UptownDowntown in Old Charleston by Louis D. Rubin

Author:Louis D. Rubin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

6

Finisterre

Although more and more people are coming to refer to boats with the neuter pronoun “it,” the traditional “she” remains fully correct in speaking or writing about any size of vessel.

Chapman, Piloting, Seamanship, and Small Boat Handling, 58th ed.

The marshland along the Ashley River shoreline was several hundred yards across. It stretched northward and southward until out of sight. At low tide it was a thick carpet of reed grass and stalks, green from late spring well into the fall, turning sallow and dun in winter and remaining so through April and much of May. At flood tide the river water covered all but the tips of the grass, transforming the surface of the marsh into a mirrorlike image of the sky overhead.

Several times a week freighters and tugboats came by along the ship channel, bound for the industrial installations that lay upstream and out of sight from our front porch or returning downstream to the ocean. By far the greater part of the city’s maritime activity, however, took place along the Cooper River waterfront Downtown, close to where the two rivers joined to form the harbor.

Our house was located on a bluff at the foot of Sans Souci Street, not far from the northern city limits. Once we were moved in, I began exploring our new surroundings. I made my way along the shoreline, followed trails through the thickets and brambles, climbed up onto the limbs of water oaks reaching out over the banks, and observed the waterfowl out in the marshland.

There were creeks through the reed grass, flowing and ebbing as the tide rose and fell. When tide was out, only a trickle of water was left in the creek beds, but the thick black mud along the exposed roots of the reed grass along banks on either side afforded no footing whatever. As the tide came in, the water filled the creeks and spread over into the reed grass, and in periods of more than ordinary high water covered it over. There was a small dock at the head of a creek at the foot of the bluff, from which we could net crabs.

In the spring the reeds turned green from the roots up. First a band of pale green appeared in the otherwise drab matting, then crept upwards as the weeks passed, giving the neutral tones of the marsh a green shading that became wider and deeper, until from shoreline to river’s edge there was almost solid greenness.

What I wanted to do was to paddle a rowboat out to the river-most edge of the marsh, so that when a ship came along I could observe from close by. Not only was no rowboat available, however, but there was also the inconvenient fact that I did not know how to swim. Lessons at the YMCA had been to no avail. Not even individual sessions with the swimming instructor, a man with the odd name of Fudge, could persuade me to turn loose the railing of the pool. I had tried again and again, to no avail.

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