Puppy Love

I hate it when people write about small, fuzzy, loveable things. It is almost as bad as "Have a nice day" said insincerely, or happy faces pasted on the wall (Mr. Yuck was better, some days).



I haven’t really had a love affair with most of the dogs that have owned me and to whom I have been enslaved to feed, walk, train, and clean up after. But I cannot yet say who was the dog love of my life–Bryan the noble and smart Irish setter; Danny the hypo-alergenic and extremely smart bichon frisé; or Byron (kin to the breed of Keats, Cavalier King Charles). Bryan, Danny, and Byron have all been super dogs to me, dogs I might have gone out drinking with, had I been much of a drinking man, and dogs I certainly have told my troubles to, as one should, with a dog one loves. We do need these animals who live with us. Two of my super dogs are still alive, and one is a nine-month-old puppy already worthy of deep and abiding love.



Danny lives with my ex-wife exclusively, by cruel decree, but he still nuzzles me and sticks his nose in my neck on those rare occasions when I see him. He even makes an exception in my case and gives me a little lick when he greets me. We are still that close.

Bryan the Irish setter of the late Sixties and early Seventies was grandson of a champion at Westminster, but, like some over-bred dogs, he was an epileptic, and I would sometimes find him stiff on the ground or on the floor of a room, for about ten minutes, then he would wake up, looking embarrassed. When I was a runner in training for marathons, he ran circles around me, even on a ten-mile run, and he was a champion groundhog hunter on my farm, piling the corpses with personal pride in the front yard. But he was also sweet and sympathetic, and a dog whose noble head you could put your head together with. At least one girl I dated during that single time visited Bryan after we broke up.



Danny came home in the early Nineties a tiny white cotton ball with sharp teeth, nine years ago, and he worried hell out of an old golden retriever, on her last legs, but he brought out the mother in her, and he brought out the mother in the rest of the family as well. On chilly nights, he slept under the covers with me, his little body curled into mine for warmth and love.




Should I say that these were proper, manly relationships, and that these dogs I am talking about are not gay dogs, even though two of the three were, sad to say for them, altered. The nice thing about dogs and men is that a man can love a dog unashamedly, despite its sex, and the dog and the man can bond without fear of labels.

Bonding Rituals



I wouldn’t get in the face of most Doberman Pinschers or Pit Bulls, and I have heard of mean and bitchy Bichons, but going nose to nose with a dog is one part of bonding. Some people don’t mind being kissed on the mouth by dogs, but you don’t know where that tongue’s been. It is a bizarre enough sensation to wake up with a puppy licking one of your ears.



I like hugging the dogs I love, I know they like their ears scratched, and some of them like you to stick the tip of a finger between their toes, an area that can be deliciously ticklish on some cats and some dogs. Some dogs, at least, seem to laugh. Some of them dearly love their bellies rubbed, but watch that practice with puppies or oversexed males.



A friend who is a dog-lover told me last week, "You’ve really bonded with that puppy," which means that she noticed that Byron plays with me, cuddles me, and even sometimes obeys me. Puppy love is sometimes tough love, when the command is "Stop that!" or "You come back here!" Especially smart dogs even seem to realize that "You come back here" means "Don’t run out into the road or you will get killed and I won’t be able to stand that." So, bonding has something to do with obedience, and a great deal to do with sleeping under your master’s face, in his arms, sometimes nose to nose.



The Criteria for Super Dogs


Sympathy, a sense of humor, and intelligence. Probably mutts from the pound are more apt to have all those qualities than pure-bred dogs, and mutts are apt to have more personality, which should be the fourth quality. Sense of humor is hard to prove, because some people don’t have a sense of humor, but some dogs and a very few cats do have a detectable sense of humor, and those animals enjoy life more than dull, overly serious pets who might mirror the dour aspect of their owners. I don’t think I am talking about the cat who plays with the mouse before killing it, or even the playful dog who is learning how to bite better. It was Thomas Hobbes who said that laughter is sudden glory. There may always be a sinister side to laughter and joy, but every now and then you run into a dog or cat who can really have a good time, and even laugh at himself or herself. That kind of animal may be a party animal, or just enjoy a joke with a human friend. Some cats are sadistic friends who will let you pet them twice, then bite and claw you on the third pet; that again is the murderous kind of playing.

Our pets, even in as highly-evolved a society as Beaufort’s, are emotionally necessary to our human well-being. Of course we are enslaved to them, and there is unnatural co-dependency between us, but we are good to them, usually, and they are good for us.

Frank

He was a very quiet institution in Beaufort, the Rector of St. Helena’s Episcopal Church, a deeply spiritual man–not obviously a civic leader, but a spiritual leader nevertheless and the consummate administrator of his church. He is the main reason I came back to the Episcopal Church and the reason I usually go to church (well, it is across the street, as well) on Sundays. He is a sweet man, a decent man, and a tolerant man, despite having conservative and sometimes unpopular views within the church. He is aware of how much humankind suffers from sin of a very private kind: privacy is very important to him, and he understands the sins of others through the sins he knows. He jokingly expresses anger at his lovely, tolerant wife and then makes fun of himself in sermons for expressing such anger. His sermons are a delight, often very funny, though he never forgets Original Sin or the miracle of the Resurrection.

