There’s nothing so good for the inside of a man as the outside of a horse.
—Ronald Reagan

December In The Lowcountry
It’s a cold, blustery December morning. Three horsemen lean into a biting wind at renowned Oaklawn Plantation. With hollowed horns used to signal the other members of the hunting party strapped across their backs, they ride through widely-spaced stands of fire-blackened longleaf pine, the horses beneath them near invisible in the thick underbrush and tall grass that has sprung up since the last time these woods burned. Their quest? Heritage and deer. Trailing a pack of eager dogs, the trio periodically drops out of the view of the standers placed strategically along the edges of the block of woods, only to emerge further downrange. Quietly weaving in and out of the thick underbrush, their movements take on an almost dreamlike quality.

Then suddenly, a whitetail breaks from cover. Whoops, hollers, and cracking whips shatter the morning’s calm. A cinematic blur of movement swirls through the trees. The horsemen rally the dogs to drive the deer toward standers and soon a salvo of shots reaps a deer.

A second drive gains three more deer, but one wounded buck flees, running hard towards a flooded cornfield managed for waterfowl, with the dogs in close pursuit. Two blows on the horn light a fire under the horsemen. Brothers Ed and Rawlins Lowndes and David Grant ride after the hounds in pursuit.

Rawlins Lowndes, commanding the hounds, rides Grant’s marsh tacky, “Sage,” and Grant rides “DP.” Ed Lowndes rides his tacky, “Laboka,” captured from a wild herd on Hilton Head Island. They have the right horse for the task at hand. For a solid week before the hunt, heavy rains have drenched the Lowcountry. The land surrounding the cornfield this morning is a muddy, obstacle-filled morass. Saplings, low-hanging limbs, tangled vines, armadillo holes, bushhog amputees—small-tree stubble—and thick, tall grass make the going rough for any horse. The marsh tacky, though, is not any horse.

The deer plunges into the flooded field with hounds in hot pursuit, and Rawlins Lowndes, carrying a shotgun borrowed from one of the standers, pounds around the edge of the dike surrounding the field, zigzagging between small trees and dodging low-hanging limbs. He urges Sage up the embankment, and up he goes— ten maybe fifteen feet straight up—through thick grass studded with perilous holes.

Lowndes and Sage reach the far bank just ahead of the deer. Is a clean shot possible? On top, the dike is a narrow sliver, and it’s a long way down to the bone-chilling water. Lowndes weighs his options as the deer turns back, narrowly flanking the dogs. By this time, David Grant and DP have caught up, and Rawlins hands off the shotgun to Grant, who gallops off, trying once again to cut off the deer’s escape route.

Back home in the Pee Dee, Grant loves “ripping” — using the horses to flush deer and shooting them from the saddle. But not just any horse will do. It takes a very special horse like DP, one not easily spooked and calm enough to let his rider fire with accuracy. As the deer catapults up the dike, Grant closes in. BAM!
DP doesn’t even flinch.

A Horse for A Kingdom
Lowcountry hunting on horseback resonates with tradition, and that agile breed, the Carolina marsh tacky, boasts an enduring legacy as well. “Tacky” comes from an English word meaning “common” or “cheap.” Hogwash. A small band of men (and women), among them David Grant and Ed and Rawlins Lowndes, knows the horse is worth a king’s ransom. They hunt deer and wild hogs as men before them did—from horseback, and they fully intend to keep hunting atop the marsh tacky a South Carolina tradition.

The Lowndes family has hunted on horseback for five generations. Grant owns and operates Carolina Marsh Tacky Outfitters near Darlington and breeds tackies. He brought three of his horses to the December hunt at Oaklawn, meaning something like 147 marsh tackies were elsewhere that day. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy estimates that fewer than 150 pure marsh tackies exist, though breeders and advocates for the horse like Grant are trying to change that.

Somewhere over the airwaves, an anthem plays for the marsh tacky, Procul Harum’s “Conquistador.” The song fits. As early as the 1500s, Spanish ships anchored along South Carolina’s coast. Their cargo included measles, small pox and chicken pox, but it also included fine-boned horses, a measure of absolution. The Spaniard’s colonies failed, and the would-be colonists left their horses to fend for themselves near Myrtle Beach and Port Royal. “Conquistador your stallion stands in need of company,” goes the song. Company it found.

In the 1600s, stunned English explorers, mouths agape, beheld Cherokee and Chickasaw Indians riding small, rugged horses. Feral marsh tackies sought refuge in Lowcountry marshes, where they were captured and domesticated, first by native people, then by European settlers and African slaves. The even-tempered horse made a good ride for children. The Gullah tilled their fields and gardens using tacky power. During World War II, beach patrols seeking Nazi U-boats rode marsh tackies. Had spies slipped ashore, men upon marsh tackies would have been the first line of defense. No surprise there. The horse had already ridden into the history books courtesy of an earlier war.

It’s believed that the legendary Swamp Fox, Francis Marion, led his irregulars into guerrilla-like forays on the sturdy-yet-nimble horses. Marsh Tackies would have easily outflanked the British Army’s larger European breeds in the woods and swamps of the South Carolina “backcountry.” Today the horses are used to pursue a quarry that’s a bit of a guerrilla fighter itself—wild Pee Dee hogs.

August In The Pee Dee
It’s a Saturday in the middle of August, and today’s band of equestrians and hunters includes the Lowndes brothers, Grant, Richard Perdue, Bryan Stanton, Moultrie Helms, and guide Troy Byrd. Other participants in the hunt include tacky devotee Wylie Bell, a writer/designer for the Florence Morning News, and equine photographer Dwain Snyder.

A day that began in heavy fog has turned hot enough to melt pig iron in Roblyn’s Neck, a 14,000-acre tract along the Great Pee Dee River. By now, wild hogs with any sense have retired to the most unpleasant pieces of real estate possible, deep in the shade of thick scrub and briar thickets. The sun rains down, and thundering down a lane scraped from the ancient sea bottom, the horses kick up contrails that hang in the air. Time suspends as well—it looks like a scene from the wild, wild West.

“No hog rippin’ today,” says Grant, “Ripping” was coined from the sound an old buck makes when you jump him out of the bed. “Rippin’ deer,” Grant adds, is a “Lowcountry art.

