Week 27 - Santee Coastal Reserve, Beaufort

It was a bit chilly heading out of North Myrtle Beach. My first stop was at an Asian Grocery to get some tea, dried fruit, and produce, and then I got onto 17 and headed south. At one point I was stopped on the side of the road changing jackets when a Sheriff's car went by trailing a line of Harley riders in formation, a line so long it stretched out of sight. They kept passing and passing, there must have been a hundred at least, and eventually I realized it had to be a funeral procession. I'd read in the local news about a motorcyclist dying around 1am on the previous weekend. When they'd all passed by, I continued to Georgetown, where I stopped for a walk along the waterfront and lunch at a nice little cafe complete with locally-grown tea.

By the early afternoon I'd covered the 80 or so miles to Santee Coastal Reserve. My expectations were set low by the drive in through several miles of monotonous managed pine forest, but eventually the road opened out into a shady tunnel through massive live oaks, and the campground turned out to be a majestic open space under big oaks and pines. The camping was free and first-come-first-served, but although the sites were already quite far apart and there were no water pumps or bathrooms for people to congregate at, the park managers had recently removed a number of them, leaving only five. I can't find any rhyme or reason to the way public land managers are responding to the pandemic, maybe they feel they need to do something, even though there are very few reports of outdoor transmission. In any case, I was coming in on the most crowded night of the week but got very lucky and snagged the last open campsite. The catch was that there was a maximum stay of four nights, so I'd have to move out in the middle of the week.

Once I set up my camp, the first order of business was getting some drinking water. I'd forgotten to pack part of my water filter, but figured it was no big deal because that part could be replaced by a plastic soda bottle. Usually they're fairly ubiquitous, but this place was so clean that I had to go around asking my neighbors to go through their trash. I met some nice people: a guy in a van down from Wilmington for the weekend, an older couple with a BMW Dakar Motorcycle on a trailer behind their RV, and another couple that looked like full-time vanlifers. The guy from the last couple was the only one that could find a bottle, he gave me the one he used to clean his windshield, insisting it was no problem to replace. I rode Punkin down to the boat ramp at the end of the road, and pumped a gallon of water out of the Santee River. It was a light straw color with just a hint of a tannic taste from the swamps upstream, but on the whole quite tasty. Then I gathered some wood for my stove and walked out on the boardwalk which extended 500 feet into a blackwater cypress swamp. The observation platform at the end had benches and overlooked a stretch of open water to the west. I sat there and watched the sun go down, shining blood red through the ghostly Spanish moss.

I decided to work on Sunday so I could take Wednesday as a travel day. Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday all followed a similar pattern. I would get up at dawn and take a long walk on one of the trails. When I got really hungry, I'd make oatmeal for breakfast, read a little over hot tea, and then start work in the first of three spots that optimized the sun and shade throughout the day. After work, I'd go out to the end of the boardwalk and read Walt Whitman and Black Elk in the late afternoon sun. Then I'd take another ramble to watch the sunset and back to the camp to fix dinner as it got dark. On a couple of nights, it got down around freezing, and having a few hours of warmth from the wood stove before bed was a welcome luxury. I finally figured out how to make a long-lasting fire in it, although maybe a lot of the trick was using the really dry wood I found. The dead wood here was just naturally drier than back home, either because there's been less rain or because the sandy soil drains better than clay.

The reserve had a surprising variety of habitats in close proximity: several types of forest, the swamp, the river, and old rice paddies converted into waterfowl impoundments. As you'd expect, this made for a lot of wildlife sightings. One morning I saw an otter running across the road from one body of water to another, closely followed by a great blue heron. I'd never seen an otter running on land, so I wasn't quite sure what it was, but when I looked down into the stream it ran into, I saw the familiar whiskered nose cutting through the water, and the heron perched on the bank. I wondered if they were fishing buddies, each snapping up any prey scared off by the other. I also saw red winged blackbirds, a red cockaded woodpecker, cormorants, herons, egrets, and a large flock of swifts. I didn't see any alligators, but woke up on one of the warmer nights to the eerie sound of their roars echoing in the swamp like a distant rock concert. On the last night a cheeky raccoon darted under the edge of my tent and dragged out my bag of trash. I made threatening noises and chased it, but it was not about to drop that bag and hustled away into the thickets before I could get close. The next morning I was able to crawl back there and collect all the trash, which was thoroughly worked-over, so I guess it was kind of win-win for me and the raccoon.

I also met some interesting humans. One day while I was working, a couple stopped by who were both off-duty EMTs from Georgia getting into wildlife photography. After some small talk, the woman asked if, when I went back to work, she could use me as a model to practice her camera skills. She took a couple of shots, and as they were leaving, the man said, "You look at these trees and it makes you wonder how many people swung from 'em." My mind was apparently in a very innocent place, because all I thought of was how live oaks are pretty ideal for hanging a swing from. "You mean like on swings?" "No," he said, "like Black people." Again I misinterpreted for a minute, thinking he was making a racist reference to apes, but then I understood what he meant. "Yeah, it was a big thing," he said, "a lot of people don't know about that."

