Photo Essay: Vacation on the Same Island for 60 Years and Your Vacation Also Becomes a Pilgrimage

In the 1930's, my parents fell in love with a century old house on a marsh creek island on Edisto Island, SC. It had been dismantled and moved by oxcart across the causeway in 1893 when the portion of the Atlantic where it had stood with 60 other houses had been wiped out by a violent hurricane. It had five bedrooms, three fireplaces, a kitchen on the back side of a breezeway, and a wonderful deep wrap around porch where we could play four square. By 1950, the house had fallen into major disrepair and been vandalized heavily, so finally they could afford it for $500. With no electricity or plumbing, we began to vacation there every August, and gradually my parents were able to add utilities. We were a family of ten, and we would go there for a month and carry water, use kerosene lamps to play nightly games of cards, read endless books, and swing in a rope hammock. We were nurtured by the incredible beauty that enveloped us, watched the silent flurry of herons rising from the trees responding to an impulse only they acknowledged, and soothed by the metronome of the gentle rise and fall of the tides. I rather liked the romantic notion of reading by candlelight; I liked using the hand pump in the back yard to wash hands or washing my hair under the rain gutter when it rained, our early version of running water. It was better to take a sibling with you to pump for you and then you for him after priming the pump with a rusty tin can full of water, and you had to skim the beetles off the rain barrel, but it worked. I readily appreciated the rhythm of the rain falling on the old tin roof, I loved the vista before me of marsh lakes filling and emptying and with the breakers of the Atlantic just visible across the marsh and past the dunes, I even made my peace with an outhouse which we euphemistically called "the little green house in the woods," but I still can not believe that we adjusted to the stifling heat of a Carolina low country August without fans for eight summers before we got electricity. Even when we did get electricity, my two sisters and I had one fan to share, so we turned our beds so that we could have all three of our heads on the same pillow and not concede the intermittancy of the oscillating feature meant to cool us all.

During the day, we would swim and crab and fish. We were the only house on this marsh creek island, so we felt like we owned the whole thing and loved walking in the yard in our pajamas, kings and queens of all we surveyed. My dad built a dock of sorts at the point using an old door and some creosoted treated lumber. It was spindly, but it was stronger than it looked, and we crabbed, fished, launched our boats, or watched for dolphins from there. We also would swim in the creek , and it was a rite of passage to be deemed a worthy enough swimmer to be allowed to join the older ones at the sand bar that appeared at low tide.

My parents never had a lot of money, and there were eight children to feed, but my dad managed to buy an old Navy lifeboat that would safely hold the ten of us on fishing excursions to Otter Island, the 'Wreck,' or Two Cedar Drop. Otter Island was a place where channel bass ran through a trough at a certain tide, and once my brother caught a 28 pound bass there. Our boat was 26 feet long, and we actually chugged along with a 7 1/2 HP motor in its well. Needless to say, it took us a while to get to our destinations. I didn't care because I loved the sense of the ten of us held together in a certain completeness out on the salt water tributaries of the Atlantic. Water is said to be a gazing glass for the soul, and I discovered that in my early years.

Edisto Beach has no boardwalk or amusement park, but it has a fascinating history, and artists and writers have found it a haven for their creativity. There are ghost stories and blue shuttered houses to scare the "h'ants" away. Edisto in its heyday of the 1830's to 1860's was called the Riviera of the South because Edisto cotton growers had developed Sea Island cotton which had longer fibers and was coveted internationally. This cotton brought good fortune and wealth, and there are many old roads that lead to plantation houses of this other era.

Actually, we have pictures of my mother and my siblings there during WWII, she wrote my father in the South Pacific about finding rare chocolate bars there, and we have a letter from a great-grandmother describing her visit to the island in about 1910, so our history there is a lot longer than 60 years.

Every year when we left, we would say a prayer for the safety of this old house of ours in our absence. It burned in 1970; we believe because a vagrant was sleeping in it in the off season. We loved her as part of our family, so it broke our hearts, but we have rebuilt another version, and the same timeless vistas surround us and bring us peace. The ancient palmetto trees in the yard have blackened trunks from the time of the fire, and you can measure the slow growth since then. Our old lifeboat carried us safely for many seasons but eventually was stranded in the marsh after a spring tide and the old planks dried out too much to be restored. There it lay stranded until it finally broke apart a decade later in a rough sea.

Now, my parents are gone, but they are buried at the lovely little island church that has an authentic Tiffany stained glass altar window. We kids are in our sixties now, and now we bring our grandchildren to walk the same paths we walked when we were young. There are fifty or more of us now as we have married and multiplied. We have had baptisms, weddings and burials at Edisto. Vacation becomes a reunion and a pilgrimage where you can touch the constancy and continuity of the generations that shaped you. As we all have moved from one state to another, from one home to another, Edisto Island becomes the one constant place in our lives. There are so many places where you spend time but somehow never return to, so it is good to have a place where you remember being five, fifteen and fifity. It is good to have a place where you were a daughter, a sister, a mother, a grandmother. It is good to have a place where the metronome of the tides has measured the days and years and decades of your life.