Visions. Port Royal Sound, South Carolina, a stiff northwest wind, a four-knot floodtide, and a boy bucking wind and sea with a load of lumber. Tall, thin, tow-headed, fearless and freckled, he was surprised how much lumber he had piled on his 16-foot skiff. And a short while later, he was sorry for it. Two-by-fours mostly, some up to 16 feet, the longest hanging way out over the bow and the shorter ones ranked to port and starboard so he could still see his heading.
A vision of myself, blubbering along with an old Evinrude 18. The boat quartered into the swells, rode them well, but the seepy old hull was flexing like a split-out shoebox. Spray froze in midair and needled my face. Overboard, I’d last maybe 30 minutes. A life jacket would have been a frivolous formality, useful only for easing the recovery of my remains. An eternity of furrowed sea the color of gunmetal, each wave topped with a hiss of pepper-gray foam.
Fifteen miles from home, five more to go.
Some say big waves come every seven, others say every nine. Yet other grizzled and wind-blown old blisters will tell you to keep a weather eye for the Three Sisters, the last of which doomed the Edmund Fitzgerald. I lost track of the math and a mountainous sea was upon me before I knew it.
Time slows down when you are eyeballing the Death Angel.
The skiff buried its nose in green water. I wrung the throttle as that damnable long lumber dug into the onrushing wave. The skiff faltered, then shook itself loose and slowly began to rise. The hull bested the big wave and hung balanced upon the crest, bow and stern both completely clear of the water, the prop cavitating, the engine howling like a banshee.
I was beginning to think I might live long enough to hang my lip over another plate of mullet and grits when there came a splintering crack from beneath the lumber. A torrent of cold seawater ran over my shoes, pooled against the transom. The fuel tank floated and bobbed in the sudden flood. Though I could not see it with my eyes, I saw it in my mind. A bottom strake had busted loose and I was fixing to drown.
But maybe not. I throttled down. The boat slid down the backside of the swell, squatted in the trough. I pulled the drain plug. Water ran in the bow, coursed over my feet and right on out the stern. Thank you, Sweet Jesus.
Like a man caught out in a north-country blizzard, I’d live only so long as I kept moving. Preoccupied with water at my feet, I neglected to read the water ahead and shortly ran myself slap up on the backside of that big mudbar at the mouth of Station Creek.
The prop chopped bottom, the skiff staggered and suddenly water was coming in both holes at once. I fumbled the plug back into the drain. No tilt or trim, I crouched and wrestled the motor till just the bottom half of the prop found scant purchase. One hand on the throttle, the other cocking the 18, I swung seaward and held on. The water-pump was sucking wind. I’d have one, maybe two minutes till the engine seized. Oh Death Angel, I spat in your eye.
Morse Island Creek was an easy run. Half-throttle, blowing around the gentle switchbacks, out of the swells now and most of the wind, riding the winding creek between St. Phillips and Bay Point islands. There, on the east bank, one turn before the creek broke out of the spartina flats into the rolling surf of Gale Break, was an unnamed little side-creek. And at the end of that creek was a scrubby marsh hummock, maybe a couple acres of tousled beach grass, a scattering of palmettos for shade, the usual tangle of wax myrtle and the beginnings of a fish camp.
Two friends awaited the arrival of the lumber. I hailed them a hundred feet from shore. “I’m taking water!” I hollered.
“Gun it!” One of them replied.
I wrung the throttle one final time. With a tooth-rattling lurch, the skiff came to a sudden stop and I stepped out onto almost dry ground.
I was 15 years old.
Dreams. God made the world in six days, the Good Book says, and on the seventh, He rested. Along about day three, He slung his right hand in a mighty arc and made the great splay of the Bight of Georgia, from Hatteras to Canaveral, 500-plus miles. He was mighty busy, yes, but He knew what He had just done, as the Book says not even a sparrow falls to earth without His knowing.
My world was slab-dab in the middle, astride four deep estuaries. Upwards of 400 islands, trackless spartina marshes, a delightfully confusing mosaic of creeks over-laid upon filigrees of other creeks – some half-million acres total, 50 percent under water at high tide. And what a tide it was – eight, nine feet twice each day. This was my playground, workplace, my larder and church. And it was my birthright. It was life, it was liberty, it was the pursuit of happiness. And it was inalienable.