Another day an older man in a white pickup truck was cruising slowly around the campground and stopped to talk. He asked a few questions about Punkin and then asked, "Are you good? You need anything?" Now, normally this is a dog-whistle for drug sales so I said, "I'm good, I have everything I need, thanks!" When he asked if I needed any food, I started to wonder if it was some kind of ministry. Was he selling weed, Jesus, or both? He rolled over to my neighbor's site and hung around making conversation. When I started to walk over he drove away. I struck up a conversation with my neighbor S, a young British chef in a van on his way from Martha's Vineyard, where he works the warm season, to visit his Grandmother in southern Florida. We agreed that the guy was probably selling weed, and this was confirmed when he showed up again and, after asking if we needed anything, said, "hey Mr. S, do you have a pot for that fire?" S played innocent and said he did have a pan for heating food. The guy then made up a story about having some hot-and-sour soup we could all share, but we both said we'd already eaten and eventually he pulled into another spot and sat there with his engine idling until around midnight, when he took off. Slightly creepy, but the guy was probably lonely as well as desperate to make a sale.

Wednesday was a travel day, but I wasn't sure where to stop next. My research seemed to indicate that in coastal South Carolina and Georgia, all the paid campgrounds were full and all the free campgrounds were closed, and this impression was confirmed by a semi-retired heavy equipment operator from Pennsylvania on his way north from Florida. So instead of camping, I decided to book three nights at a hotel in Beaufort, SC (pronounced BYOO-furt unlike the one in NC which is BOH-furt). The ride there was fairly boring since it was all highways (17 and 21), but there was a bit of excitement when I passed the Beaufort Marine Corps Air Station and felt the deafening roar and vibration from a low-flying formation of fighter jets. It took me right back to the Cherry Point MCAS in Havelock and for a little while I felt myself to be in a sort of confused overlay of the two Carolinas. But I got to the hotel and it turned out to be in an excellent location, close to restaurants and a grocery store. Better yet, it opened onto a long open park of live oaks and palmettos at the edge of a marsh that stretched away for miles.

Just after I checked in and was about to unload Punkin, a burly middle-aged man walked up and asked if I would be willing to sell my bike and for how much. I told him I couldn't sell it for several reasons, but we struck up a conversation, not that it needed much striking. As he told me about how he'd been pulled over by the cops for doing 40mph on his only vehicle, a racing bicycle given to him by a friend, and that when he saw my motorcycle he felt instantly it would be perfect for him, I started to realize I'd run into another curious character. And it got better: turns out that he used to be a highly trusted driver for the Italian Mafia in New York, ten years of that before leaving with no warning and retiring down south. "See to work with the wise guys you gotta have a persona, right? It's the persona that wears you down." For ten years he worked continuously with only a couple hours off on occasional Sundays, putting on a tough face even though he was as he put it, "just a little girly man." "I'd pick up the wise guys at JFK, LaGuardia, they're soft. The Russians are hard, they don't have a persona, that's just how they are. They think comedy is soft, never crack a smile unless they're totally drunk, and their jokes are all weird... See when the Chinese want something done, they get the Russians to do it, and when the Russians want something done they get the Italians to do it, and the Italians get the Latin Kings to do it, and those guys are crazy."

There was a lot more: piles of cash left on the back seat as a loyalty test, a mob boss's wife trying to seduce him, references to "the body business", and the many dangers of the gangster lifestyle, not least of which is a simple heart attack from rich food and too much stress. "You got all this pressure on your aorta, right? And then one day you let it go and pop!" At the end of the conversation he wished me well on my travels and told me to be careful out there on the back roads. At first I thought he was talking about traffic safety but it seems he was specifically concerned about the danger of being abducted by guys in white pickups. I told him that as a matter of fact I'd run into a guy in a white pickup just a few days before... But it's funny the things people see as likely dangers!

Otherwise my stay in Beaufort has been pretty uneventful. I mostly worked from the shade at the edge of the marsh, but one afternoon I worked from the dramatic bluffs overlooking a bay with sailboats, and walked around the fairly generic waterfront district (they have a [Kilwins](https://www.kilwins.com/, 'nuff said). This weekend I'm hoping to pick up some speed and make it the rest of the way to Florida!

Things I Learned

• Live oak acorns are pretty tasty right out of the shell. I cracked them using the lid of my laptop like a nutcracker!
• You can buy home tests for marijuana and nicotine at the drugstore. At first I was confused because surely a person would already know what they'd smoked, but then I realized they're for testing kids.
• I heard a strong Pennsylvania accent for the first time and it sounded strange because it seemed to oscillate between Redneck and Canuck.

Wonderful Things

• The subtle V above a fish turning under water.
• The rustle of tall marsh grasses in the breeze.
• Cypress knees looking like little statues of robed saints and Madonnas.
• The hooked heads of swimming cormorants like Art Nouveau periscopes.