He has been divorced, in the distant past, and he remembers that pain. He is not afraid of admitting that he was an atheist before receiving the call to come into the church. He twits the notorious worldliness of the group often called "Whiskeypalians" in the South, while he embodies its sophistication about clothes, golf, tailgating at Clemson football games, or making the right choice among bourbons or wines. He has been known to say "I like your stuff" to a well-dressed parishioner. He is a spiritual man without a trace of self-righteousness, even in the midst of firmly held beliefs that are not always popular. He does not like to hear Jesus, or even St. Paul, accused of self-righteousness. If either can be rightfully accused, Frank’s religion might be full of holes. Without a touch of self-consciousness, Frank signs his letters with a phrase from the General Confession, "Miserable Offender."


Frank seems so hard on himself that he can forgive other sinners, like me, with apparent ease. He leads a good, thoughtful, tolerant life, even though his church and his diocese have been accused of intolerant perspectives toward gay bishops or gay marriages, among other hot topics in recent church history. I wrote one column mischievously titled "A Queer Eye for a Straight Bishop," but then I squelched it for publication, out of respect for Frank. I am sure he would read it with tolerance and see the humor in the situation.

My favorite photograph of Frank, one I wish I had taken, is of him bopping. The picture is in the social events section of images from the St. Helena’s directory, and the occasion was a dance sponsored by the church. Frank is a runner (he runs at ungodly, godly hours such as 4am), and he is a graceful man, capable of winning an egg-in-a-spoon race for the sake of charity. In the picture he is bopping at a jaunty angle, with the complete assurance that his dancing is, well, cool. You can tell why the ladies have always loved Frank and why he kisses them with godly innocence as they pass through the reception line on Sunday.

When I heard that Frank was retiring in order to take a deanship in a large church in Birmingham–from Frank’s mouth at the eight o’clock service–my eyes filled with uncontrolled tears. The woman sitting next to me must have thought I was a sentimental idiot. Selfishly, I was already missing this man who had been a living link to my mentor, the dear Rev. Churchill Gibson, who had confirmed me in Richmond, Virginia, and had tutored Frank at Virginia Seminary. Both men had been my examples of how and why a Christian should live his life, from day to day, in sickness and in health, in sympathy and in anger, with love and with tolerance.

I was thinking last night, while walking meditatively at bedtime, that I would have followed Frank into battle willingly, if he were my commanding officer, but then I thought of how ridiculous an idea that might be, except in an age of onward Christian soldiers.

Frank goes to be Dean of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, a position of great fanfare and esteem, and the church has, I am told, 3400 parishioners, and a huge administrative staff to administer. Frank moves up in authority, and he would not go if he did not believe that the large responsibility is part of his calling.

When I last saw Frank, after the 6pm service on the day he announced his departure, he was talking freely to the few informal parishioners who attend that service with the guitars and the singing of spirituals: he was there among some of the heaviest previous sinners–those who took the liberties of the Sixties seriously–and he said to one of them, "Someone asked if I was happy, this morning. Of course I am not happy, with leaving." He was dabbing his eyes as he said it. I shook his hand, twice in succession I think, and I said I would be seeing him privately, I hoped, before he went his separate way to Alabama. It was comforting somehow that he was crying the way I had cried that morning.

Growing prize leeks and potatoes as a solution to the world's problems

"Think globally, act locally." "Be a part of the solution, not a part of the problem." "Don’t let the %#@%&%#@ get you down; don’t get hassled to a frazzle."

I really have considered living by all those important sayings and song lyrics of the late Sixties, but I also believe in "Forgive them that hate you," "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," and "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

I don’t believe in "the Golden Rule: ‘Gold rules,’" or "Life isn’t fair," or "Greed is good," or "Never give a sucker an even break."

Now, though, is the time to act locally, because we can grow the best-tasting tomatoes known to humankind, Rutgers; we can bake the best bread in the country using natural and healthful ingredients, as the French and Germans and Norwegians do; and we can encourage the industry that made a number of the prominent families in Beaufort prominent: truck farming.
I was just in Northumbria, northernmost England, a few weeks ago, and, in the little hamlet where I stayed, [name withheld because I don’t want any other tourists there], there was an active contest to grow the biggest and best potato and the biggest and best leek. Hell, the contestants had little water tubes leading down to the roots of each leek, and they all dug around in river soil deposited thousands of years ago to find the greatest fertility for the beds of leeks or potatoes. Towns sponsored the "Best leek [or potato] grown in five-gallon buckets using your soil" contest, and posters were up at post offices and tea rooms in larger towns. There was pride in those home-grown leeks and potatoes.

