ISLAND SCENES

I hope everyone had as nice a Thanksgiving Day as we did. Tourists were out in force because the day was gorgeous. Not too hot, not too cold. We met several interesting people. One couple had traveled from Colorado to spend the holiday on their sailboat. Once in Charleston SC  where it was docked, they sailed down to our little island and were having turkey and dressing next to us at Barbara Jean's. After overeating, we waddled--er, walked around the island.

A few interesting sights:

This is the highest point on the island. The airport was built on the highest place, but this mountain of ground-up debris from the hurricane aftermath must be a height record. You can tell it's almost as tall as the airplane hangar beside it.

Mounds of the ground-up tree branches, trunks, roots, and other leftover debris are constantly being piled up and moved around by the tiny scraper you see at the bottom right. I'm not sure what the white thing next to it is. It may have something to do with the loading. But even though truckloads of the stuff are constantly being taken away, the pile doesn't seem to get any smaller. And we still have debris to be picked up. The worst part is that the lack of rain dries it up and the winds send the dust swirling through the air. Some people are finding it hard to breathe.

Further on our walk, we came across a tree blown down in the storm and recycled by the imaginative homeowner. For Halloween, a ghost hung from the top branch. This week, it's decorated for Christmas. See the Santa cap on the top ball?

Someone must be an artist to see such potential in felled timber!

And finally, here is our own lovely lemon tree. The lemons look like Christmas ornaments, don't they?

Now if I had an artistic streak in me, I could make this into an outside Christmas tree! Except that we're probably going to pick the lemons and have a pie before Christmas! Yum!

VETERANS DAY PARADE

St. Simons Island celebrated veterans yesterday by a parade and other activities. We went down to the Village for the parade. It wasn't a long parade, but we had several veterans from different wars in it. One was in this car with what looks like his wife and grandkids:

Besides the veterans, we had what I believe is the local high school's military program--is it called Jr. ROTC? Anyway, they made a nice impression:

And one of the county high school's bands came out in full force:

And the whole point was to thank our veterans for their service to our country. This poem sums up what an immense debt we owe them, why we should be thankful to them every day--not just one day a year!

IT IS THE SOLDIER

It is the Soldier, not the minister

Who has given us freedom of religion.

It is the Soldier, not the reporter

Who has given us freedom of the press.

It is the Soldier, not the poet

Who has given us freedom of speech.

It is the Soldier, not the campus organizer

Who has given us freedom to protest.

It is the Soldier, not the lawyer

Who has given us the right to a fair trial.

It is the Soldier, not the politician

Who has given us the right to vote.

It is the Soldier who salutes the flag,

Who serves beneath the flag,

And whose coffin is draped by the flag,

Who allows the protester to burn the flag.

©Copyright 1970, 2005 by Charles M. Province

HURRICANE WARNING!

Wednesday

Yes, we just received our voluntary evacuation notice today! Hurricane Matthew is heading our way!

South Carolina's coastal area were already under an evacuation order, which had concerned us. So when this one came, we were kind of prepared. As luck would have it, we were on the road, coming back from Atlanta where my guy took his photograph that had been chosen to hang in the State Capital (more on this next week), when the news came.

As we hit I-16, going from Macon to Savannah, we started running into traffic. I-16 is usually an uncrowded, easygoing road. Not today. I think most of the cars were coming from Hilton Head and Savannah. Luckily, we were going toward Savannah rather than away from it!



As we came over the causeway to our island, the tide was up in the marshes. And I mean up. Usually, the marshes look like a green field. Not today.

We're packing up tonight, putting our legal papers and a few other precious items into the car. Tomorrow morning --Thursday-- we'll be heading back to Atlanta to stay with relatives. Right now, it's projected that Matthew is due to call Thursday night or Friday.

When this blog publishes Saturday morning, we should know if our house has been blown away or not. We're keeping our fingers crossed! This is the first time we've had to go through this!


Saturday

The mandatory evacuation notice came Thursday morning as we were heading out. We got to Atlanta and watched news and Internet reports on the hurricane progress.  Matthew meandered around and passed our island Friday night, This morning we got word that our  neighborhood houses suffered little structural damage, probably because the eye was about 45 miles offshore.

A lot of trees and power lines are down but hopefully that will be cleared away within a few days and we can go home. We are very thankful!

BRUNSWICK STEW

Ah, who doesn't love Brunswick Stew? And everyone has his or her own favorite recipe. Probably not the one that includes squirrels and/or rabbits but certainly more than one meat. Along with the several meats the recipe takes, are several vegetables including but not limited to, lima beans and corn.

