours outside Saigon, many nights under rocket attack.
Bobby’s contract with Air America had an interesting clause. At the expiration of his duties, “the Company” would fly him to any airport anywhere in the world it was legal to fly into. Bobby chose Copenhagen, bought a 26-foot Hans Christian sloop, named her Blue Gypsy and sailed her home to Daufuskie.
Solo.
He took a wife, went to sea again, another three trans-Atlantic crossings. He tarried in the Abacos, gave up the sea, built a house from timbers from a railroad trestle and a pulpwood barge, began throwing exquisite pottery based on the prehistoric Indian shards that litter the ground here like dry leaves. In a good year, he’d go through 6,000 pounds of clay.
But his house was his eventual undoing. The timbers were sopping with creosote, used to deter shipworms in those days. Creosote is highly toxic and, on a hot day, the air inside just reeked of the stuff. Twenty years of breathing poison led to throat cancer. He summoned me to his deathbed.
I told him I wouldn’t let them close Prospect.
He took my hand, smiled weakly and said, “I don’t know, Rog. High Roller has a lot of money.”
“Your grandpappy and my grandpappy were friends. Your pappy and my pappy were friends. You and I are friends. That’s a hundred years. He won’t close that road. You can rest easy on that.”
He lasted a couple more days, died in his wife’s arms.
Though he was a man of great faith, there was no funeral. We spread his ashes on the river he loved so well. His wife put a memorial stone in our old Colonial Cemetery off Prospect Road, next to his grandpappy, momma, daddy, aunts and uncles. Dates of birth and death and an epitaph, “Tell Everybody I’m OK.”
I was chair of the Island Council, the closest thing we have to mayor. The Council, elected since 1962 from amongst the bearded and bleared constituency, had no enforcement power but was charged with offering home-grown solutions to unique island problems. A resolution was proposed and unanimously passed with the appropriate whereas at the beginning of each paragraph, 17 in total. Complicated format but simple intent. We asked Beaufort County to keep Prospect Road open by whatever means they deemed most expedient and efficient. And the County Council, weary of the issue, slapped High Roller with papers condemning a 50-foot right-of-way slap through the middle of his land.
You could hear the howling clean from Savannah.
High Roller lawyered up and counter-sued, fine with the county as their insurance picked up their legal tab. The barristers bullshitted and bellered while we waited two years for a court date.
Meanwhile High Roller was up to more mischief. He bought ten acres between Prospect Road and the Colonial Cemetery and blocked access. We sicced the law on him again.
We call that cemetery Mary Dunn, as Mary Dunn gifted ten acres to the people of Daufuskie in her 1876 will. Oldest crypt is Phillip Martenangele, a captain in the Royal Colonial Militia, murdered in 1780 by patriot partisans on his own front steps before his wife and child. Eighty-odd years later, soldiers from the 7th Connecticut Volunteers, hearing that plantation gentry were always buried with their wedding rings, broke into the crypt with their rifle butts, smashed the coffins and scattered the bones. It remained open for a century and, as a child, I remember the grisly sight. But a tribe of canebrake rattlesnakes took up residence therein and were a perfect hazard to cemetery visitors. Bobby Burn shot the snakes and walled the crypt back up. Newest stone is Bobby Burn’s.
High Roller cited the statute, “Abandoned Cemetery on Private Land.” But Bobby Burn and Mary Dunn had the final word from their graves.
Then High Roller said a road diagonally across his property impeded his full enjoyment thereof. The county elders agreed. He could close the road, but only if he provided equal access along his western fenceline. High Roller complied and built the new road upon his neighbor’s property, not his. But the roadwork uncovered what was left of the old Yankee fort. We put up an historic marker, and the tourists loved it.
She’s six feet sock-footed and a great beauty. I call her “Leggy” and she calls me “Boss.” She wrangles horses and real estate, runs a freight barge on the side. It’s a bit like the old Higgins boat, the landing craft that stormed the Normandy beaches in 1944, but aluminum and in rough shape when she got it. New rigging and new steering helped, as did new twin Yamaha 250s on the transom, 18 knots fully loaded. Want a horse or heifer hauled over? Hay to feed them? Pickup or tractor? Bespoke barge service, ready when you are, weather allowing.
“Gonna name her Prospect Hope,” she said.
“How about Prospect Cut Ass?” I replied.
“No, Prospect Hope.”
“God bless, you sweet Leggy. You know our state motto?”
“What is it?”
“While I breathe, I hope.”
Prospect Hope.
Perfect.