Prize leeks protected by corrugated steel

Widows living in seventeenth-century Northumbrian slate-roofed houses all were growing vegetables in the side or rear yards (the front is reserved for an abundance of flowers). You could see the pride in the straightness of the rows and the healthiness of the leeks or lettuce or beets.

I kept thinking, "We should be doing that in Beaufort." It would be one way to win the war over using oil to bring us shrimp from Patagonia or coffee from Colombia. We may not be able to grow coffee in Beaufort, but we can grow shrimp. And we can certainly grow tomatoes, strawberries, watermelons, squash, and collards.

The front garden of a Northumbrian cottage

We don’t have to let the @#$%^*&%$# get us down: we can ride a bicycle to the farmers’ market and buy local chantarelle mushrooms, local gumbo, or local watermelons. We could even put the produce in a back-pack to save a plastic or a paper bag. We can save our cars for really important or urgent transportation, and, when we use them, we can do it as part of a carpool. There is no good reason to keep driving our SUVs off the sides of the cliff of the world economy like lemmings or crazy competitive sheep. And a study has appeared in the last few weeks that proves that aggressive driving, petal to the metal, is the principal culprit in our waste of gasoline. It is suicidal in more ways than one to speed by someone in a large bully of a vehicle. Practice the real Golden Rule instead.

In an op/ed piece in the New York Times August 5, Bob Herbert wrote that efficiency and conservation are obvious answers to our current explosion in energy cost. And, of course, there are the everyday good energy deeds that would help make a world of difference: car-pooling; taking public transportation when possible; using more efficient lighting; dropping the thermostat a couple of degrees; buying more efficient appliances; unplugging appliances that aren’t in use, and so on.

In addition to living at 77 degrees in the air-conditioning, as they are now doing at the U.N. building, we can do all that Bob Herbert suggests and more. We can compost our waste vegetable matter, fruit peelings and coffee grounds, in the back yard and use the decayed compost around fruit trees. If we have to have irrigation to keep our grass green, at least we can use part of that water to make vegetables and herbs grow. We can reuse plastic bottles by putting tap water in them and pretending that the water is from Perrier or Evian. Denmark has done most of this, and Denmark is now energy-independent, as Thomas Friedman describes in the Times.

In addition to bicycling and car-pooling, we can learn to walk again, at a pace that makes it ever so easy to talk to neighbors and make strangers into friends. Our dogs would appreciate that, and, if they do poop, we can, slightly yuckily, save the remains to bury next to a rose bush.

Am I some kind of a nut? Not according to the people of rural Northumbria, who raise their own chickens and grow their own vegetables and herbs, preserving one of the most beautiful regions known to civilized humans. They seem to get along with their neighbors; they provide work for each other to make a living with (I bought a hand-made shepherd’s crook for £45, and I met Angus, who made the stick and then used my money to buy dinner and a lager or two); and, because they are usefully occupied with productive activities like gardening, they seem not to waste much time with hatred or anger at the follies of the human race. At the bed and breakfast where I stayed, the innkeeper, Gareth, had installed solar water-heating panels about ten years ago! And the most competitive sport in rural Northumbria? Growing prize leeks and prize potatoes.

What is Tacky?

A really tacky thing from Italy

The most feared word in the South is the one that hurts so much if it is applied to you, something you wear, something you do, something you own. The scene would be perhaps a hunt club ball, with all the men in tuxedos and all the women in full-length gowns. One of the men from a semi-distinguished family decides to be flamboyant only in that he wears a ruffled shirt with his black bow tie, his real onyx studs and cufflinks, his nothing-but-cotton low-gloss black cummerbund, his black and polished wing-tipped shoes. He should not have worn that shirt. Someone comes up to him, someone from an older family with a fancier name, and says, loudly enough to be heard by those around them, "Fred, that just isn’t done." The women off to one side start chattering, and the fearful word comes up, tacky.

God help Fred. He must slink off to the corner of the ball or go home and change his shirt, right now. His wife is ashamed, blushing darker than her rouge or her lipstick. They will never live it down. In an earlier time, Fred would have had to challenge the distinguished gentleman to a duel the next morning, to save what was left of his honor. And all this was caused by his tackiness.
That was the law of the old South, and it is still around, say, in the wine selection at an exclusive local country club. You wouldn’t own a pink Lexus, would you, if you were from old money? Your swimming pool wouldn’t have a plastic liner, but a Gunite one, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t have a new yard ornament as compared with an ancient fountain, would you? --especially not a gnome with a funny hat. Your shutters (you do have shutters, don’t you?) have to be Charleston black-green. Your car should have leather seats, even if it is a Honda. You can eat rare tuna, but not Spam, certainly. And the family four-poster bed is less tacky than a king-size.