“In the Lowcountry you can find tracts that haven’t been turned into one big cut-down and you can get close to the deer. In my area I still ride cut-downs. I have chaps I made for my horses to keep the briars from cutting too bad.”

According to Grant, marsh tackies are the best horses he’s found for rippin’. “They take the gunfire, briars, and blood better than most,” he says. “I will ride a cutdown with the wind coming to me and pick my way from spot to spot where I think a deer will be bedded. When he rips up, you better be quick and you better have a good horse.”

But today is about hogs, and as the day heat ups, so does the action. The land echoes with yelps, yowls, and yaps of Pee Dee curs, a dog Grant describes as the “noble Pee Dee game dog.”

“When you hunt hogs,” says Grant, “you need dogs that can think – ‘Plenty of signs, but no hogs. Where are they?’ You need a dog that can work an area and find a hog bedded down in a blowdown or more often in the middle of a hellhole cutdown. It’s tough!”

The music dog hunters love sounds out—a howling bay that signals the dogs have cornered their quarry. That epic do-or-die last stand unfolds. Somewhere afar a banshee-like squeal makes the hair stand on the back of your neck. Riding point, Grant and company gallop off, puffs of smoke bursting from unshod hooves. “Most of the time,” said Grant, “I ride point. I get the honor of being the first to bust up briars, jump a ditch, cross or swim a slough, or dodge snakes.” A good point horse, he adds, “will go to the bay on its own when it hears the dogs.”

Closer to the dogs, bedlam—pig squeals and chaotic dog vocals. Grant plunges through head-high brambles, briars, and undergrowth clawing his way to the action. There’s Bill, diminutive leader of the curs, nipping at a 200-pound sow.
Grant’s adamant about protecting his dogs. He hunts with a GPS tracking system that gets him to the bay quicker than the old days. “I often ride right into a fight if my dogs are getting cut-up from a bad hog.” Grant says he has a “pact” with his Pee Dee curs. “If they have the grit to hunt all day, fight everything a Pee Dee river bottom can throw at them, run a hog through Hell and back, and fight to the death if need be, I will do whatever it takes to get to them.” And for that task, there is no equal to the marsh tacky.

Little Bulldozers
Wylie Bell first learned about the marsh tacky when she interviewed Grant about the Hilton Head Marsh Tacky Beach Run. She ended up riding one of Grant’s tackies at Hilton Head. “The first thing I noticed,” she said, “was how easily tackies adapt to new situations. Here were these five-year-old horses thrown into a thousand people, racing horses next to a rolling ocean. And they handled it amazingly well. People were crowding around them all day, and no one got kicked or bitten or run over by a spooked horse.”

Later, Bell discovered the marsh tacky’s hardy character. “My first hog hunt opened my eyes to how tough a breed the marsh tacky is. I’m always careful to watch for fallen limbs, holes, uneven terrain, muddy spots—anything that could cause a horse to trip. On a hog hunt, you run full speed through mud and muck and cutdowns with stumps, holes, logs, and briars. The horses never miss a beat. They don’t panic when they get wrapped up in briars or when they’re mired in a bog up to their chest. Like little bulldozers, they push through whatever you ask them too.”

Grant tells his hunting partners, “Let’s hunt back to the truck.” It’s an inside joke. Too many times they’ve hunted all day with no luck. But sometimes when he says, “Let’s hunt back to the truck,” that’s when they catch hogs. But no such luck today. It’s hot and the curs pant heavily, winded. The hunt ends. It’s time to load up the tackies, those noble survivors.

Pursuing deer in December, wild hogs in August, tilling gardens come spring, racing at Hilton Head, defeating the British, patrolling for German submarines and proving to be an anchor for tradition, the marsh tacky does it all. What else can be said about this horse for all seasons as a horse pure and simple? Bell hits the nail on the head.

“The marsh tacky is simply better put together to handle riding in the woods and swamps. They’re smaller and more agile, their hide is thicker, and they have good, solid hooves. Marsh tackies are not big horses, but they ride big. They have huge hearts and sharp minds, and for people who own them, they’ll be that horse of a lifetime.”

The Eyes Of Laboka
Ed Lowndes on Lowcountry Deer Hunting
I ride into the woods along deer trails looking for a deer’s hiding places. My tacky, Laboka, will usually see deer lying in hiding. When Laboka sees one, he stops and stares into its eyes. I focus my eyes into the thicket, fallen tree, or cane patch and spot the deer. If the deer is suitable to pursue, I “jump” it, and the chase unfolds. The deer will run its course through old-growth hardwoods into Carolina Bays. The deer knows it can escape into the water and thick marsh grass where hounds can’t follow. The deer’s speed and wits usually let it escape through the standers. I ride Laboka to the perimeter to stop the hounds’ pursuit. While on my horse, I loudly crack my whip to simulate a gunshot and the hounds believe the deer has been harvested. I blow my cow horn to regroup the hounds behind Laboka who leads them into woods to look for another deer. This old style of hunting brings “fair chase” into our vocabulary. My horse’s name, Laboka, means “the mouth” in Spanish. He’s very inquisitive and nuzzles objects he finds interesting.

