Being somewhere warmer as winter waned seemed like a must-do this year. By March, we had cabin fever and wanderlust, so we thought we’d head down the Eastern seaboard. We eliminated Florida as a destination because we wanted to be in a region culturally more “Southern.” It could have been the coast of Georgia, but we decided on South Carolina. Maybe it was because we’d already been to Savannah and Sapelo, one of Georgia’s Sea Islands, but hadn’t seen those of the Carolina Low Country or been to Charleston.
We drove first to the beautiful old port of Beaufort, then headed to the state campground on nearby Hunting Island. As we drove across St. Helena Island to get there, we saw some trawlers idle at dock, and discovered our visit would not coincide with the April-January shrimping. We were sadly off-season for that, but our timing worked well in other ways. Hunting Island is the state’s most popular campground, and we were lucky to get a site there. Most campers reserve a year in advance. Set right beside an unspoiled beach, it feels tropical with its lush vegetation. We were also there at a quiet time of year for bugs, happily missing out on the hot weather plague of sand fleas, no-see-ums and mosquitoes.
Then we traveled to Edisto Island, only an hour south of Charleston. After exiting the coastal highway, civilization fell quickly behind as we headed through sleepy countryside. Canopies of live oaks, strung with Spanish moss, arched across the quiet roadway. Early settlers fished and farmed there, growing valued crops of indigo and rice. After the Revolutionary War, plantations produced long staple cotton of a quality so fine that the Vatican specially ordered it for the Pope. Slaves from Africa brought to the island numbered nearly 10,000, pre-Civil War. Isolated from the mainland, the culture and language they shared remained intact. Even today, Gullah is part of the spoken dialect. African tradition has shaped Low Country cuisine, and the justly renowned art of basket weaving, using sweet grass, bulrushes and other local vegetation, continues to thrive.
Edisto’s fertile soil is still home to many farms, but tomatoes are king here now. Local produce abounds at roadside stands. If you continue across the island (nine miles wide by nine miles long), and over another bridge, you arrive at the barrier island of Edisto Beach. En route, you can see a dock with several shrimp trawlers tied up. As recently as 1994, a New York Times travel piece described Edisto Beach as an idyllic, undeveloped fishing village. Today, it is a very different story.
From a fleet of twenty-some boats, two are all that remain. The beachfront, once unpopulated because of its vulnerability to hurricanes and erosion, became built up when federally subsidized insurance took away some of the financial risk. Now, rental properties stand shoulder to shoulder. With a Wyndham timeshare resort featuring a golf course as its centerpiece, it is difficult to picture this village ever having been defined by fishing, so thoroughly has the place been transformed.
That’s not to say the excesses of Edisto’s resort identity can’t be minimized if desired. We communed with the natural environment quite nicely by staying in one of the two state campground locations on Edisto. We pitched a tent along a salt marsh, only a few yards from the dunes and beach. Like Hunting Island’s, it is a long stretch of sand full of shells and lapped by gentle waves. There are rules about lights and dogs along the beach during the loggerhead turtles’ nesting season, but it is a strollers’ and beachcombers’ dream come true. There are even fossils to be found there. The other campground is nestled in a maritime forest of live oaks and the state’s tallest palmettos. An ancient midden of oyster shells, 4,000 years old, is part of a hiking and biking trail. Around the island, boating, fishing and kayaking opportunities abound, with rentals and excursions available.
A visit to Edisto Seafood, the island’s only fresh fish market, revealed a bittersweet story. The shrimp are still there to be caught, but since they cost more than imported ones from Asia, the market for them has almost disappeared. When we asked where on the island we could eat fresh-caught seafood, which is of course a large part of Edisto’s reputation, the answer was only one restaurant, Whaley’s. The others don’t want to pay a higher price and cut into their profit margin. But what, we wondered, if more of us did what the bumper stickers around town implored and supported local seafood? Paying a bit more might be worth it, right? It seems the answer is definitely yes. Shrimp that is imported is cheap because of cheap labor and environmental irresponsibility. Thousands of acres of mangrove swamps have been destroyed to become intensive-culture shrimp ponds. Antibiotics are used with abandon. Runoff pollutes local drinking water and spreads pesticides and disinfectants, as well as diseases endemic to the ponds, into the wild. On the other hand, the U.S. wild shrimp fishery is considered one of the cleanest and most responsible, holding to higher ecological and health standards than any other nation. As for another kind of invasion, that of vacationers, how do locals feel about their town turning into a tourist trap? Captain Barry Fontaine, of Fontaine Charters, explained his sentiment: visitors and residents should be able to co-exist. After experiencing the same attitude in Charleston too, we decided that Southern hospitality is no mere cliché, but is genuinely alive and well.
Our itinerary omitted the anchors of Carolina’s coastline, Hilton Head at its southern end and Myrtle Beach to the north. We’d chosen places to visit we thought we’d like because they seemed related to what we like best about the Maine coast: towns with a tradition of fishing. We learned what those places also share is a large and looming question: what will keep fishing a viable economic activity there and not just a legacy of local color?
Tina Cohen writes for much of the year on Vinalhaven.