There is a variant on tackiness, and that is redneckedness. I like the sound of that made-up word which should be pronounced "rednekkid-ness," I have to admit, but I have heard "redneck" used as an adjective, in public, as in "Why, honey, that’s so redneck!" I think it was tacky to say that, but redneckedness, the state of being a redneck, is certainly perceived as being worse than being tacky. If you want the ultimate in irony, the very person who thinks rednecks (whatever they are) are awful might just be trying to save themselves from tackiness or separate themselves from rednecks. I sort-of resent the label redneck, because I have owned a farm, driven a tractor, and taken in the hay, and I have known a lot of gentlemen farmers and lady farm wives, basically and fundamentally decent and polite, hospitable people who worked hard for a living. Certainly they weren’t leering mountain men or Daisy Mae farm wives or Appalachian ignoramuses who had gun racks in their pickups and shot hippies on sight. But the backs of their necks might have been red from constant exposure to the sun. I don’t use "redneck" any more than I would the n–word, or any other racial or ethnic filthy and hurtful prejudicial tag, but that’s just me: "redneck" is a colorful word, and many local people, black and white, use it colorfully.

But what of the social distinctions made by the people who say "draperies" but would never say "drapes"? They think saying "drapes" is tacky, like saying "divan" (pronounced "dye-van") instead of "sofa," but is making those sorts of distinctions all bad? In Virginia, I was taught that saying "pee-can" was incorrect and of the lower classes; here in South Carolina, though, you had better not say "p-cahn." It may be bad to discriminate against fat people just for being overweight, which they may not be able to help because of glands or unhappy obsessive behavior, but what about letting fat people know that their being fat will kill them, or letting smokers know that smoking will do the same thing, quicker, to themselves and to those loved ones breathing secondhand smoke? These are all touchy issues, like purchasing hair-straighteners and skin-whiteners, painting your face according to Max Factor, using depilatories, having boob-restorations, buying wigs and toupees and hair-dye, having tummy-tucks and face-lifts performed (look at poor Michael Jackson, having to lie about that to Barbara Walters). Which of these things do we do or not do, for fear of being called tacky?

Really tacky thing from Italy, up close:

The Beaufort Marine Institute

"Marine" in the title does not refer to the U.S. Marines, nor to a place where boats are worked on. Most people driving up U.S. 17 past Lobeco see the sign on the right and probably have no idea what it might refer to. But the Beaufort Marine Institute has helped mend the lives of hundreds of "troubled" boys who might otherwise have continued to go wrong. The BMI is indeed an institute, in the old sense of a place where students are taught proper conduct, and it does have a connection with the sea.

The physical plant is not unlike a Boy Scout camp–intentionally Spartan, utilitarian, without frills. Signs along the vehicle path in the grounds of the BMI name such virtues as "Loyalty," "Family," "Honesty," "Integrity,"
"Diversity," "Leadership," "Enthusiasm," "Dedication," "Creativity," "Safety." All those virtues are taken seriously here. An air of military discipline and orderliness energizes the whole place. Here are dormitories, there is the administration building; there is the donated swimming pool to teach the kids how to avoid scary situations at sea, there is the mess-hall; and there are the classroom buildings with small libraries and banks of donated computers.

In between the buildings are sandy soil and tall pines. We are on an island, a sea island accessed by a causeway, not far from deep water; but we are also in the boondocks, miles from any town’s temptations, down a dirt road. The kids who come here, boys between the ages of 14 and 17, have all been in trouble more than once. They grow to like the quiet seclusion.

Within the last fiscal year, 2005-2006, the BMI had an amazing 100% completion rate, which means that all of the students who graduated in 2006 have remained for their whole term. Also, only about 28% of recent graduates (they graduate in about five months, and return to their homes) are repeat offenders. The BMI is a model for other recovery programs around the state. BMI represents a desirable place, not a Dickensian group home, and the atmosphere there is more like a family than of an institution.

The young men come from Charleston as well as Walterboro, and from Columbia as well as from Yemasee: they may be street smart or farm wise. They may have arrived tough and lacking in respect for father, mother, or any older member of society. They may have come out of a drug-dealing gang that offered them an appealing home on the street as compared with a home without a father, or a home with alcoholism or crime ever-present. Some have sold marijuana or cocaine in various forms; some have been led into fights which the law calls assaults. All have probation officers who have provided their names and files to the BMI for possible admission.

When I asked one of the boys what his offense was, Dariell’s voice and face dropped as he answered me, "Yes sir, I was busted for possession AND selling marijuana." He was obviously ashamed and embarrassed. The attitude of the boys towards their crimes and misdemeanors seems to be one of genuine contrition and confession, not one of hardened pride in criminal achievement.

The name Beaufort Marine Institute might also be a little misleading because the local chapter, founded in the 1980s, is now part of the Associated Marine Institutes, based in Tampa, Florida. The AMI originated in Boca Raton under the auspices of Florida Atlantic University’s Florida Ocean Sciences Program, and it took shape with the guidance of a benevolent judge trying in 1968 to find something useful and educational for troubled kids to do (to take them to sea, among other things, and show them the necessarily-disciplined life of a sailor under command): thus the "Marine."

The BMI aims to be a successful home for wayward boys, taking kids with budding criminal careers and setting a strict rule over them, trying to help with what is called the unified approach–concentrating on their education; channeling their teen energy into sports, camping, and meaningful labor; and taking them out to sea after they have learned swimming, diving, and other maritime skills.