My fascination with islands began with Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Scotchman’s novel took form when his stepson painted an imaginary island with watercolors on a cold, rainy summer day. Stevenson, looking on, began to imagine his tale. And so, from a boy’s map came Stevenson’s Treasure Island and the villainous Long John Silver who gave us the model of a pirate forevermore: a peg-leg Pete with a parrot perched on his shoulder.
Such is the power of islands. They fire up the imagination, leading us to wonder what mysteries might lie on those distant self-contained worlds.
All that mystery isn’t lost on Hollywood. Islands have long provided Hollywood and television raw material. Here are but a few: The Island of Doctor Moreau, “Fantasy Island,” “Gilligan’s Island,” and Papillon (Devil’s Island). And then there’s “Lost,” the recent TV series about the survivors of a commercial jet crash on a mysterious tropical island somewhere in the South Pacific.
We expect islands to be strange, exotic, and dangerous. In Lincoln County we are no strangers to islands. More than 100 islands dot the lake, freckles of land that seem ordinary. They don’t, for instance, nurture strange beasts or post signs warning you to keep away. Beyond the lake mystic islands are out there though, and they’re closer than you think.
Stallings Island
As the Savannah River courses toward Augusta you’ll find Stallings Island in Columbia County. The island takes its name from the Stallings culture, a Late Archaic era of hunter-gatherers. The island sits eight miles upstream from Augusta in the Middle Savannah River. The Native Americans who lived here have been referred to as “the people of the shoals.” Known best for their innovations in pottery, these people “fibered” their pottery, that is they mixed Spanish moss and shredded palmetto leaves into the clay for strength.
North America’s oldest pottery lies here, preserved by time and off limits to intruders. The island is considered the birthplace of pottery in North America. The pottery dates back some 4,500 years ago, predating farming in Georgia. The Shoals People long lived off freshwater mussels, piling up mounds of shells known as middens, well before any fields or orchards were conceived.
Archeologists discovered a massive pile of shells 12 feet tall, 500 feet wide, and 1,500 feet long on the island. Artifacts found include stone axes, shell beads, flaked “arrow points,” and “cooking stones” made from soapstones. Don’t think you can go there looking for artifacts, however. The island is protected.
This island, once known as Indian Island, contains numerous human skeletons. So many, in fact, it led explorer Charles C. Jones Jr. to refer to it as “The Island of the Dead” in 1861.
People no longer live on the island but donkeys do. The Archaeological Conservancy purchased Stallings Island and put goats and donkeys on the island to control vegetation. The Conservancy fenced off the large mound to protect it from looters.
Paddle by and you may well hear braying donkeys and bleating goats, placed there to control the island’s vegetation. “The Island of the Dead” … it sounds forbidden and it is but it’s nowhere as dangerous as …
Monkey Island
This island sounds like an urban legend. Many people refuse to believe it exists. Even people that live near this island find it hard to believe that approximately 3,500 wild monkeys live there, free ranging, no cages, no pens.
A reporter from the Charleston Post and Courier described what sounds like a scene out of Africa. “The monkeys emerge from a primeval Eden of live oaks, families grappling down the branches, ‘troops’ strutting in the underbrush like little lions, mothers carrying yearlings on their backs.
“In the mist and rain, eerie as ghosts, they surround a human visitor. They whistle like birds and screech and hiss with a sharp intake of breath. Their eyes stare with intelligence and curiosity.”
I can’t tell you where the island is because it’s federally protected. No trespassing. At all. Besides, finding it is near impossible. It’s taken some reporters years to find it. Let’s just say that south of Augusta in the South Carolina Lowcountry, monkeys thrive on a small island somewhere in the vicinity of Beaufort.
Some reports say the species there include rhesus, African green, macaque, common marmoset, Capuchin monkey, and squirrel monkeys. Other reports, and these are more consistent, say only Rhesus monkeys live there. Eyewitnesses indicate that the Rhesus monkeys, native to India, consider the island theirs. No humans dare live there. To go there is to risk being torn apart, especially if you go there during the breeding season. (Nothing worse than a jealous Rhesus monkey.)
The monkeys were first brought to the island in 1979 for the Food and Drug Administration’s Polio Certification program. Their original purpose was to test the effectiveness of polio vaccines. They were left to their own devices, namely to live and breed. Each year adds another 750 newborn monkeys to the island. The new monkeys are tagged or tattooed.
Each year 500 monkeys are taken to labs yearly. The island, according to published reports, is a containment area for the primates that Alpha Genesis Inc. uses for biomedical research. The original colony came from the Caribbean Primate Research Center of La Parguera, Puerto Rico.
The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources owns the island today and leases it to Charles River Labs out of Massachusetts through funding by the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAD). NIAD says the monkeys are used to test antibodies for things ranging from HIV AIDS to anti-bio terrorism medications.
Now if all this monkey business sounds captivating and you’re thinking you want to go down Lowcountry way and see the monkeys, be forewarned: you may be endangering your life. According to the CDC, incidents of the B virus existed in free-ranging macaques in Puerto Rico’s Caribbean Primate Research Center, which were moved eventually to South Carolina. Once transmitted to a human, B virus has a fatality rate close to 80 percent. I’m not sure those species inhabit the island, however. Reports conflict.
Another reason not to go is the fact that poachers have sneaked onto the island to hunt monkeys and the monkeys have learned to be aggressive.
I saw a report where some curious teenage boys went to the island for some hunting. Hearing a thunderous, screeching noise they looked up to see hundreds of monkeys swinging down from trees. The boys vamoosed to their boat pelted all the way with the freshest monkey manure imaginable. So, there’s yet another reason to steer clear of Monkey Island.
So, we have Stallings and Monkey Island. Chances are you never heard of either. Exotic islands are closer than we think aren’t they. We don’t need to hop an airplane and fly to other countries. We may not be able to go onto some of them but just knowing they are there makes life more interesting.
A few years back I wrote a little story about a forbidden island and it provided me an escape in my mind as good as going to Africa. Based on some experiences I had in the 1980s, it was a journey like none other.
Are there other exotic islands out there just under our nose? There are. There’s Goat Island where a man and his wife lived alone for 32 years subsisting on the land and what the sea drifted in, living outside man’s laws and conventions. And this island, too, is closer than you think, but it’s a story with a sad ending, a story for another day.

A writer is only as good as his material, and now and then something profound falls into his lap. For close to two years now I’ve been working on a book for the University of South Carolina Press. Early chapters of the book concern the blues.

A major part of writing is research. It’s akin to mining for gold; you get a lot of dirt but few nuggets. In this case, however, the blues turned up a nugget of gold, black gold.

Frank Beacham, a journalist originally from Honea Path, South Carolina, wrote a penetrating chronicle called “Charlie’s Place.” The story originally appears in his book,Whitewash: A Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder (available athttp://www.booklocker.com/books/939.html). Frank and I exchanged emails, and he granted me permission to excerpt his account of Charlie’s Place and the Chitlin’ Circuit. It’s a story that’s Old South, and it brought back my childhood in several telling ways.

Envision a dazzling marquee ablaze with these names … Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, B.B. King, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, The Supremes, The Temptations, Muddy Waters, and quite possibly the first true rock and roll star, Little Richard of “Tutti Frutti” fame, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom.

They came to entertain on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a string of clubs and joints throughout the South where black performers could do their thing in a safe acceptable venue. Finding a place to eat after the show and a room for the night? Well that was another matter. Entertainers destined for greatness had to find accommodations with friends.

