Low Country, J. Jones [top 10 best books of all time .TXT] 📗

It does not count rainfall, tornados, storm surge, and wind gusts. It is only the sustained winds that are tallied above. The formation of a hurricane is the next step for a tropical storm, which originates with what they call a tropical depression. Nature gets the blues, like the rest of us, I suppose, and only tearing something up helps. I cannot blame the weather for something I am guilty of myself.

Hazel, which arrived in 1954, is credited with transforming Myrtle Beach into the family-friendly and affordable tourist destination that it is today. Out to sea washed the beachfront shacks and up went the roadside motels, largely built by the H. C. Jones Construction Company. Aerial photographs of the area after storms are popular as postcards and on book-jacket covers of souvenir histories. Where lumber and bricks upheld dreams and protected a family of memories, there stood empty lots or piles of broken beams and debris. The pictures of Hazel seem to always be sold in a wash of sepia brown. Tourists buy prints of other people’s catastrophe, marveling at the unimaginable. I hope these are talismans by which they count their blessings, but I have a feeling that they are just turning a natural disaster into an attraction. At least the Pavilion did not wash away. No, that marvel was destroyed by nothing so marvelous in scale as a hurricane. Only the everyday greed of shortsighted men.

The summer my parents announced their first separation in what would be a long series of rifts and reconciliations was a particularly active hurricane season for our stretch of South Carolina coast. At the very least, I will remember the blue house in Little River that was the scene of so much fighting and unhappiness as having the best front porch of all the houses we lived in. Mom spent days searching secondhand stores for rocking chairs to fill the porch and then painting them white to match the railings. Maybe she thought their wide arms would hold her family together. Not long after we moved in, even our beloved Bandit died. Mom picked us up from Nana’s after midnight, and as my brothers squirmed unseatbelted between bites of fast food in the green van, she began to cry in thin creaks at first and then sobs; unusual, as her angry tears were always quiet. Along the familiar neon stretch of Restaurant Row and past Briarcliffe Mall across the street from the Meher Baba ashram we didn’t know was there, she got it out that Bandit wouldn’t be coming home with us. His heart was infected with parasites, and they could only afford to put him down instead of treat him. Not long after, she said to us in the car, “We’re shutting down the restaurant.”

“We know,” said her three eldest kids in unison. We knew it all, of course. They hadn’t been able to pay the rent for months, and Uncle Herman, a teetotaler like Granddaddy, would take the sign and whatever else he could sell in the building. The bank was about to take the house, and we were officially moving to Charlotte.

Little River was one of Blackbeard’s hideouts. He buried treasure all over the inlets in our neighborhood. Glittering jewels and doubloons sparkling in the swamps and mud-colored waterways. The man who finally killed Blackbeard, Robert Maynard, was hired by the governor of Virginia to track down the most fearsome pirate of the Golden Age of Piracy. Maynard sent spies in canoes up waterways like the one by our new house to discover where the pirate and his crew were hiding. In a battle off Ocracoke Island, Blackbeard was captured and killed, his head displayed from the mast of Maynard’s ship and his body thrown overboard. The legends say that it swam headless in laps around the ship before sinking to the bottom of the ocean. My brothers and I roamed the neighborhood and the banks of the water with sticks and Super Soaker water guns, pretending to be pirates ourselves. We had been waiting and watching our parents take out their unhappiness on each other, and we wondered what was going to happen in the safety of the sappy pine lots, tracking the course of their love like we tracked the hurricanes swooshing across the Atlantic during the fall. In fact, before Hugo blew into town years before, the biggest news from our coast had been the discovery of a shipwreck that yielded one of the largest hauls of gold ever found on the bottom of the ocean, pulled up from the Central America, which had gone down in 1857.

It was only a few weeks after my early-June birthday when the first storm of the season danced past our home, whisking over the whitecaps beyond the local pier and skimming the Outer Banks to the north of us. A sharp elbow to the gut of the Atlantic, awkwardly bumping into the faceless names that crowd the ocean floor. A for Arthur. Though technically within the bounds of the season, a hurricane in June was unusual enough to feel like an omen. I had cut out the hurricane chart the paper published every year on June 1, the first official day of hurricane season, and tacked it on the wall, as I did every year. I usually didn’t have to start marking latitudes and longitudes until the end of August. We often did it as a class assignment in the first weeks of a new school year, watching as our little crisscross marks of ink or colored pencil curved out from the bubble of western Africa. Hurricanes were tricksters, moody spirits, and just about the only thing you could count on was their changing course at the last minute. X marks the spot, we’d note on our tracking charts, where the eye came ashore, penciling its path from a school desk till the name disappeared, usually around Canada somewhere, under my name in the top right corner of the page.