Like all video lectures, this one goes on too long, with endless unnecessary polite introductions. The interesting part begins when Horry County Museum Director, Walter Hill, takes over, at 5:00 minutes in. I think I recognize most of the sites here, just from the kayaking around. You will too, from the blog. Now learn what important industries all those weather-beaten shacks used to house!
Above link brings the incredible Carol Burnett singing that hilarious satire on an old Dixie song, “The Swamps of Home” (from OUAMattress). It will get you laughing. The photos are just a wrap-up of B-roll shots from my fabulous, too brief (%&! Southwest) visit with the folks back east. What an amazing post-vax treat for us all. Thanks Mom, Leslie and B.J… especially a kiss to Les, to whom I still owe a very stiff drink, for coordinating and for the dealings with the airline.
PLAYING POGO IN WACCAMAW NAT’L. WILDLIFE REFUGE DEPT.
For the View, a weather report calling for a ‘15 percent chance of rain’ has been far from a deterrent to exploring a given locale’s natural history. Thus at 9:OO this morning, I saw blue skies and puffy clouds, was cheered, and duly set out for the Waccamaw NWR, Conway’s crown jewel. As in, them jewels:
The river runs down through Georgetown and is the (protected) watershed for the whole Grand Strand. Virgin blackwater bald cypress swamp is the ecologic regime.
I’m sad to say I am mostly innocent of the names of the principal plants and denizens of this amazing swamp. Forget about the Latin names! (It took me two years to figure out how to web-search for specific plants in the CFP, where it still can take two or three hours to pin down a particular species. And all that former experience means bupkus here! There is no Jepson’s Manual.) But I have learned about Carolina Ponds, or Bays, of which I found a couple:
You know as much as I do about the species that prevail — black bear, possum, fox, bald eagle, cottonmouths, swallow kites, otters, frogs. In lieu of naturalism I pay tribute to Walt Kelly, Mom’s favorite cartoonist. Perhaps not coincidentally, he’s the best wildlife cartoonist in American history.
Long story short: I was a mile-and-a-half into the beauty, when the blue heavens turned gray and suddenly opened. Water rises fast in the swamp. I had to run — slowly — slip on that boardwalk and you’re in with the ‘gators and cottonmouths. So while distant alarm bells rang at the various kayak launches, I dashed — slowly — back to the trailhead, pathetically flinging wet mud off my muddy fossil scallop shell for Mom, and stopping to take photos where my breath ran out from the beauty, not from the jog.
By 1:00 pm I was back home, hot-showered and jammied-up, and Mom was brewing hot ‘Constant Comment’ tea to stave off the chill. It was a fabulous day.
Philadelphia; to Bridgeport; to Burbank with Disney; and he even died in the SFV, in Woodland Hills. One of the great California writers.
It’s not the heat, it’s the humility — the lowness, that is. Sea level plus inches.
View the lows of Horry County, South Carolina (stifle your sniggers and pronounce it like Orry-Kelly). View too, a bit higher, her fine seat Conway. This was formerly pronounced Kingston, until the King became de trop round these parts, in 1776. The town’s mostly Tory elite fled after him, nipping its bloom in the bud.
So Conway never “took off” economically. Even during the Era of Good Feelings, it was still a backwater. Local history plaques blame absentee landlords. (Read the inscription, I don’t make this stuff up.) But today, there’s a good farmers’ market; we tried the boiled peanuts. You should too. Hot damn!
View our lucky folks kayaking on the Waccamaw, pronounced the usual way. Twenty bucks at Waccamaw Outfitters gets you a paddle and two cool, fresh hours in paradise.
After the sequential horrors of the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, several bank crashes, the Depression, the Second World War, and a devastating hurricane flood just three years ago, then finally Covid-19, Conway hasn’t had the (ahem) breathing room to bustle and acquire the wealth that might have killed its spirit. A perpetual “comer,” it is yet unspoiled by over-development. But the traffic on any random corner is as bad as LA’s (seriously) and the wait for a pedestrian signal where two county roads cross, is just as irritating. Still, my walk downtown brought me to the only thrift store; it had two fantastic, authoritative local histories! (A buck each, bottom of the box! Badda-bing.) Better still, I spotted the Main Street Theatre marquee was touting an optimistic revue, “Brand New Day.” Mom was so excited she got us tix! The show was wise and gutsy — Sondheim-centered. Books, nature preserves, musical theatre, history… well, the VVV can confirm sleepy Conway is nicely civilized.
Georgetown is the next county south. Confusingly, its magnificent seat is also “Georgetown.” But both were first “Winyah,” exclaimed as if you were cheering the place on.
Terribly important spot for American history, especially African-American history and food history; for this was of course a capital of the American Rice Coast — the brutalized daughter of the African Rice Coast. Slave labor on countless back-country plantations gave tidewater Georgetown traders wealth. Many of these were Jewish, even in the seventeenth century. Georgetown remains largely Jewish to this day!
Of course the Christian cemeteries feature many memorials for members of the densely interbred armigerous planter caste: Fraser, Middleton, Butler, Allston, Allston, Allston…
Here in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved West African rice farmers were put through hell to clear the cypress swamps, levee the river banks, grade the paddies, and balance the outflow of fresh black river water against the in-flood of salt tides from the sea. The slaves, whose people in Guinea and the Senegambia had domesticated rice centuries before, essentially taught the whites how to grow it economically. Their astonishing contribution to American and world agriculture and wealth deserves remark; of course their unwilling efforts perfected white exploitation and the destruction of the tidewater ecosystem. The amazing story is well told at the Rice Museum, which is in the old Market Clock Tower.
After the Civil War and Emancipation (celebrated here officially for the first time as a Federal Holiday, this Juneteenth!), devastating hurricanes filled the paddies with salt water. Without their slaves, the planters couldn’t fix the fields; and when the local ‘free laborers’ (meaning the freed slaves themselves) failed to jump at the chance to do their old life-destroying jobs for the pennies-per-week the planters were willing to cough up to pay them, all that rice got pretty sticky. So the factory farms were sold off to Yankee robber barons, who eagerly put in duck-hunting clubs, yacht clubs, and pleasure gardens. The most important of these carpetbagging barons, from an aesthetic point of View, was Archer Huntington, son of the Southern Pacific’s Collis P., half-brother of the Pacific Electric’s Henry, and himself…a translator of early Spanish poetry. (One simply has to do something, even with inherited railroad millions.) Archer and his Bohemian sculptress wife Anna Hyatt bought out four of the old rice farms, including most of the Allstons’, and built Atalaya, a fantasy of an Hispano-Moorish coastal fortress.
Atalaya has two inflections of meaning: “watchtower,” or keep; and “high place, clear Views, good light,” thus cognate with atelier, meaning studio for Anna. As with so much in the Lowcountry, hurricanes wrecked their idyll and eventually ruined Atalaya. But this allowed the public to visit; the Huntingtons gave the ruin and the beach, and the whole vast acreage of their work-from-home hacienda, to create the state park.
Nothing could be finah than the beach here. I may have covered Atalaya in the VVV before, but there’s nothing so romantic as a ruin and it was even more fun to crawl around it with Chris than it was the first time. So how could you not enjoy seeing it again too, Patient Reader?
The Valley Village View 