That’s the way it was in the era of Jim Crow, that strange name representing the era of supposedly separate-but-equal facilities. That time of sitting in the back of the bus, of drinking from water cooler’s marked “Colored Only,” and not sitting at drugstore counters. Nor, in a bit of reverse discrimination, were whites supposed to mix with blacks to enjoy music, something we take for granted today.

Charlie’s Place was on the Chitlin’ Circuit in an alcove, so to speak, known as Whispering Pines over Myrtle Beach way. The pines began whispering, as Beacham wrote, the night Billie Holliday sang at Charlie’s Place. Thus did the name Whispering Pines come to be. Other black performers destined for greatness came to Charlie’s Place including Georgia’s aforementioned Little Richard.

Charlie Fitzgerald, a chic black entrepreneur from New York, ran Charlie’s Place from the late 1930s until his death in 1955. Charlie’s Place, it should be noted, had a reputation as a peaceful establishment but that didn’t head off trouble. As Beacham wrote, “Fitzgerald’s coziness with whites was out of sync with the time and place. Racial tension in South Carolina began escalating after a federal judge opened the state’s Democratic primary to black voters in 1948. It was to the chagrin of many Southern whites that blacks began to assume a few positions of power.”

The times and tensions conspired to make Charlie a marked man. He stood out as a success. He stood out as a man wealthy and fearless. He did as white people did. Go into a restaurant and sit down. Another sin was letting white kids into his place to see and hear the marvelous black entertainers. It was inevitable that the KKK would pay him a visit.

At 9 p.m. on August 26, 1950, the KKK drove by Charlie’s Place. A Beacham excerpt: In an intimidating visit to his club, Klan members demanded that white patrons no longer be admitted. “They told Charlie they didn’t want the white kids there listening to music,” said Hemingway, (Henry “Pork Chop” Hemingway was the first black policeman in Myrtle Beach and a friend of Charlie’s). “Charlie told them to go to hell. They warned him they were coming back.”

Just before midnight, true to its word, the Klan came back.

Beacham recounts this visit in an updated version of a chapter, “This Magic Moment, When the Ku Klux Klan Tried to Kill Rhythm and Blues Music in South Carolina,” which originally appeared in Toward The Meeting Of The Waters, Currents in the Civil Rights Movement of South Carolina during the Twentieth Century (University South Carolina Press).

The nightriders quickly and violently raided Charlie’s Place. They tied Charlie up and threw him in the trunk of a car. They riddled his club with bullets, silencing the Wurlitzer that had unified blacks and whites via music and dance. They beat people. Once the assault ended, a Klansman lay on the ground bleeding. Beneath his blood-soaked sheet he wore a police uniform. Shot in the back, he died later. No one was charged.

Klansmen beat Charlie with a bullwhip. Somehow Charlie escaped. I, write of this 1950’s violence because I, too, once had an experience with the Klan, albeit most innocent and as a spectator.

I believe it was the summer of 1955 that Dad drove me up town one night well past lightning bug time. I want to say it was a sultry night, stifling and heavy. Just on the outskirts of town headed towards Washington, down on the left, a Klan rally was in progress. A cross burned and men in hoods and sheets stood in a circle while a man in the center shouted. It was just like a scene from Fried, Green Tomatoes, and it scared me to death. I think that’s why Dad took me there. To show me what real terror looks like.

Two reactions have lived within me ever since: a deep fear, for one, and gratitude for another that my Dad was with me and not in that circle of sheet-clad men.

Much of that nonsense is behind us. Thank Heavens we have crossed many a bridge as race relations go. And yet we have a ways to go. Little burrs remain under the saddle. I, for instance, prefer the term black to African-American. I’m simply a white. I choose to think I’m 100 percent American, not a European-Caucasian. I find hyphenated heritages a bit divisive. If we’re all in this together, let’s make our names less reminiscent of a time we’d like to put behind us.

We were talking over race relations one night and I asked a woman whose opinion I respect a question. “Do you think the South would have worked out its race issues eventually without Civil Rights legislation?”

“No,” she said.

For some reason I can’t explain I believe it would have, but then, what do I know. All I can say is that way back in my youth I spent a lot of time playing with my black friends down on my Granddad’s farm. We played baseball, ate together, did farm work together, and we swam in the ponds. We spent many a day knocking down wasp nests (It was as close to war as I ever got), and we sat on the porch of their home many evenings telling scary stories about a crazy man who lived nearby. We were just living. Nothing more.

When school rolled around, we parted ways. They had their school and I had mine. Somehow the school years kept coming and going and the wedge drove in deeper and deeper, and the day arrived when we lost touch for good. That doesn’t mean I don’t think of my childhood friends. I do. Every day. And I’d like to think that they think of me too.

So here it is July 4th, 2010, a time to celebrate independence and freedom. My mind, however, is back somewhere around 1957 or so, a less free time. My black friends and I were young and we didn’t know, much less care, what the much larger world out there thought. But then the baseball games stopped and wasp nests suddenly had no reason to fear our rocks and sticks, and only the winds ruffled the ponds’ surface. We, too, had a role in the big play; we just didn’t know it. And so Frank Beacham’s work touches me in a way I cannot explain and words are supposed to be my strength.

All I can offer is this. We were innocents. Caught up in a system. And it made a huge difference in our lives. Still does.

We love our cars. Just hop in, turn the key, and off we go wherever and whenever we want. Contrast that to mass transit. You go by its schedule and you have little choice as to whom you sit near. It can be, and often is, a less-than-stellar experience.

An email came across my desk last week where a writer described the difficult time she had riding a bus from Columbia to Washington D.C. and back, a 27-hour journey. It involved rude people, an oversexed couple, and ultimately an arrest.

I could relate to her adventure, having ridden a Greyhound from Columbia to Charleston, West Virginia, eons ago. My memories of buses and bus stations, however, come from being on the other side of the ticket window. And what memories they are.

For two years I worked as a ticket agent for Southeastern Stages and Greyhound while going to graduate school at the University of Georgia. It was, without doubt, the most entertaining job I’ve ever had for one reason: people and their situations. Solzhenitsyn said it best, “Circumstances can make devils of us.”

Let’s time travel back to 1972 – 1974.

