Water
Driving along the highways and back roads of the Carolina Lowcountry, one senses the intrusion of creeks and rivers at every turn.  So riddled with waterways is the landscape that it’s hard to get anywhere without crossing a bridge. The water is taking over the land -- or so it seems.

In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s the land that is invasive here.

Flying low over the lush archipelago that stretches between Charleston, SC and Savannah, GA, it is clear at once that the roadways one sees at surface level are in fact a series of narrow, winding peninsulas – thin fingers twisting out into the much greater expanse of water and marsh that is the dominant geography here.  Island after island, and the bridges that join them, leap-frog across the rivers and sounds.

Amidst this spectacular panoply of grass and tide, the great alluvial deltas of the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto Rivers fan seaward.  “The vast table-linen of the great salt marsh,” Pat Conroy has called it.  These three rivers, their names giving rise to the acronym “ACE Basin”, were once the most fertile rice basket in all the Western Hemisphere.  But the end of slavery, (all those dikes and flood gates and concentric shallow fields a testament to inconceivable man-labor two centuries ago!), put an end to that. 

The Sea Island planters turned to cotton; making it the most valuable commodity in the world, and the waterways became the thoroughfares that got the crop to market, long before roads -- much less bridges -- were built.  The price of Sea Island cotton peaked in 1852, and many of the biggest mansions in Charleston and Beaufort, SC, and Savannah, GA were built around that time.  The water made it happen, just as it still defines life here today.

Over the centuries, the tides that cleanse these marshes twice daily have accomplished what scientists on other parts of the coast could not: the Lowcountry’s bays and estuaries remain some of the purist and most pristine in all of America.  The food chain, beginning with microscopic organisms in the roots of spartina grass, supports a thriving eco-system that has been called “the ocean’s breadbasket.”  It anchors the very culture that has grown up among these islands and creeks.

And a rich and fascinating culture it is, embracing the Gullah traditions of St. Helena as well as the beaches of Hilton Head Island, the sophistication of Charleston and the wild beauty of Hunting Island.  It is part history, part climate, part good food, and a large part appreciation of Nature’s bounty and the blessing of living well.  And it begins and ends at the water.

As it always has.