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

roller coaster down in Garden City had blown away. The worst story I’d heard came from McClellanville, just outside Charleston, where the eye made landfall. I know now that the story as it was told and retold did not happen that way. That human nature is attracted to the tallest of tales, and the need to share what we have witnessed spirals into gossip of the most inconsiderate kind. And while it’s true that nearly the whole town sheltered in the local high school’s gym, which really did flood up to the ceiling in the middle of the night, the rumor passing among my classmates that everyone had drowned is not. I know now that nobody died in the gym that night but still on occasion hear the story passed around as if the rumor, by now the beginning of a legend, were stronger somehow than the truth. Everybody survived drowning by climbing onto the rafters, a story scary enough to need no embellishment to me, but then I am no longer a resident of the Low Country and don’t reckon to be again in this life. That such tragedy might have happened was not at all that hard to believe, especially to a child’s imagination. At Dora’s house, weeks after the storm, we watched from her porch as a whole house floated down the Waccamaw River.

When the National Guard allowed us to cross the swing bridge, Grandpa had us go see if his beach house in Cherry Grove still stood. He’d been so fond of his own beach memories that he’d bought a duplex on stilts and rented it out part of the year. We drove past turquoise and pink beach awnings that had been shredded by the wind, the shattered signs of the popular beach-wear stores that used to say EAGLES or WINGS where we bought our dollar-apiece hermit crabs, and boarded-up windows with their messages spray-painted to the storm. HUGO GO HOME was scratched on the plywood. When we got to Cherry Grove, we had to leave the silver station wagon at the end of the block and walk around puddles and piles of debris. The beach house was still standing, but under the carport was a pile of sand nearly all the way up to the ceiling. The carpet inside the house, one story off the ground, had been soaked through from storm surge lapping underneath. Where I stood had been ocean water well over my head, and as Mom did a lap around the house to assess the damage, I noticed the water line on the stilts and stairs that led up to the front door. The ocean had stretched a full block inland and had somehow returned to where it had always been, looking pleased and contented for the exercise.

Children recognize in something only their own relationship to it, and I had thought of the ocean as a friend that welcomed me into its warmth and seemed sad to see me return to land. That it was indifferent not just to my presence, but to that of whole towns and families, was a new consideration. It swallowed whole the pier I fished from and tore in half the walls of hotels whose pools I snuck into, and it was not bothered a bit. This was an initiation into the logic of coastal life, an acceptance that danger was inevitable. Just as it is impossible to predict where the eye will make landfall, none of my family would have guessed that for the next hurricane that graces these pages, we’d be living on the north end of the Low Country.

7

_________

Aces over Eights

THE SUMMER AFTER HUGO, THE SUMMER OF 1990, my parents decided to make the move to Tennessee so Dad could sing country music on the radio. The Pancake House could do without Dad, and Waccamaw Academy would be shutting down at the end of the next school year. The inland tourists, the rubberneckers, the college kids, the Canadians, they were good for nothing but traffic and trouble. Among the locals, those who were taking their forever spots on the rebuilt pier with the other old men who fished every morning at dawn, who had played baseball for the Myrtle Beach High School Seahawks with my dad, who had lost something important to the ocean’s surf and surge as we all had, swirled a mix of disdain and deference to those out-of-towners. My parents did not want to end up like them. They had their own dreams to go after instead of giving up their time to the fantasies of these outsiders. Don’t you always end up hating most those you need to stay afloat? The tourist tips added up to not much. Glued to the tabletops with globs of Country Crock and spilled maple syrup, besides. These folks didn’t need my dad to scramble their eggs and deliver their hangover waffles. In Mom’s ruffled peach apron and his favorite baseball cap, he did that for us on his days off, with a perfected flair I mistook for magic instead of routine. Hope infects the smallest first. My little brothers and I divined the big time in the crystal balls of our parents’ eyes.

When he was at work in the mornings, I liked to hide in his guitar case. He kept the guitar propped up on a metal stand if he wasn’t going out with it. When he got up from the couch, he held the fragile neck of it down at his side, like he was holding the hand of a sleeping child. The instrument seemed to follow him around more faithfully than the dog. Laid flat and left open on the carpet, I was more fascinated by the case, and when I could get away with it, would tiptoe into its empty body. The lining, a soft gray fuzz, welcomed me inside. I slunk down until my form had curled and contorted just right. The shape of that