Athens, Georgia, 220 West Broad. The bus’s dieseling engine revs up, a puff of oily black smoke rises, and I key the microphone: “Now loading in track two, Greyhound’s local to Hull, Colbert, Comer, Carlton, Calhoun Falls, Saluda, Columbia, Fayetteville, and points north.” Folks in the lobby gather their belongings and another load of mankind departs Athens. No sooner than they leave, another bus arrives, all sorts of humanity spilling out its doors in all manner of dress. Some clutch a paper bag stuffed with their clothes. I remember few smiles in this flux of mankind. The scene repeats itself over and over, a cycle of delivery and subtraction of the curious, vagrants, students, and ordinary folks.

Inside, I worked with a great group of guys, ticket agents and baggage handlers, who were either in graduate school themselves or working extra hours to bolster day-job income. They came from places like Hartwell, Augusta, Wadley, Wrens, Tifton, and, as we’d often announce over the pubic address system, points beyond.

Not long out of undergraduate school and fresh off a year teaching in my hometown, I was a wide-eyed innocent seeing things I’d only heard about. As people go, I received a good education in that building on 220 West Broad. Desperation, dreams, and drifting: they were part of the curriculum as were laughter and sadness.

It was in that small bus station lobby that I saw, for the first time, a man passing himself off as a woman and there that I saw a man shoot himself. As he approached the ticket counter, he dropped a gun, which fired upon hitting the floor. He limped out the lobby trailing blood. I found the crumpled bullet in a corner of the lobby. We never saw the accidental shooter again, a man I believe who intended to rob us.

I saw prostitution, drug dealings, and other crimes there. One cold December night not long before Christmas, I thought I too was about to be a victim. A fellow ticket agent by the name of M.E. Geer, an aspiring dentist, and I were closing down the station. It was late and we had all the cash from the day’s ticket sales and shipping fees, $7,000 or so, ready to go into the safe below the shipping counter. The safe was open and we were just about to put several fat zippered money pouches into it. Just seven or so feet away was a heavy steel door we’d yet to lock.

Suddenly, the door swung open and a wild-eyed hippie burst through. He had both hands thrust menacingly in the pockets of his army field jacket and slammed them on the countertop pointing at us.

“Give me the bread, man.”

M.E. and I looked at each other. We were dumbstruck.

“C’mon, give me the bread, I’m in a hurry.”

What seemed an eternity passed and then M.E. said, “What?”

“C’mon man give me the dough.”

We looked at each other again. Without saying a word, we each had decided to hand over the money when this desperado said, “We’ve got a shipment of pizza dough here.”

How glad we were to give this scraggly errand boy his dough.

There were moments of laughter too, often at the expense of a fellow agent. Back then, before computers arrived, we used a thick catalog-like book to plot routes and connections, Russell’s Official Bus Guide. With this reference, red-covered and thick, a 1,000-page collection of all bus stops, times and routes in the USA and Canada, you planned cross-country trips for travelers.

Every ticket agent lived in fear of that call where someone wanted to go from Athens to, say, Maple Bay, Washington. Such an accursed agent would be tied up for an hour or more, plotting and making detailed notes while the customer patiently waited on the other end of the line. And if he was the only agent on duty, say late at night, it meant trying to serve passengers and answer other phones as he charted the route. It was torture—an agent’s worst fate.

During moments of boredom, we’d think up the most difficult of difficult routes to plot and when we had found the perfect route for tormenting a fellow agent, we’d get a friend to pose as a curious traveler and call in. The poor mark would pick up the phone, saying, “Bus Station,” and a look of pure agony would cross his face. Shielding the phone with his hand, he’d look at us for pity saying, “Damn, this guy wants to go to Maple Bay, Washington.”

“Ah man, you’re screwed,” we’d say. As he thumbed through the guide muttering and cursing, it was all we could do to keep from laughing out loud. Many times we played this prank and often we suffered it as well.

We could be cruel. Out back beyond the steel door, propped open by a huge flint rock, sat a dumpster, the receptacle of the greasy food sold in the lobby by a tall, skinny greaser and his assistant, a bucktoothed girl whose name is lost in time. One day a fellow agent came in to work his shift. “Hey, some dude is in the dumpster.”

We all went out for a look. A wino was in the dumpster. All you could see were his feet sticking out. Agent A.T. Smith said, “Watch this.”

A.T. picked up the rock and hurled it against the side of the dumpster. The explosion was deafening 20 feet away. I can’t imagine what it must have been like inside the dumpster nor can I explain how fast a non-athletic human can move. No words can convey how this dumpster diver launched out of there. He looked like a surface-to-air missile flying backwards. It was like he had springs in his hands or someone was reversing a film where he had dived into a dumpster for sure. He shot out like a rocket, landing on his feet, running like a madman. I calculate he has circled the earth 200 times now.

One brutally cold January night, 10 degrees it was, a one-legged wino came into the lobby on crutches. He asked us if we had anything to drink. For years a half-full bottle of cheap gin had been gathering dust on a baggage shelf. We gave it to him. “Now don’t drink it here,” we told him. “Don’t drink it here.”

“No suh, I won’t.”

As soon as we handed it over he popped off the cap and drank it dry. We had him arrested, taking consolation in the fact that he had a warm place to sleep on a 10-degree night.

I saw, too, the members of what would prove to be an enduring rock band. Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland worked with me as baggage handlers. Ricky’s sister, Cindy, and her friend, Kate Pierson, stopped by often to talk over the half-door that separated the baggage room from the lobby. They later met a fellow by the name of Fred Schneider and formed a band called the B 52s. Many a night Keith Strickland and I worked the night shift. When I see him in concerts, it’s hard to believe he’s the same shy guy I worked with many shifts. How often I look back in time, seeing Keith and Ricky in the baggage room, talking softly, playing what appeared to ukeles.

Back then, guys grew their hair long. Southeastern Stages, however, had a dress code that forbade long hair. One agent, Tony Gay, had extremely long, wild hair, the kind that Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page would have envied. Gay refused to cut his hair. Instead, he tucked it into a hairnet and clamped a shorthaired wig over it to comply with the dress code. With his Roy Orbison-like glasses, droopy mustache and wig he was a sight.

Once cold, windy March afternoon, the station manager, Mr. Strickland (“Strick”), sent Tony up the street to deposit a bank pouch. Another agent was off duty and he witnessed quite a spectacle. As Tony turned the corner, a blast of March wind knocked off his wig, which hugging the sidewalk started sliding down the street like some strange animal, a baby beaver maybe, running for its life. Tony fell in hot pursuit of his wig. A policeman, seeing this strange guy running with a pouch of money, fell into the chase as well. It ended with a big laugh for all.