Of course rules are necessary, more than in a Boy Scout camp. Students get in line and march to breakfast or the work-place; they announce when they are leaving a building; they answer adults always with "Yes, sir," or "Yes, ma’am." They introduce themselves politely to strangers.

What I have observed while becoming a Board member is that at the BMI "behavior modification" is a positive thing. The institution builds mutual respect for adults and for the other boys. The boys learn self-discipline, they begin to practice politeness and mutual respect as a way of life, they accept military or marine models of rank and rewards, and they come to understand that hard and gratifying work is in itself the better alternative than a life of petty crime. They certainly leave believing in the value of education. When I have asked a group of four kids whether they want to go to college, they all said "Yes sir," without hesitation.

BMI is very much about role-models, and the teachers and administrators there try to be good models. The 32-member staff of the BMI represent kindly father-figures or mother-figures, administers of compassion rather than just keepers of rule-books. They may offer the first evidence of loving kindness a tough boy has ever experienced.

One of the best models, judging by the boys’ enthusiasm for his teaching, is Larry Peck, a retired biochemical engineer, a grandfatherly type who knows everything about boats and seamanship, takes them out and gives lessons in marine life, the way a grandfather should. The kids admire him, and he has affection for them. Together, they re-build marine engines and paint donated boats so that they can be used or sold to help raise money for BMI. The boys are learning useful, marketable skills, and they love to learn from Larry. "I have one kid who wants to study underwater welding," Larry told me, "and that pays well, even if it is dangerous." As I watched, Larry showed several of the kids how to hold and cast a shrimp net from the campus dock, and we even brought up a few shrimp. "The kids love him," Amy Nevells, Director of the BMI, tells me. Meanwhile, the kids working for her or for Larry earn "recognition points" for such virtues as leadership, good attitude, respect, appearance, and participation, and those points help them rise in the ranks. By the time they leave, very few of the boys should be called "troubled" any longer.

The boats and engines Larry and the kids paint and restore to working order have all been donated by local individuals or businesses. Of course the Beaufort Marine Institute takes cash donations as well (call 843-846-2128), and the BMI Board of Trustees sponsors a very popular croquet tournament at Bray’s Island every spring, which this year raised more than $30,000 for operating expenses. There is no greater asset to the Beaufort community than the Beaufort Marine Institute.

Graduation at BMI in 2008: Leviticus and his mom, who forgave him

No-see-ums

"I am faint: my gashes cry for help."

So says the bloody Sergeant in Macbeth. When the no-see-ums were out, we members of the cast knew what the bloody Sergeant was talking about. The chainsaw jaws of those tiny diptera cut into our unprotected scalp and hands. Tiny gashes cried out for help. After a bombardment of what are sometimes called sand flies, gnats, or midges–most heavily at dusk but at other times during the day or the night as well–the backs of our hands were red with slapping and decorated with little dots of blood, our ears itched like crazy, and our scalps were on fire.

No real-estate agent tells you about the no-see-ums unless you ask a pointed question. No Chamber of Commerce pamphlet tells you not to go near the marshes when the gnats are out. Quietly, the natives of this area say no-see-ums are placed here by God to keep the Yankees out.

How can you tell you are becoming a native? Because if you are native, they don’t bother you as much. They even seem to go to tourists first. They are like alligators or copperheads or Marine fly-overs: you just learn to live with them. The "Beaufort salute" is a swipe with your hand in front of your face, to keep them out of your eyes.

The one-two punch of tiny mosquitoes and even tinier no-see-ums can leave a tourist dizzy and drained. It is the female of both of those species who is to blame. As Macbeth says, "Blood will have blood." These female flies are blood-hungry. They need it to feed their babies-to-be, and they may get it in a kamikaze raid, knowing that their bite hurts and that many of them will be killed by wildly slapping hands or madly itching fingers. If they could think and laugh, they might chuckle at the spectacle of grown men and women slapping their heads, looking like the little moron who kept hitting himself because it felt so good when he quit.

To defend against them, people spray a fog of Deet in the air and walk into it, as if they were testing perfume and inhaling toxic waste at the same time. Other people, even non-smokers, ask cigarette addicts to blow smoke in their hair, to make no-see-ums cough and get sick. When I sprayed Off directly into my hair, I got the strong impression that the little buggers were slime-skiing between my hair-follicles, enjoying themselves on the slalom course. Either that or they were still biting as they died.

The only chemistry that seems to work against no-see-ums, as far as the intelligentsia of Beaufort can tell, is an expensive skin cream (or lotion or spray) marketed by the Avon lady and local drug stores called Skin-So-Soft (no , I am not an Avon lady). The product started life as a skin-rejuvenator, something like Oil of Olay, but actors on location in some country below the Equator discovered that the product they were applying on their face to keep it forever young was also keeping the bugs off. Something in the product–its viscosity, its deep chemistry, or its cheap perfumy smell–worked to keep the gnats from doing their job.