No one seems to know quite how Brunswick Stew got invented, but there are some interesting tales. Below is the pot that supposedly first cooked Brunswick Stew on St. Simons Island in 1898.

Why it should be displayed in Brunswick, Georgia rather than on St. Simons is a mystery, but there it is. And notice that there is some ambiguity here. The meaning could be that the first time the stew was made on the island was 1898. Or it could mean that that first time the stew was ever made, was on the island.

In any event, there are other claimants to the title of inventing it. One goes that it was originally made in Brunswick, Germany. Since most of its ingredients are indigenous to the Americas though, I kind of doubt this one is true.

Another one comes from Brunswick, Virginia. According to their marker (below), in 1828 a camp cook stewed some squirrels with onions, butter, stale bread and seasonings.

Since real Brunswick Stew requires several meats and vegetables (and so far as I know, no bread), this seems doubtful to me, too.

The most likely theory to me is the old Indian hunting stews, where bits of meat and whatever vegetables were handy were simmered together in a communal pot and enjoyed by the hunting band.

But despite the claims, there's no clear-cut answer.

My advice, when you come across it, is to enjoy it. Especially from Southern Soul, here on the island. Their stew is reminiscent of the Brunswick Stew my daddy used to go out and bring home when someone he knew in the country was cooking it. And oh, boy! It was good then and it's good now!

BEACH WALK

The tourists have thinned out a little. Not much, but if we go to the beach early, it isn't crowded.

Our beach has changed a lot during the past ten years. Here we're standing on the beach looking back toward the shore. This beach used to be a sandbar that was unaccessible at high tide. Now it's connected all the time, with several large tidal pools at low tide as seen below.

Where once the river flowed between the sandbar and the beach and back to the sea, has now become the tidal pools. This is the end of the river. If you could walk to the left, you'd come over to the houses.

As I said, a few people were out, including this paddle-boarder.

And a guy playing with his dogs.

And this bird. I don't know what it is but I'm sure someone does. He reminded me of a sandpiper except bigger.

He was a cutie, running in and out of the waves!

WALK ON THE BEACH

We went over to the beach to walk yesterday morning. There weren't a lot of people but there were some pretty shells like these:

And evidently a swarm of jelly fish had been caught by the tide because there were a lot of dead ones on the sand. We had to watch where we stepped. Here's one:

And of course, there was a car carrier in the distance. The tiny specks at the bottom are people walking on the beach at the edge of the water:

Our beach has changed considerably since we started coming here fifteen years ago.  Then, the ocean was about ten foot from the end of the boardwalk and low tide meant just a short walk to the water. No more. Now there's a little trek to get to the water even at high tide.

There was also a long sandbar out in the water that was visible at low tide. As the years passed, the terrain changed. The sandbar lengthened. The currents between the sandbar and the beach turned into a river. Then the river narrowed. Now the sandbar is gone and all that remains of the currents are a couple of tidal pools. Sand has filled in the rest. This is a pool as we come off the boardwalk. The ocean is at the bottom of the sky beginning from the left. You can barely see it on the horizon, and it ends at the dark line beginning abour two-thirds across which is where the King and Prince hotel curves out toward the water:

And this tidal pool is further up the beach. The water once ran through it and down to the first pool above. You can't see the ocean at all in this picture because it's to the photographer's left:

As a result of the sands shifting, the houses that once sat close (in some cases, too close) to the water, find themselves a fair distance from the ocean. Dunes have taken over what was once a river and then a tidal pool. Now only a shallow trench lets high-tide water into the pools that are left. I took this photo standing on the beach and you can see how far the dunes extend:

Nature certainly brings a lot of changes!

BIRD MAN

Today we were walking in the Village, trying to make up for all that turkey and fixings we indulged in over Thanksgiving (and by the way, I hope everyone had as lovely a Thanksgiving as we did) when we came upon a man feeding the birds.

When we first saw him, he had a bird perched on his head. I wasn't in time to snap that shot but here he is with what looks like sated birds. He's offering them bread but they aren't nearly so eager as they were in the beginning.

Personally, I wouldn't want to be sitting in the midst of them since they can start flying around overhead at any given time!

LOCAL AUTHOR EVENT

Our Literary Guild (that used to be a Friends of the Library till they disbanded and reformed due to a conflict with the system library director at the time who is no longer in charge; in fact, our county formed our own separate system) put on an event to benefit local authors yesterday and invited twenty authors to participate. I was happily one of them. They set up tables at the Casino atrium for each of us to display and sell our books, furnished lunch, and generally catered to us for the four hours we were there. It was a lovely experience, easily one of the best put-together of its kind that I've attended.

