Quote of the Day (Josep Pla, on Autumn and the Sea)

"Autumn is the season most suited to the work of men today. At this time of year city dwellers discover that streets and squares are clean and luminous, the air is light and cool, and people walk with a spring in their step. Since this has to do with temperament, I think I am a man of the sea and working at sea is what I find most congenial, agreeable and easy to grasp. I cannot disassociate the sea from autumn." — Catalan journalist and author Josep Pla (1897-1981), diary entry for Nov. 9, 1918, in The Gray Notebook, translated by Peter Bush (2013)

I took the image accompanying this post when I was on vacation in the autumn of 2014 in Beaufort, SC, by the Atlantic Ocean.

Photo of the Day: Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park, Beaufort SC

On vacation in Hilton Head, SC, six years ago, I took a one-day excursion over to Beaufort. There are many reasons to enjoy this Lowcountry community, but the multi-acre Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park is an especially appropriate way to appreciate its charms.

The park, named for the longtime mayor who secured federal funding for the project, was built along the Beaufort River / Intracoastal Waterway in the middle 1970s and renovated from 2006 to 2008. Locals use the park for the Taste of Beaufort, Water Festival and the Shrimp Festival, but it can be appreciated year-round—including by tourists like me—for the green space and riverfront walkways that I photographed here.

Walking around here, it’s easy to understand why favorite son Pat Conroy continually evoked this waterside community, including in his bestselling novel The Prince of Tides. Experienced once, the sea breeze, palmetto trees and gracious antebellum architecture linger forever in the memory.

Photo of the Day: ‘An Universal and Unmoving Cloud’—Beaufort SC

“The sky above us showed

An universal and unmoving cloud,

On which, the cliffs permitted us to see

Only the outline of their majesty,

As master-minds, when gazed at by the crowd!

And, shining with a gloom, the water grey

Swang in its moon-taught way.”—English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), “A Sea-Side Walk,” in Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Poems and Letters (Everyman’s Library, 2003)

While vacationing in Hilton Head, SC, in November 2014, I took a day trip to the nearby Lowcountry community of Beaufort. It also impressed me with its lovely seaside views, as you can tell from this photo I took at the time.

Photo of the Day: Carriage Ride, Beaufort, SC

This image illustrates one of the many ways in which tourism has come to play a major role in the economy of Beaufort, SC. It tells a great deal in a short space about the picturesque, preserved antebellum homes and the lovely, improbably enduring Spanish moss of this coastal community that so many came to love over the years (including a longtime resident, the late novelist Pat Conroy). 

I confess to falling under its spell myself when I visited the town on a longer vacation to Hilton Head back in November 2014 (so much so that I took a ton of photos, such as this one).

The guides tended to dwell more on the period before and during the Civil War—understandable, in one sense, as the homes are a compelling argument for historic preservation (even being featured in films such as The Big Chill), and the story of these buildings were told primarily by wealthy white slaveowners. But from now on, I think more people—and more effort on the part of the community—will focus on a later period that has not received as much attention: Reconstruction.

This was brought to my attention forcefully toward as I listened on C-Span to a panel discussion hosted by the American Historical Association (AHA), “Commemorating the Reconstruction Era.” The panelists mentioned how, in the waning days of the Obama administration, the President had designated Beaufort the first National Park Service site dedicated to Reconstruction.

This period of American history was long mischaracterized as an era of vengeful Northern carpetbaggers and their self-interested collaborators, corrupt Southern scalawags, who initiated a period of debasement of the defeated South. Over the last 60 years or so, with the onset of the Civil Rights movement, that stereotype is now the subject of necessary revisionism.

Beaufort is an excellent place to start with educating people about what really went on: a thwarted but heroic effort to extend the full rights of American citizens to former slaves. Taken over by the Union Army in 1861, Beaufort and its environs became a kind of laboratory for a Second American Revolution, where African-Americans could vote, buy property and create institutions such as churches and schools that would build their community. 