Inalienable? I thought so, anyway.
River Dogs, they called us, River Rats, others said. Pappy was a dock-builder, grand-pappy too, and my great-grand-pappy was a Confederate Naval Officer. My buddies had similar pedigrees. Wrestling that load of lumber ashore was memorable, but hardly unique. Swamped, washed ashore, marooned, oyster-cut, sunburnt, hit by lightning, missed by bullets . . . thank you, Sweet Jesus, once again.
There was a currency of a cast net, a double-drop bottom rig, a galvanized bucket, a cast iron pan, a rash of bacon, a sack of grits and maybe a sixpack of Pabst Blue Ribbon if we could afford it. No I.D.? No problem. Just slide it through the till at the A&P with the rest of the vittles.
It was a fine thing to be a boy back then.
Spot-tails, trout or drum, mullet, shrimp, or oysters, the rag-horn island bucks and wild hogs we busted from the palmetto thickets. If anybody went hungry, he deserved it. Jean Ribault, the first European to see all this, proclaimed in 1562, “There is no finer or fitter place.”
He was right.
Fish camps, dozens of them. Casawadda, The Blood Shot Inn, The Old Glory Hole, Chimmey-Hammy, The Capers Hilton and the Tomaine Tavern, misspelled, places where boys could learn to be men and men could learn to be boys all over again. All you really needed was a deepwater creek reasonably close to high ground. Deed, lease, permission? Clear title to tideland hummocks kept a tribe of lawyers up at night, even in those days. We took full advantage of the ambiguity.
Gale Break Camp, two rooms, 14-by-24 or thereabouts, of sturdy but unconventional construction. Used lumber, scrap plywood, lots of windows and a tin roof that rattled us to sleep in the rain. Gutters running into an overhead shower tank, a toilet that flushed with each tide change, a dock of cast-off pallets and assorted jetsam, a wheezy Kohler generator that produced quavering and uncertain illumination, and a Dixie No-Smoke stove that smoked plenty. We built it all ourselves.
If it wasn’t heaven, it was close enough, considering the skeeters, the sand gnats, ticks and copperheads.
But the Devil came a-calling, hammering on heaven’s door. Call him the tax man, call him the real estate wizard. Call him the government man and the environmentalist with the absolute best of intentions, the road to hell, being paved with them, some say. Call him Faisal idz Abdul Aziz Alsaud – the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
Who?
That’s right, Prince Faisal, later King Faisal, who came looking for an obscure, remote and secure anchorage for his sea-going yacht. The high ground immediately to the east was almost perfect, except for the bunch of shotgun-toting boys staking tenuous claim with a dock of pallets, Kohler light-plant and a plywood shack.
But to someone, that last impediment was easily remedied by a gallon of gas and a match. A day later I stood ankle deep in the ashes of my childhood dreams, bellering like a lost calf. And my rage burned hotter than any fire.
I plotted revenge, each scenario increasingly impractical and entirely unlikely. The mills of the gods, the Greeks remind us, grind exceedingly slow. But yet they still grind. In Saudi Arabia they have an annual event, the maglis, they call it, where anybody from the lowest goat-herder to a prince can sit down and chew over grievances with the king. Eight years later, almost to the day, on March 25, 1975, Faisal’s nephew came before him, kissed him on the forehead as is the custom there, then shot him dead with a pistol. The nephew was later beheaded in a public square. Bless him, he saved me a plane ticket, my neck too.
It all seems a dream to me now, but I know it’s no dream. The camp is gone and Faisal is dead, historic facts. Though only a single post from our old dock remains rotting in the mud, other evidence abounds in the lives of men who as boys enjoyed the Gale Break Camp. Two engineers, a career naval officer with combat command at sea, an intrepid “gentleman smuggler” and one man who in the span of 40 years was a boatwright, a restorer of historic buildings and a gifted bluegrass musician. And me, blessed to later run boats from the Bahamas to Hudson Bay, a writer, a plague upon the developers and real estate tycoons, a seeker of visions and a dreamer of dreams.