Here are some pix. Yours Truly is in the first as we're setting up. I am fortunate my guy's done stuff like this. He made up the boards and set up the table and did all that. All I had to do was sit there. (Of course, since he practically forced me to participate since I am the shy, retiring type, I guess he felt like he had to make it easy.)

Then here's Dr. Christina Johns on the right. She's written a fictional semi-memoir.

Finally, here's Buzz Bernard. His book Eyewall, the story of a hurricane hitting St. Simons hit too close to home for me.

A fun day. Thanks go to all the volunteers who worked so hard to make it successful!

AIRPLANE RIDES

Our little airport has been busy this week. First all the jets coming and going, bringing people in before the GA/FL football game and taking them out again. Also planes bringing people in before the McGladrey Golf Classic that's next week. Seems like no sooner does one get off the runway than another takes its place!

But more interesting is the plane here for the weekend. My guy had to hustle to get a picture before it moves on to Savannah. It's an old Ford Trimotor. If you could zoom in, you could see the writing on the body: Eastern Air Transport! Remember Eastern, anyone?

Anyway, rides are $75 a pop. It can hold up to nine passengers, each with its own window. Cool, huh?

DANGEROUS WATERS

A sandbar runs alongside our island. At high tide, it's invisible. At low time, it entices tourists to go out with umbrellas and beach chairs to enjoy the ocean.

What they don't know is that when the tide turns, the sandbar becomes a trap. The tidal pool they waded through or the wet sand they walked on to go out onto the sandbar, quickly changes to a rapid current of water when the tide comes in, a current that can carry strong swimmers away. Unfortunately, it's happened several times in the few years we've lived here.

Like a fourteen-year-old girl in 2010. Her mother and young sister made it to safety, but she didn't and was lost. And last year, a soldier and his family were out on the sandbar. He got them to shore before being swept away, though his body was later recovered.

Now it's happened again. As I wrote Monday about the lovely beach and how we enjoyed living here, searchers were out. A teenager who'd been out with a couple of his friends to play in the ocean had been washed away. This time was a little different because the tide wasn't coming in. He simply stepped off the sandbar on the ocean side into a drop off and never resurfaced. That happened Sunday. His body was retrieved a couple of days later and his funeral will be tomorrow. His friends, fortunately, were rescued by a kayaker who gave them life jackets and towed them to safety.

Strangely, the police chief was already on the County Commission's agenda for last night, to ask for funds to post warning signs and put an emergency response center beachside. It passed, of course, as it should have after another tragic drowning.

What I don't understand is why it's taken so long to get this done. There are lifeguards between certain hours, but there is nothing to warn people that the sandbar isn't safe, that the tide is unpredictable and dangerous. I remember a proposal to put red flags out whenever a rip current threatens, but that never happened. I wonder if it's because the authorities were afraid of discouraging tourists?

So we've lost another person, a fine one from all accounts. He would have been a junior this year and was in the Navy Junior ROTC program. Everyone agrees he was a quiet, likable young man whose too-young demise leaves his family and friends griefstricken. My heart goes out to his mother.

Maybe he would have stepped off into the ocean anyway, even with a series of signs and in full knowledge of the dangers. But maybe he wouldn't. I find it hard to understand why it's taken so long to get warning signs and a rescue station set up.

VISITING EGRET

Headed out of the complex for our regular walk, we spotted this guy fishing in our lagoon.

He posed for a picture, then  started fishing again.

Lovely weather, gorgeous wildlife, what else can we ask for?

WHALE IN THE PARK

I blogged a while back about the tongue missing out of our whale down at Neptune Park. I pointed out how people were throwing trash inside it, and that the opening was large enough for a small child to slip through.

So a couple of days ago, we caught a county worker putting a metal mesh net in the mouth to block trash and kids from getting inside. We stopped and told him how happy we were they were fixing it. We learned, to our chagrin, that the county had not removed the tongue because it was coming apart as we had assumed. No, indeed.

Someone had stolen the tongue.

Now why would anyone want to steal a wooden tongue the size of a scooter wheel?

Anyway here's the latest pix even if you can't tell much about the wire netting that's supposed to keep trash and people out. Wonder how long it'll last.

CHANGES AT ST SIMONS

While we were away, some stuff changed on St. Simons Island. Here's a photo of the whale in Neptune Park the kids always love to climb on. See how it's been spiffed up? Fresh paint, fresh sand, new shells glued to barnacles! Looks like a new statue!

And to my joy, Sweet Mama's did not close as we feared when we saw their old place up for lease! They simply moved to a new location near Winn Dixie (the old Quizno's) and got all spiffed up, too. Oh my, I had to go in and get pound cake squares!