The pay was low but the work was fun. It was my last job as a blue-collar kind of guy, and I still miss it and its blue-collar cast of characters. Seeing all manner of humanity was an eye-opening experience, an education for sure. And so when I read the writer’s account of her bus trip to D.C. and back, I knew exactly what she had encountered. Almost forty years later, bus travel remains what it was in the 1970s.

Politicians and environmentalists like to propose public transportation as a more desirable way to move human beings about. If you like that idea, I suggest you hang around a bus station or subway not for a while but for several years.

Cars and freedom and privacy make a combination that will always be hard to overcome no matter what gas costs. And besides, other young fellows like I once was stand to benefit from the memories and lessons a bus station serves up.

Many times my Mom has spoken of Anthony Shoals as a place prominent in her childhood memories. “It was,” she said, “our beach.” It’s a special place I wanted to see but couldn’t. It didn’t exist anymore.

As a girl, my Mom and her family spent special times there. She remembers quite accurately that the shoals had mountain laurel and rhododendron. They had fish fries and a lot of get-togethers up above the shoals in a place that amounted to a natural campground. Of course there was no electricity but there was a spring that provided water.

As for food, they would pack up live chickens and take everything you needed to cook with, lard, staples, and more. Numerous families would be there. Mom said it was where farming families vacationed after they “laid by.” “They’d take watermelons, cantaloupes … mama took a flour sack of homemade biscuits and we’d haul everything there in a wagon pulled by two mules,” she said.

They would swim and what a joy that must have been on a hot summer day. It seems rustic now but looking back that’s how life was. It’s romantic in the sense that it serves up an idealized view of a difficult time. It was a time when most of the creature comforts we take for granted didn’t exist and that, too, further underscores what a special place Anthony Shoals was. It was in a very real way an oasis. A “beach-like” adventure only I find it better than today’s beaches.

I myself have memories of the place. I remember a fish fry I went to there as a young boy. Three things stand out from that day. The beautiful rock-studded waters, the feeling that this place was special, and how a man scoured a frying pan with river sand until it shone like a mirror. Oddly I have no memory of eating fried fish that day.

All my life I assumed the entire shoals were beneath Clark Hill Lake, and that confused me because I did some math and I should have been too young to remember the place. Still, I had this memory of a place that I didn’t think existed, and I just couldn’t square things in my mind. Clark Hill dam was completed in 1954 and surely the waters had covered Anthony Shoals, but no I was mistaken.

Sometimes it’s great to be wrong. Anthony Shoals still exists. In fact, it’s part of the Broad River Wildlife Management Area. You’ll find rapids at Anthony Shoals, a very long series of rapids of Class II difficulty. You’ll also find a channel cut through ledges so barges from yesteryear could travel upstream. Canoeists and kayakers love the shoals.

What’s not to love? Grassy islets, forest-clad slopes, and a rocky streambed hosting rushing water make for a picturesque setting. And it gets even prettier come spring. Anthony Shoals is the only place on the Broad River that supports the rare shoal lilies that dwell on Southeast fall line rivers. History lives here too. The area also harbors remnants from previous settlements, including Native American mounds and the ruins of old mills and factories from the 1700s.

In researching Anthony Shoals I ran across stunning paintings by Augusta native, Philip Juras. In 1997, he earned a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Georgia, writing his thesis on the pre-settlement savannas that once flourished across the southeastern piedmont. Philip, who lives in Athens, focuses primarily on remnant natural landscapes that offer a glimpse of the Southeast before European settlement changed so many things. An artist quite often is passionate about his subject matter and so is Philip.

Here’s an excerpt from Philip’s essay in Bartram’s Living Legacy: Travels and the Nature of the South.

“There is no river scene in the Piedmont of northeast Georgia more stunning than Anthony Shoals on the Broad River. Perhaps there used to be. Perhaps the many great shoals on the Savannah River were just as glorious before they fell silent beneath the waters of the Thurmond, Russell, and Hartwell reservoirs, but I’m not quite old enough to have known any of them. Only the rapids above Augusta, my hometown, still show the beauty of the Savannah before it leaves the Piedmont. But the wildness of the river there is diminished by the new mansions looking down from the bluffs and the dams parceling out the flow from upstream. I think that’s why I love Anthony Shoals so much. This final stretch of the Broad, as it runs through the Broad River Wildlife Management Area, is the only place in the upper Savannah River watershed where the sound of a wild river still rises from such a wide swath of bedrock.”

Juras continues commenting on the setting for his splendid painting. “On the evening I captured this view, mountain laurel, snowbells, mock orange, Piedmont rhododendron, and fringe tree were in various states of bloom on the steep slopes next to the river. The main show, however, was being staged on the river itself, where one of the few populations of shoals spiderlilies left in the Savannah watershed was catching the light of the western horizon with glorious full blooms.”

Juras recounts how Anthony Shoals avoided being dammed by two proposed hydropower dams. “Though spared in the 20th century, the shoals have certainly seen human activity before then. If this view had been painted 150 years ago, the Broad River Manufacturing Company would appear on the opposite bank. Its millrace would be visible reaching upstream to the head of the shoals, and in that view much of the forest would have been cleared from the hills. However, if you imagine an earlier time when Native Americans inhabited this area, it’s likely the scene would appear much as it does today.”

The Broad River Manufacturing Company Juras mentions used cotton referred to as “Goshen cotton.” The cotton’s long gone and its gift to us today is some of the more interesting ruins from the nation’s early industrial settlements. Brick walls and towers rise from the forest floor.

I find the place fascinating. I plan to go there soon with my camera and laptop. I’ll find a shady spot with a command of the shoals and reflect on all that’s transpired here. I’ll imagine Native Americans gazing at the rare shoals lilies of spring. I’ll watch barges poled and dragged upstream with cargoes destined for merchants in the Piedmont. I’ll see whitewater rushing through the distant mill’s millrace delivering the most natural power imaginable. I’ll watch kids playing as their parents prepare a tremendous picnic. I’ll see an artist painting his beautiful landscapes. Best of all, I’ll take solace in rediscovering a place from childhood, one I thought lay beneath lake waters like so many other long-lost treasures do.

