Low Country by J. Jones (books to read in your 20s .txt) 📕

handful of beachfront homes perfectly and sporadically preserved, while the neighboring houses, as solidly built and all up on stilts, as is the law, are soaking, salty debris piles. Some houses even crack ragged and straight down the middle like a cartoon egg. Tape up the windows, bring in the bicycles and toys from the yard. Wait in line at the Scotchman to fill up the car and get a few extra gallons of gas. Are there batteries in the kitchen drawer? And where the devil are the flashlights? Fill up the bathtubs and extra buckets with tap water while it’s good and running, so you can brush your teeth and flush the toilets, though I don’t know that the tap water in Horry County has ever been that good. It turned all our teeth yellow.

Hugo hit as the sun went down on a muggy late-September school day in 1989. A car in a hurry to get out of town had hit a power line and knocked out our electricity early that morning. The county didn’t bother to fix it. In a few hours, everybody’d be without power anyway. Our little brown house on the edge of Conway was a few miles inland of the Intracoastal Waterway, where the turn-bridge has since been replaced by a tall concrete one that looks down on it. The Waterway is still the line of demarcation separating must-evacuate from probably oughtta. Nana and Granddaddy, who could see the ocean a half mile from their house on Calhoun and King’s Highway, packed a few bags of jewelry and family photos and came to ride out the storm with us. If Hugo had not been expected to come ashore as the strongest hurricane ever to hit our coast, a hurricane party would have been in order somewhere. If you’re not a Baptist on a Sunday, there’s not a lot that will inspire sobriety on a weekday in the Low Country, but a category-five hurricane might be one of them.

Once the power went out at our house, we got our flashlights and radios out. I remember being a little bit bored, anticipating the awe of great forces I was too young to grasp, but interpreted as fun. Like the ups and downs of the roller coasters at the Pavilion, or the thrills of ghost stories by candlelight. It was too dark to see what made all the noise outside, and there was a lot of noise outside. The adults were worried about it. Nana and Granddaddy sat on the brick hearth of our little fireplace in silence. Nana stroked her toy poodle, Tiffany, and recalled talk of finding snakes blown up into tree limbs after Hazel. Dad had gotten the poodle, to ease Nana’s loneliness, from the captain of a boat called Mistress Tiffany, who had a pet monkey and with whom he gave moonlight tours of the inlets and marshes. They left from Drunken Jack’s after the bar closed, and the monkey went around the boat collecting tips in a captain’s hat.

Dad paced around the living room with a radio in hand, and Mom kept watch over the candles. Justin, Jason, and I made a game of seeing who could hold their palm over the dreamy, dancing flame for the longest, and I won, of course. If I had been able to endure parading on stage in sequins and bathing suit, I could endure the pain of fire. Hugo came ashore a category four, the eye making landfall just above Charleston, and spawning in Conway half a dozen tornados at that darkest time right before dawn that ripped up the live oaks at Witch Links golf course a few miles down the road. We learned later that that was the freight-train sound we heard in the dark. Maybe the adults knew all along the sound of tornado winds and spared me the knowledge. My brothers slept the whole night through, as I listened to both Mom’s worry and the winds.

Uncle Mike thought he would outsmart the storm and shelter to the south. He took Chris and Brian to the safety of a high-rise hotel by Charleston’s harbor. Hugo’s eye was projected to come ashore at Myrtle Beach, you see, and while it is usually true that most storms crook northward at the last minute for more civilized ground in North Carolina, Hugo bent south, so that Mike’s instinct had taken his family right into the eye of the storm. They were okay and only got stuck in the hotel for a few days without power. Don’t be fooled by the relief of an open eye above. The back end of a hurricane is the most dangerous.

Early the next morning, I crawled out of Mom’s bed, leaving her and the boys asleep. Nana and Granddaddy had taken my room and were not out yet either. Dad had cranked his pickup truck and was listening to the news on the car radio with the driver’s door open. I sat on his lap looking at the tender pink blisters I had earned holding my hand over the candle, as we listened to the weather forecast. It was a cool and sunny fall day. The pine forest around the perimeter of our house was still there, but every single tree was bowed down at the waist as if in supplication to the clear blue sky. “After Hugo, none of our maps worked anymore,” Dad recalls.

Nearly fifty people died in South Carolina, mostly from drowning and electrocution, and for a while it was the most damaging storm ever recorded. Dad was especially hard in reminding us not to play in even the smallest puddle until about Christmas that year, much less jump in any creek or ditch water. “If the alligators or snakes don’t get you, you’re liable to get electrocuted.” With all the flooding, the wildlife was as displaced as the humans. When we returned to school, we heard stories of gators moving into backyard swimming pools. The Swamp Fox