One of the AHA panelists, former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, and Columbia University historian Eric Foner, began to press for the NPS designation for Beaufort more than a decade and a half ago. The campaign had to overcome stiff opposition from the Sons of Confederate Veterans and others before Barack Obama created the monument through the Antiquities Act. 

The Web site for Beaufort prominently mentions a few key points of interest related to this much-misunderstood period of American history: Penn Center, site of the first academic school for freed slaves; and Tabernacle Baptist Church, the burial ground for Robert Smalls, a slave who, in 1863, pulled off a daring capture of a Confederate steam ship before turning it over to Union forces, and, in the postwar period, served in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Photo of the Day: Pat Conroy Country

The news of novelist Pat Conroy’s death from pancreatic cancer at age 70 this week filled me with a sense of loss. It’s hard to think that we won’t be having another one of his books—which, for all their occasional lapses into overheated prose, also exude real storytelling power and insight into dysfunctional families (much like his own, from which, he frankly acknowledged, he drew on for many of his characters in the likes of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini).

But, above all, his work evokes an extraordinary sense of place, as I noted in a prior post. In a Facebook post marking his 70^th birthday, he noted: “It was in Beaufort in sight of a river's sinuous turn, and the movements of its dolphin-proud tides that I began to discover myself and where my life began at fifteen."  I understood what he meant so well when I visited his South Carolina town, for a fleeting day, on vacation a year and a half ago.

Conroy came back here to live, in the same lowcountry community where his quarreling parents were buried. And now, his own restless journey has come to an end here—with the ugliness of the disease that killed him counterbalanced by “the beauty of indrawn tides” that moved him and, ultimately, thousands of readers worldwide.

Photo of the Day: Calm Harbor, Beaufort, SC

The coast communities of South Carolina and Georgia certainly have their beauty, but every time I hear of a tropical storm developing from August to October, I immediately start to worry that these areas may be affected. This week, with Hurricane Joaquin blowing up the coast, was no different.

These last couple of days, my mind drifted back to a vacation nearly a year ago, when I visited the lovely town of Beaufort, along South Carolina’s Low Country. (See this for just one of several posts I wrote on this place since that short visit.) Fortunately, according to this latest news report, Joaquin is not expected to inflict significant damage on the area, though a double red flag warning is serving as an advisory to people not to swim unless they have a board or floatable device tethered to them.

Good advice.

Photo of the Day: ‘Secession House,’ Beaufort SC

When I was down in the lovely coastal town of Beaufort, SC, last fall, I fell in love with the antebellum homes on virtually every street of this Lowcountry community, including this Greek Revival mansion. A sign outside identified it as the Maxcy-Rhett House, and gave some details about its principal owners: Milton Maxcy, an educator, and Edmund Rhett, a lawyer, planter and politician.

All seemingly helpful, except for a few details of critical importance. The lifespan of Rhett, I noticed, extended into the middle of the Civil War, and the name seemed to speak of all manner of planter privilege. (Indeed, the name chosen by Margaret Mitchell for her rakish hero of Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler, combines two of the most storied names in South Carolina history.)

It took just a few clicks on the Internet to discover the nickname left off the sign: “Secession House,” denoting the critical discussions held here in which Edmund Rhett—and, even more important, his brother Robert Barnwell Rhett, a U.S. Congressman and Senator—propounded ideas of states’ rights that found explosive and divisive expression in the secession movement and the Civil War.

The declaration of secession by South Carolina, the most die-hard secessionist state, was a dream come true for the Rhetts, particularly Robert, whose oratory for the cause over the last three decades had been so extreme that it became known as "Rhett-oric," I discovered in Adam Goodheart's "Disunion" post for The New York Times back in 2010.  After that, things did not go well for the state, and even less so for the Rhetts. Edmund died mid-war, and Robert may well wish he had, who lost two songs in the conflict and, because of facial cancer, became so disfigured that he eventually had to stop going out in public.

Under the circumstances, it's nice to see that American flag flying on the home rather than the other flag that's become notorious the last several weeks, isn't it?