The shoals, by the way, take their name from relatives on my Mom’s side of the family. That’s where my daughter, Becky, gets hers middle name, “Rebecca Anthony Korom.”

And now I discover that people actually pursue rock climbing there on a small group of challenging boulders, several of which have “climbable problems.”

I can’t wait to go there. I’ll spend an afternoon at a place where my Mom spent some of her more memorable childhood days, a jewel of a place that still sparkles.

My lunches have been simple but delicious all summer. I’ve pretty much lived off tomato sandwiches. I grow my own tomatoes in the back yard. Here in the city we don’t have that much land for planting a garden, so I satisfy my urge to farm in a simple manner: bush tomatoes in one half of an old whiskey barrel. I’m always thinking of other things I’d like to grow. The desire to grow things is one of those instincts hardwired into us. Somewhere along the human highway running from hunter to gatherer, we learned to stay in one place and grow those things that sustain us.

(The way things are going we all may resort to growing our own food soon, but that’s a story for another day.)

Growing up back home, I remember gardens aplenty. We had gardens and I remember mornings spent shelling field peas and butter beans, shucking corn, and chopping corn too. Shelling butterbeans would eventually give you a raw spot on your thumb. And shelling peas wasn’t a joy. I recall how my Dad made a pea sheller from the rolls of an old-fashioned washing machine. It worked though it smashed some peas and sent others flying all over the place.

I don’t recall, however, seeing roadside stands in Lincoln County. Maybe that’s because everyone back then had a garden. I remember for sure my Granddad Poland’s watermelons. I remember how his back porch would be stacked end to end with striped, dark green, elongated melons known, I believe, as a Congo watermelon.

That was then; this is now. Progress keeps changing things. As we become more and more urbanized, as more and more kids grow up far removed from farms, people are losing touch with what it takes to grow things. Fruit and vegetables magically appear. The many convenient ways we get food these days has created a disconnect in the minds of many as to what is actually behind a basket of tomatoes or peaches. And that, of course, is a ton of hard work, but my how the work delights the senses.

Is there anything lovelier than baskets of fresh peaches or tomatoes? How about ripe, shiny bell peppers? Or what about a basket of purple plums? I love going to grocery stores like Publix and looking at the beautiful produce, but there is a better way to enjoy the labors of farmers. This past Saturday day, my friend, the legendary Trix, and I went to a place that makes grocery store produce look like a bag of dried peas. We drove down to the Farmers Market, a collection of sheds that stands in the shadow of Williams Brice stadium.

Large fans shift the air about here, air that’s strangely sweet. The aroma of fresh vegetables and fruit commingles with the overripe air of discarded produce. It’s a fragrance strangely absent in supermarkets. In fact, supermarket produce has no smell at all.

You’ll find flowers, sod, and an assortment of Southern riches in the Farmers Market that make the summertime delicious to the eyes and taste buds.

I walked around with my camera and soon spied a beautiful stand of crooked neck squash, striped watermelons, purple plums, large pods of okra, and succulent cucumbers. And then, lo and behold, large orange sacks of Vidalia onions appeared. A short, weathered woman overlooking all these riches spied me. She walked over and said, “We’ve got Vidalias.”

She’s got to be a Georgian I figured, knowing that you can’t label onions as Vidalias unless they are the real deal. Sure enough, she’s from Brooklet, Georgia, a rural outpost just outside Statesboro.

There’s something about farmers. They seem the truest, most honest folks on the planet. Talking to her was easy as she loaded us up with a bag of Vidalias, cantaloupes, a nice watermelon, which she slapped several times. “Hear that,” she said. “That’s how it sounds when it’s ripe. Listen,” and she slapped it three more times. “Got seeds, now.”

Next we got a basket of crooked neck squash and as we talked she explained that she stays here all week selling produce grown beneath a Georgia sun. Her husband goes back to the farm and gets another truckload ready for her to sell. Pure teamwork.

I know that the current Farmers Market is destined to close by October. That old bugaboo, progress, aided by politics, is again rearing its often-ugly head. A new and better farmers market is being built over here just off I-26 and I-77 on Highway 321. This new market will feature a restaurant, an RV park, amphitheater, an agricultural inspection station, and will sprawl 2,500 feet of frontage along I-26. It’ll be bigger than seven Super Walmarts. Sort of sounds like a place to go on vacation. “C’mon kids, pile in the car, we’re going to the Disneyland for Collards and Daisies.”

When I asked this Georgia farmwoman from Brooklet what she thought about this new and improved market, worries flooded her face. She’s not sure it’s a good thing. “We got a lot of walk-through traffic here,” she said, “students and poor folks wanting fresh produce. They won’t be able to find us as easily.”

She doesn’t think the new, distant location will draw pedestrians like the quaint old market next to the stadium did. Farming is fraught with risks and anything deviating from a tried and true formula must be eyed with suspicion. The good folks of Columbia, South Carolina, are changing the ultimate destination for her and her husband’s hard work.

Of course, there’s a story behind the story here. Those of you who’ve come to see Georgia play the Gamecocks over here know that their stadium lacks anything even remotely akin to a campus atmosphere. You can circle the entire complex and you’ll spot three trees yielding shade. All three are large oaks and all three are in the Farmers Market. I can show you where some grass is, too, if you really want to know where it is.

For a long, long time the University of South Carolina and its fans have wanted to grab that property. It’ll soon be theirs. And the new Farmers Market? Well, it’ll be a ways down the road, toward Charleston. I’m sure I’ll check it out next summer, but I’m even more certain of something else. Growing my own tomatoes.

Fall and football are just around the corner, but I’m already dreaming of homegrown tomatoes sliced thick and piled on whole wheat bread slathered with mayonnaise, a dollop of sour cream (try it, you’ll like it), and a slab of sweet Vidalia onion. Add a little salt and pepper and it beats a grocery store’s wax tomatoes by a country mile. Sadly for me, it’s as close to farming as I get. There’s something about growing things that makes you a better human being, and this world needs all the good human beings it can stand, not to mention fresh vegetables.

Farming’s a tough way of life that keeps getting tougher. The next time you sit down to a squash casserole, a bowl of beautiful strawberries, or a cool refreshing salad filled with cucumbers and Vidalia onions, send up a special prayer for those true heroes of the soil, Southern farmers.