Here in Beaufort the gnats breed in the marshes, the tidal wetlands. There are so many of them and they breed too fast for us to have any clue how to control them yet, though perhaps we may be able to trap them using an approximation of human scent and a zapper. We may all soon be installing bat-houses on marsh property, since bats seem to love to eat small diptera and mosquitoes. And those scientists who like to alter DNA might be able to shift a gene or two in the no-see-ums so that they develop a taste for alligator blood and leave us humans alone. As they now are, they have evolved until they have become flying motor-mouths, with powerful swept-back wings covered with spots for camouflage. As soon as they land, they dig in until you slap at them, and even then they seem to die happy, having succeeded in their mission to make your life miserable and feed their children at the same time. My scalp itches just thinking about it.

I remember one horrible time when I had to wade through pluff mud to the edge of the swamp grass to collect a floating kayak paddle. I was in shorts and a flimsy shirt, wearing high rubber boots, and the boots stirred up the no-see-ums. I felt like a water buffalo at the edge of the water hole, where all the killer flies hung out. Water buffalos go crazy under such attacks.

You will pay for foggers, for aerosol cans, for creams, for lotions. They all stink and sting. Skin-So-Soft costs about $7 for a little bottle of lotion, but it does spread thinly, and it does seem to work. Perhaps it is a Yankee invention, to help us remain in beautiful Beaufort.

The Society of Shrimpers at Low Tide

The shrimpers don’t expect much, and they are happy with little: five or six shrimp of varying sizes in a half-hour, treading water in the bottom of a drywall-mud bucket.

The styles of humans casting casting nets vary. Among the casters, there are front-tossers, backhand-flippers, teeth-grippers, and lazy down-droppers. I spent twenty minutes in the WalMart fish section, reading the labels of the various casting net packages, after I had been tossing the net for almost a year, and I learned a few things. Backhand probably produces a perfect circle more often than forehand. Tossing high, above the plane of the body, is probably better than tossing on a level or tossing down. Most experienced casters do use their teeth to grip the net, as well as their two hands, but be warned that you can occasionally rip out a filling when monofilament catches on a something, or when a lead weight bangs into a tooth.

One-person shrimping here in the South is a matter of casting a monofilament net symmetrically-rigged with lead weights and round plastic guides for the filaments that rein in the weights. Monofilament nylon line is probably an improvement over the cotton netting that still is used, because thin nylon threads tend not to snag as easily as cotton ones on obstacles on the bottom (though they can be neatly severed by the sharp edge of an oyster shell). The object is to cast the net where you want it to go (that’s another whole question, one of aim) in a perfect O, as in a fly-cast for trout. Casting a perfect circle is harder to do, the larger the net, with a five foot diameter easier to put in a circle than a seven-foot diameter. Often the casting ends up in a crescent or a half-moon shape, which causes caster to curse or moan. The average Egyptian net-caster using the same technology 3500 years ago probably could fling a better O than we modern, technologically superior casters can. Monofilament line can have a tyranny of its own, catching on every little splinter as you carry it down the dock.

A perfect cast will drop to the bottom rapidly, surrounding all shrimp and fish inside. I have caught everything from shrimp and finger mullets on up to large rays and one notable gar, all in a cast net.

Shrimping is harder exercise than it looks to be. A Gullah woman with a soft lilt in her voice that sounded to me as if she had just arrived from Jamaica told me that she could no longer cast even a small seine because she had had metacarpal tunnel surgery. The motion swinging the lead weights out into an arc over the water several times in the course of a minute can work up a sweat quickly, and exhaust even a strong man after twenty minutes of casting. On the wharf at Beaufort, on the end near the bridge, at low tide you have to lean well out into space in order to pull up the net clear of the oyster shells that snag and can cut the filaments. That hurts your back. And at night it is hard to see what you are doing, leaning out over the oyster shells.

Another comrade of the wharf, a retired Navy marine engineer, told me and others in his audience that the shrimp flow in from the sea with the tide, around the point across the bay, in a huge S shape, following the current and the channel, bouncing off the underpinnings of the wharf in one place and then circling around the end of the wharf near the bridge. I have no idea whether he was right, but when I took my kayak against the outgoing tide, right next to the corner of the wharf, I ran into a strong current near where he said that channel was.

Shrimping at dusk, just as the lights come up on the water, was recommended to me by several of the regular shrimpers on the wharf, so I tried that, but my visit wasn’t timed according to the low tide, and I had only middling success.

One thing the shrimping gringo doesn’t know is that the squirmy translucent shrimp bouncing unpredictably on the tabby surface of the wharf can stab hell out of you. They do have a defense system, with spines sharp enough to penetrate a heavy-duty baggie. I’ve learned to pick them up from behind, so that they can’t stick a spine into my finger. One of the best tips I have received on how to handle them without being injured was from a kid from Charleston: he showed me how to pick them up by their antennae.

