Slow Down, Go Down, Down Lowcountry Way

Discover The Joys Of Traveling The Lowcountry

 

A flash of white drops into the river to your left, then climbs, a fish in its talons. A bald eagle! Just then a dieseling eighteen-wheeler parks on your bumper and the rare moment vanishes in a lane shift. The eagle, says legend, is the only animal that can look into the sun, but you’ll never know driving 75 miles per hour. Nor will you smell tidal backwaters and swamp dogwood or watch endangered wood storks feed on mudflats. Worst of all, you can’t know what waits beyond the exit.

Maybe it’s time to slow down. Maybe it’s time to go down, down Lowcountry way. You know, take the road less traveled. Two different roads, indeed, remind us that Frost was right. One, Highway 64, leads to Walterboro where an ancient lane cuts a green leafy tunnel through a swamp. President George Washington traveled it, the Old Charleston to Savannah Stagecoach Road. At best, he made thirty-three miles a day the spring of 1791, and you can bet he saw plenty of wildlife.

The other, I-95, (a bingo card space?) lets you rip off thirty-three miles in twenty-five minutes. And why not? About all you’ll see are concrete, billboards, and eighteen-wheelers. I-95 may be the “Main Street of the East Coast,” but drive it and sensory deprivation is your companion.

The lesson? There’s a difference between driving and traveling. President Washington traveled, though he didn’t have a choice. Charles Kuralt did. Heed his words. “The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody. If the United States (substitute Lowcountry) interests you, stay off the interstates.”

Beyond The Bingo Highway

The next time you head south on I-95, explore Exits 53 and 57 near Walterboro, Exit 38 at Yemassee, Exit 33 to the Lowcountry Visitors Center, and other departure points within the ACE Basin. Let the Lowcountry cast its spell over you.

You’ll discover a wonderful sense of place. Drive coastward past haunted, green swamps and oaks dripping with Spanish moss into the land of black water and white sands, ever slanting toward the continent’s edge. Discover culture, geography, language, tranquillity, and wilderness. Ruins, canoe trails, Gullah’s intonations, history, heritage, wildlife, plants, antiques, islands, and saltmarsh. You’ll find that and more in this sea-level garden where magnificent landscapes rule. There’s plenty to do and lots to see. The journey is your destination.

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There’s something deeply moving about swamps, wetlands, and refuges. Alien and beautiful, they testify to nature’s resilience. Consider the Great Swamp Sanctuary where 800 acres of braided-creek bottomland form the shimmering green heart of Walterboro. Just three minutes off I-95, a town, of all places, provides a tranquil setting to contemplate Southern swamps. Stroll the boardwalk stretching over more than two miles of swamp. See the Old Charleston to Savannah Stagecoach Road where its bridges, washed into oblivion, still throw up bulkheads through the black waters. George Washington gazed out a stagecoach window here, hoping, he said, "to acquire knowledge of the face of the country."

That face has changed but Washington would still appreciate the East Coast’s largest estuarine preserve (134,710 acres), the pristine ACE Basin. The Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers sustain this great basin covering parts of Colleton, Charleston, Beaufort, and Hampton counties. The rivers twist and turn past cypress swamps, historic plantations, old rice fields, and tidal marshes. The scenery is picturesque, the South of old. And here in the land of buttressed trees and cypress knees, you might discover if the bald eagle really does stare into the sun.

Off Exit 21, The Blue Heron Nature Trail in Ridgeland will teach you something about native wildlife and plants. With sunning alligators and anhingas, educational displays, a boardwalk, and nature center, it’s a good stop for kids. They can feed fish, turtles, and ducks and visit the butterfly garden (shaped like a butterfly) where flights of fancy rule the day.

Sanctuaries In An Ancient Land

Travel on and soon you come to the great sanctuaries. Jasper County can’t hold the expansive Savannah National Wildlife Refuge (29,175 acres), which spills into Georgia north of Savannah. The refuge, on the Atlantic Flyway, hosts thousands of mallards, pintails, teal, and other duck species during winter. Songbirds sojourn here on their flight to and from northern nesting grounds. The area hums with life year-round as freshwater marshes, tidal rivers, creeks, and bottomland fashion a mosaic of quintessential Lowcountry habitat. The earth melts into water, and a prairie of rippling green grass gives form to the wind. Estuaries glint beneath a sun raining a miracle called photosynthesis.

Land, water, and marsh, all in juxtaposition: the “edge” effect sets up nicely for wildlife. One acre of cordgrass alone supports one million fiddler crabs. And that is just one species in this staggeringly rich environment where sun, saltwater, chlorophyll, and decay produce a rich broth that anchors the sea’s food chain—detritus. The interplay of sunlight, minerals, and water sustains priceless communities of life—biomes, as the biologists say, and the area runs ripe with natural history.

The Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1927, merits respect not just for the reasons above but because it’s a graveyard of sorts. Ghosts from the rice industry linger here ... levee remains, remnants of slave quarters, old mill sites, and small cemeteries.

Slaves cleared riverside swamps of timber and undergrowth, erected earthen levees, and built an intricate system of dams, dikes, floodgates, ditches, and drains. And then the moon went to work, raising and lowering the tides that irrigated fields, encouraging the growth of rice and drowning weeds and pests.

It was a short run.

Hurricanes and the Civil War doomed the rice culture. Wild rice lives on, however, and the refuge clamors during migratory periods when twenty-one species of warblers and thousands of ducks, including the rarely seen cinnamon teal, descend. Moving in great flotillas, they dive and dabble, unlike the great blue heron stalking the shallows step by step, all part of the great maritime ecosystem surrounding you.