“Hot town, summer in the city. Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty.” Those lyrics from Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer In The City” resonate with us Georgians. Summer is just four days away, and though this spring has been fairly cool, well, you know it won’t last. Old Sol will bring the heat come July, and fortunately we won’t have to find ways to stay cool. We’ve got air conditioning.

Does it get hot here? Well, here’s how climatologists describe Georgia. “A humid subtropical climate with mild winters and hot moist summers is characteristic of most of Georgia.” Here’s how I describe a hot summer day in Georgia. “A searing Georgia afternoon is like sitting on a Broilmaster grill in one of those ovens that bakes black enamel paint onto cars. The air is thick and you can’t breathe. A starched white Oxford shirt sticks to your skin, which is close to melting. Your shoes feel like they’re filled with coals, and the nearest drink of water is 100 miles away.”

When the temperature climbs into the low 90s and beyond and the humidity feels like it came from a steam iron, Georgia gets hot. So hot it makes me wonder how folks got through those long summer days and evenings before air conditioning arrived. Old homes were built with large windows and high ceilings and that helped, but you know it had to be brutal.

I remember one particularly sweltering summer day as a boy. I checked the record highs for Georgia and that day occurred the summer of 1955. The mercury reached a scorching 107 in Augusta in July 1955. (Two years earlier, on July 24, 1953, the folks in Louisville reached a record high for the state, a record that still stands.)

Today we beat the heat with high-powered Carriers, Rheems, Tranes, and Lennox air conditioners. Freon, ozone problems or not, stands as one of man’s great achievements, and if you don’t think so, drive to Augusta and back with no AC. Chlorine-free Puron has replaced Freon-based R-22 and it doesn’t destroy the ozone layer. So, strike a medal for Puron’s inventor too.

But how did we cope with the heat before air conditioning? I’ll forego the old swimming hole cliché. Instead, I offer up five ways we survived.

Homemade ice cream. Kudzu. Fans. Icy Coca Colas. Freezer lockers.

How well I remember the excitement that gripped me when I saw Mom and Dad slicing peaches late on a Sunday afternoon. Mom, reaching for the vanilla extract, would make the ice cream mix and in went those peaches, nuggets of gold floating in liquid snow.

Sometimes she added cherries, sometimes strawberries, and sometimes it was just plain vanilla ice cream. Always it was fabulous.

Dad never had to tell me twice to churn the ice cream. I was on it. I’d crank away. He’d add Morton’s Rock Salt to the water making a chilling brine within which the six-quart canister turned, occasionally lodging up against an ice chunk. And what boy doesn’t remember the Morton Salt girl in the yellow dress carrying an umbrella? “When It Rains It Pours.”

I’d churn away and the churning eventually would get harder and harder. As the churn slowed, my sisters, Brenda and Deb, drew closer. When we saw ice cream oozing out the top, it was ready and off they ran. Dad would come take out the canister and give it to Mom. She’d scrape cream from the blade and soon we were feasting on cold bowls of homemade ice cream. If you didn’t get brain freeze eating homemade ice cream, then you weren’t eating it right.

Many a hot evening, often on Sundays, we’d have homemade ice cream and it didn’t matter if the mercury topped 105, we felt like it was 40 degrees!

One of the darkest days in humanity was the invention of the electric ice cream churn. Some things are meant to be done by hand and churning ice cream is one of them. But then someone got the bright idea of adding an electric motor to it and what a racket it makes, whining and grinding away.

Another way to beat the heat was with kudzu. That’s right kudzu. My Grandfather Walker would string a lattice of hemp among the columns on his front porch and plant kudzu at their base. In short order a dense, deep green screen of kudzu blocked out the sun. It felt 20 degrees cooler behind that buffer of greenery. What I remember too is the pure quality of light hitting those broad green leaves. The kudzu glowed in an emerald-translucent way that made you feel cooler just by looking at it.

Another great invention was the window fan and its cousin, the box fan. For a long time I couldn’t sleep without a window fan purring away nearby. The white noise of the fan’s blades moving air proved soothing and the cool air flowing over my skin made it easier to sleep. On one of those blistering night when you hope a thunderstorm will come crashing through but heat lightning is as good as it gets, you could get by with a window fan, something you don’t see as much these days.

It had to be that brutally hot day in July 1955 when Dad went into town and bought a box fan. He brought it home and we put trays of ice cubes in front of it. I remember how we sat so the wind could blow over the ice right at us. It was that hot. With no air conditioning, a wind hinting of ice cubes was as good as it got.

Another heat buster was an icy Coca Cola from an old timey box filled with water and hard chunks of glass-like ice, not that frothy airy ice you see today. If you reached in deep to get a Coke off the bottom, your arm went numb and your fingers tingled as if a jolt of electricity had hit them. The best Coke I ever had was on my Granddad Poland’s farm when I was a boy. Aunt Vivian went up to Price’s Store to get Cokes for all of us. We had been gathering hay beneath a fiery sun.

I was sitting against a persimmon tree on a hill overlooking the hayfield when Aunt Vivian handed me a cold Coke, rivulets of condensation dripping from it. As long as I live, I’ll remember my first draw on that Coke. The Coke was so cold, so good, that it burned all the way down my throat and my body shed about 18 degrees of heat in two swallows.

Another way to cool off was to slip and open the freezer locker and lean over into it. I’ve never been to the Arctic but I can’t imagine drier, colder air. Dense clouds of vapors rose to meet me as I opened the door. Leaning over, I’d inhale that chill air. It smelled cold and clean and from the first moment I breathed deeply, the heat left me instantly. All the frost on frozen tomatoes and vegetables looked more like frozen tundra, and for a brief interlude I had miraculously flown from the steamy latitude of 33.824 to the North Pole. All I had to do was stick my head in a freezer locker.

Eating homemade ice cream, drinking teeth-shattering Coca Colas, sitting near fans, standing behind a cool screen of kudzu, and immersing myself in the Arctic via the frosty breath of a freezer locker: that’s how I kept cool as a boy.

I was doing more than surviving the heat. I was storing great memories of a time when we found innovative ways to cool off. That’s for sure. Today’s kids walk into an air-conditioned house, ride about in an air-conditioned car, and drink Cokes from an air-conditioned box. They probably think kudzu is some new video game. I don’t even know if kids today know what homemade ice cream is. Something you get at Baskins Robbins I guess. If that’s true, what a shame. They don’t know what they’re missing do they.

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