Shrimp are very good bouncers, among their other annoying habits, and they can flip their way out of the bucket just as they can flip clear out of the water when they are being chased by fish. It’s sad to return to a dock and see a shriveled dead shrimp who bounced out the night before.
Shrimping gringoes like myself have a hard time heading shrimp at first. The larger red sea shrimp, with their extended red antennae and their black inquisitive eyes on long stalks, seem to defy you not to take their heads off, but someone has to do it; otherwise, you bring home a bucket or a cooler of shrimp that just lay there and then die with their heads on. Actually now I just leave them in a shallow bucket of salt water until I am ready to boil them at home, rather than leave shrimp heads all over the dock or wharf.

But, after ripping their heads off, you have less sympathy for the no-longer-living organisms, and it may become easier to cook them. Friends who have lived here all their lives tell me there is calcium in the shells and that you should marinate the headless but un-peeled shrimp and then dredge them in flour and fry them in canola oil. This makes the shells soft, apparently, and it makes the tail end of the tail crunchy but not too sharp, so that you get very tasty, slightly crunchy shrimp to eat, and you get the calcium to boot. I am still not sure about eating the shrimp in their shells, though.

Shrimping at night on the wharf at Chambers Park, near the beautiful lights of the bridge, is worth doing for the company, for the good and bad advice, and for the shrimp. As one of the first people I talked to when I first visited Beaufort told me, "It takes a lazy man to starve, in Beaufort."

Crabs, Crabbing, and Crabby Old Men

There’s this machine I once bought at our cherished Fordham Hardware. It is called the Crabmaster II (I have no idea what happened to Crabmaster I), and the instructions outside of the packaging make it look as if there is a little crab-processing factory inside the box. I imagined it as being similar to the famous Bass-o-Matic machine touted by Dan Ackroyd on the original Saturday Night Live–a kind of grinder processor that makes the crab mushy but edible. The instructions say that as the result of owning this machine, you will have beautifully clean and tender crab meat with as little effort as possible. Well, I found out that you do get nice, tender, mushy back-fin crab meat, but I also found out that to arrive at that tender meat, you have to do all sorts of intense labor with the crabs. In other words, you have to clean and pick the crabs before the Crab-o-matic will even start working for you.

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I have a mind to call the Crab-o-matic people as a crabby old man to ask them what the hell I am supposed to do with the claws, since they aren’t written into the instructions at all. I want to turn a technical writing class loose on those instructions, anyway. The instructions tell you to numb the crabs for ten minutes by putting the living crabs on ice, then pull them apart, alive, as they squirm. They want you to take off the mouth parts and pull out the deadmen (I think those are the gill sacks), then quarter the crabs, scrubbing out their intestines with a tooth brush (whose tooth brush?). You have to numb LIVE crabs with ice, pull off their limbs, crack open their backs. Now I know exactly why crabmeat costs so much. I start to feel sorry for the crabs at this point, and I think of becoming a vegan.


The Crab-o-matic people want you to keep the body parts on ice for ten hours and then run the back-fin sections through the Crab-o-Matic (yes, it is a squishing machine with a hand crank). You squish them until the backfin meat comes out–the cranking is only slightly easier than doing it with your own fingers.


Now, here is why I want a sensible tech-writing class to look at those instructions. All the body parts are left uncooked, of course. So, after ten hours, what DO you do with the claws–cook them, or throw them away, along with 50% of the meat? And my friend Maria, who fishes and cleans fish for a living, thinks that claw meat is the best part of the crab. When I told her about the Crab-o-Matic, she said "When are you going to ask for your money back?"


I have become fascinated with the process of crabbing, since I used to do it, many years ago, on the Chesapeake Bay. Old-time crabbers, sometimes crabby old men or old men of the sea, set out many individual pots in the rivers and saltmarsh creeks using whole fish, the greasy and smelly menhaden (the fertilizer fish), as bait. As often as they can, perhaps every three days, the crabbers come by in their jon-boats or Whalers and collect the crabs. On board are scales for weighing the crabs and a cooler chest for storing them alive but numb. Below a certain size, little crabs get thrown back. Collecting from fifteen pots in an hour or so is hard work, but then if you have a good catch you can take them to W. H. Gay’s seafood and sell them. Then, in a restaurant like the aptly named Steamers, a customer can buy nine whole steamed crabs for $9–you pick ‘em–and everybody makes a profit.


What if you want your own crab pot, perhaps tied to somebody’s dock? You can have up to two pots without a license for crabbing, and, if you put a salmon head or a turkey neck from a local supermarket in the bait chamber, tie a polyurethane rope securely to the pot, and hurl it into the deepest part of the channel (so as not to have the pot out of water at extreme low tide), you will have crabs, guaranteed, sometimes within several hours of setting out the pot. Be aware, though, that if you put your crab pot on a community dock, someone may get your crabs, or your pot. If you put your pots out in the channel, you need a float to identify the pot and a boat to collect the crabs.