Savannah National Wildlife Refuge bursts with beauty, diversity, natural history, and man’s history. But staying on I-95 reveals none of it. As Jim Wescott, director of the Lowcountry & Resort Island Tourism Commission, points out, “A lot of people don’t realize what beauty and wilderness they’re whizzing by at 70 miles per hour.” Pay it a visit.

Off Highway 278 near Hilton Head, a more modest sanctuary waits, Pinckney Island National Wildlife Refuge (4,053 acres). Namesake Pinckney Island is the largest and only island open to public use. Most of the refuge (67 percent to be precise) consists of salt marsh and tidal creeks. Hummocks abound. Greenery, blue water, blue sky, chocolate pluff mud, and flecks of white against Spartina compose a land of sublime earth hues.

The flecks of white, of course, are ibis, herons, and egrets. You needn’t be a birder to appreciate avian life. An amateur here can do quite well. The refuge harbors wading bird rookeries, osprey nests, and the endangered wood stork. Low tide’s mudflats become a breadbasket for herons, egrets, ibises, willets, terns, sandpipers, and oystercatchers that engage in a raucous race to glean food before high tide returns.

Of course, all this natural wealth proved tantalizing long ago. Explore Pinckney’s fourteen miles of hiking and bicycling trails and you follow native Americans who dwelled here as early as 10,000 BC. Behold, as they did, vistas of broad salt marshes, forests, and freshwater ponds.

Mackey's Creek, the Chechessee River, Port Royal Sound, and Skull Creek merge here, and all that water sustains some of the most pristine salt marsh habitat in the coastal zone. Not surprisingly, studying, viewing, and photographing the island's wildlife and marshscapes are popular throughout the year. Fancy yourself a naturalist. Learn about    food chains and energy flow, the water and nutrient cycles, how plants and animals adapt to changing water levels, the importance of wetlands, and man's relationship with the environment.

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Man Lives Here Too

They’re as inseparable as shrimp and grits—Man and the Lowcountry. Visit the Hampton Museum and Visitors Center (HMVC) for a perspective on man and the Lowcountry. An old brick building, erected in 1892 by the Bank of Hampton, holds the museum. Marie S. Ellis is the curator.

You can start with the photos, 5,000 strong. Marie reels off the subjects. “Our photos cover areas such as architecture, businesses, civic and other clubs, education, government & politics, military, natural history, special events, sports, and the Watermelon Festival.” Some photos pre-date 1940, she added, but most are from 1940s to the present.

You’ll also find military artifacts, antique medical equipment, memorabilia from the Watermelon Festival, and wares of local craftsmen and artisans. Learn about native Americans and Post Office memorabilia. You’ll also find an unusual company doll collection that includes Jell-O, Ralston Purina, J.P. Coats Thread, Mary Jane Candy Bars, 20 Mule Team Borax, Armour Canned Beef, Morton Salt, Ceresota Flour, and Domino Sugar among others.

“Our gift shop is very small,” said Marie, “about two feet by four feet by one-and-a-half feet.” On sale are booklets about Hampton County, local, handmade souvenirs, church dolls, porcelain Christmas ornaments, and illustrated HMVC stationery.

For many years people tried to open the museum’s old safe. None succeeded. Then Thomas E. Finch, a retired government locksmith from Clearwater, Florida, overheard a conversation about the safe in a Santee restaurant. “He called to offer his services in 2005,” said Marie. ” We accepted his offer and after 14 hours the safe was open.”

A $ 500 money wrapper and a white ring box, empty, were all they found. But there’s another mystery: the secret compartment a visitor found in a cash register and what was in it! Curious? Go down Lowcountry way and talk to Marie.

“My Lady’s Room” contains antique beauty salon gadgets and a “swooning couch.” Upstairs is an exhibit on the USS Hampton, a nuclear-powered attack submarine whose first commander started a tradition of Navy participation in the Watermelon Festival.

While you’re in the Hampton vicinity, check out Lake Warren State Park, a 422-acre park holding 200-acre Lake Warren. The park's flood plain forest supports large trees and four pine species. A three-acre lake holds largemouth bass, brim, redbreast, crappie, and catfish.

Just a ways down I-95, at Exit 33, you’ll find the Lowcountry Visitor's Center at Point South in the Frampton House (1868). History is deep here. The magnificent oaks bordering the building were more than 100 years old when Lee’s troops built the earthworks there to defend the Savannah to Charleston railroad line. Sherman’s torch passed through, destroying the original plantation house. Behind the center a gazebo reflecting 18th century architecture stands at the trailhead for the Revolutionary War Trail.

You’ll find exhibitions from other Lowcountry museums, Walterboro's South Carolina Artisans Center, and a display about major movies filmed in the Lowcountry. Radio, The Prince of Tides, Forrest Gump, and The Patriot, among others, share Lowcountry connections. The Lowcountry seduces the camera, drawing pros and amateurs alike. And, so, minor films take place here as well. One torrid August afternoon long ago, working near the Combahee River, shooting Blackwater Rivers, I trained an Arriflex BL on a bald eagle. The eagle soared upwards, riding a thermal. Intent on prey, it never looked into the sun. It can’t. Only the blind can.

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Forsake I-95. Discover the joys of traveling the Lowcountry. Explore the great plain that once lay beneath an ancient ocean. Go down where the surf foams and flirts with your feet. Tread the grainy remnants of ancient mountains, borne seaward for eons by rivers.

There’s beauty and history here. As Kuralt might say, “If the Lowcountry interests you come see where the first president traveled, blackwater rivers, old rice fields and tidal gates, and the mythic bald eagle.”

For once, let the journey be the destination. For ancient wonders live here in the Lowcountry. Just off the Bingo Highway.