Salt Marsh Sunrise

Dawn…tidal creek on the salt marsh….James Island, South Carolina

After a four hour drive from Augusta, I pulled into the front yard an hour before dawn. I turned the ignition off and just sat for a few minutes. It was so quiet. The only sound was the whir of the central air conditioning unit trying to kick off the blanket of humidity indigenous to the Carolina low country.

Though I can only see her silhouette against the starry tapestry of the moonless sky, a dozen years’ worth of summertime visits completes the picture.

At least fifty years old, solidly constructed of cypress, the house is surrounded by a broad deck , features more beds than the room for them, and is located on the edge of a James Island tidal creek.

On the east side of the house, framed by two massive oaks draped with Spanish moss, are the landing boards that threshold the wharf. The sun-bleached walkway stretches almost a hundred yards over the ebony pluff mud and stiff reed grass to the floating dock. A hinged gangway allows the dock to independently rise and fall with the tides . Positioned underneath are four rusty red Styrofoam pontoons, lashed with stainless steel metal bands.

Like a true beach house, function rather than style dictated her design. And her function was for making great memories... casting for the “browns” racing the tide out of the tributaries, pot-bound, blue crab freedom fighters sinking their claws all the way to the bone of a careless finger, dances on the dock to beach music, low country boils washed down with ice cold Budweisers…and the laughter of close friends…indelible, audio fingerprints.

Rose was the magnet that drew me to the low country. She and her family lived in Augusta, but the bulk of their summers, and mine, were spent here on James Island.

With her short black hair, olive complexion, and  ice-blue eyes was a five foot four inch whirling dervish of laughter, energy, and passion; Rose was always ready for an adventure!

The first time we crossed the Mississippi River during a road trip to visit my family in Dallas, we found a path that led us down to the riverbank. We threw our clothes on the grass, and baptized ourselves in the chocolate waters of the mighty Mississippi. And then, our hair still dripping, we laughed while we made love beneath a cathedral of primal river oaks, our secret rite of passage to the West.

Our vision did not match the reality.

Driving from Augusta to Dallas... and bored. We thought it would be a great idea to skinny-dip in the Mississippi River… we were idiots.

We took the first exit after crossing the bridge and drove down to the riverbank. We were laughing as we stripped off our clothes. Then, holding hands, we jumped off the bank into the chocolate brown waters of America’s septic tank.

Before our feet hit bottom, the force of millions of tons of water moving at about five knots grabbed our legs, and turned our romantic interlude into a writhing, choking, gasping fight for survival until we were swept into an eddy a quarter mile downstream.

Naked and bruised, we scrambled up the bank. Crawling on our hands and knees through an endless thicket of prickly blackberries interspersed with bayonet plants, we finally made it back to our car. But it took us an hour to de-thorn ourselves enough to painfully slip on our clothes, ease into our seats, and find the nearest shower to detox ourselves.

Rose, and by the number of cars scattered about, at least ten others were soundly snoring inside the house.

I found one Topsider on the floorboard, and blindly groped around under my seat for the other shoe until the sharp point of a safety pin convinced me to call off the search and step out on the damp lawn barefooted.  

The lush Bermuda felt great until I met some of the locals. 

With military precision, a blanket of red ants covered my feet before giving the order to bite in perfect unison.  

I would have screamed like a girl, but couldn’t chance waking a witness!   

So I just slapped as many of the little bastards as I could off my feet and legs as I jinked and hopped my way to the marsh and jumped of the edge of the landing, to sink shin deep in the soft, cool pluff mud. 

My feet popped like a muffled champagne cork as I pulled them out of the black mud, and stepped up on the wharf. Looking down as I gingerly gimped  across the weather-warped boards toward the dock, I saw angry mobs of militant fiddler crabs shaking their fists at me. Above my head, a gaggle of gulls were whoopin’, hollerin’, and braggin’ about the slices they were cutting out of the marble slab sky.

I stepped onto the dock, reached into the big wooden storage box and wrestled with the tangle of faded beach chairs.When I finally managed to get one pinned, I plopped down in it to survey my wounds.

As the rising sun melted the morning’s mist, the sounds of a salt marsh symphony swept away the still of the night… the haunting “who, whooo, whoooo” of a barn owl, Hungry Jack fishes slappin’ the shrimp around the waterway, and the hypnotic hum of cicadas.

The folks in the house were at least a couple of hours away from breakfast.

This is the perfect time for me to kick back and contemplate my future… our future… to wonder about the mystery of life, the meaning of it all, and what contribution I’d make to the enrichment of humanity?

But, at the moment, all I could think about was how good it would feel to dig my fingernails into those ant bites and scratch them ‘till they bled!