But what do you do when your pot is full of crabs? I don’t know anyone who reaches in the pot bare-handed, since you would have to be really quick to grab that back fin without getting cut to ribbons by front claws. Crabs are relentlessly aggressive, ripping each other’s claws off when a bunch of them are assembled in a crab pot or bucket. You can use very heavy gloves, if you like, or a pair of crab tongs from the Lemon Island seafood place. The people who process fish at Publix use a kind of chain-mail glove, to keep from being spiked. Although there is no limit for how small a crab can be in a private pot, you might throw back the smaller crabs to be caught again when they are larger.






The crabs will kick up a ruckus with their naked aggression in a bucket of marsh water, but you can keep them that way until you get home, and they will stay alive for some time, burbling and blowing bubbles to show they are still alive. Don’t leave them outside in intense heat or in full sun or they will die. You can numb them on ice if you like, and you can boil them quickly, and almost painlessly: it’s very quick, but you don’t want to think about it.


To pick a crab, get out the edible meat, is a tedious process, and the tediousness is the reason why crabmeat costs so much. If the crabs have been boiled to death (really, being exposed to boiling water kills them very quickly) and then iced down to help make the shell brittle and to preserve the meat, the claws can be cracked with the back of a sturdy knife, front and back, and the meat carefully extracted, with care to remove any strips of cartilage inside. The yucky part is pulling off the shell (what deviled crabs are cooked in), and toothbrushing out the intestines. This is not a job for the squeamish, and doing it may turn you against eating crabs.


When you get really good at crab-picking, you will get enough shell-free meat for deviled crabs or crab-cakes or crab-burgers for three people out of about ten medium-sized crabs.
You really need your sense of touch to release the backfin meat without taking in a few bits of shell or cartilage, but, believe me, if you have gotten that far, you will have a great sense of accomplishment in producing a beautiful food. Machines can’t do the work as well as fingers can. As for all the shells and awful offal, that can go in the mulch, to make some good fertilizer for next year’s tomatoes.


What happens to the Crab-o-Matic, as you get really good at catching and picking crabs? I think it should go way up on a cabinet shelf, behind the turkey roaster and the other utensils you use only once or twice a year.


The salesman at Fordham Hardware, to do him credit, told me the truth. When I asked about the Crabmaster II, "Will it work," he said "We sell a lot of them." This is a typical, cleverly-evasive sales-person answer. It means, when translated, "I really don’t know if it works, but it is popular." If you go one level deeper in interpreting this message, what he means is "I don’t think it works, but I would like to sell another one, so please buy it because other suckers have, in the past, and we need the income."

Perforated fences in Beaufort

You need to walk all over the Historic District, to discover where all the perforated walls are. I really didn’t know what to call them, but when I first moved to Beaufort and rented a house on Wilmington St., a block off Bay St., I lived next door to a perforated wall. The perforations allowed me to peek into a large yard, tended every few weeks by a crew of Mexican gardeners and grass-cutters. I started thinking about that wall, because I had never seen one like it. It was only one brick thick, and the bricks were ingeniously laid to support one another but to leave a checkerboard of openings. Our cats went through the interstices.

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Were the masons saving bricks? Were they creating a peekaboo vista into the gardens? Were they perhaps creating a flow-through system for high water during a storm surge caused by a hurricane? Or were they allowing the breeze from Beaufort Bay to filter through the yard, curtailing some of the mugginess and mildew of summer?



Many of the houses on Bay St. have perforated fences, of varying heights, from about two feet on up to six feet high. All have a base substantial enough to hold the weight of the bricks above, and one solid course of bricks across the top to stabilize from corner post to corner post.



The Oldest House Fools You



What is said to be the oldest house in Beaufort, on New Street on the Old Point–the house what are said to be musket-slits in one basement wall–has a perforated wall beneath its side facing New Street. "Aha," I thought: "that proves that perforated walls are very old, and that all the other houses in Beaufort copied the older house and put in perforated walls." Then I talked to the present owners of the 1719 house (the date is questioned), and they told me that the perforated wall is new. Besides, it is not an exterior wall surrounding a garden, like all the other perforated walls in town: it is a new wall which seems to have been put in to ventilate the basement area. The owners also told me that the oldest house was built not on a tabby foundation but on a phosphate rock foundation (phosphate rock looks like something that came down with a meteor, but it is very hard and dense and makes a good foundation material as well as a necessary component of commercial fertilizer). Also, the musket-slits were suspicious because they were at ground level, underneath the floor of the house, and who would want to shoot at attacking Yemassee Indians from underneath one’s house?



So, perforated fences are not a sign of antiquity in the Historic District of Beaufort. Scratch that theory. I found out later, talking to one antique dealer and one expert on real estate, that perforated fences are a comparatively new addition to older houses in Beaufort, and that they began to be put around houses probably in the late nineteenth century. Though they are what might be a unique characteristic of Beaufort architecture, they are not old, compared to the houses. Perforated walls are banned in historic Charleston, because they are not old enough! But in Beaufort they are still being put around houses. I know a family from New York, for instance, with a house on Bay Street, who just installed a perforated fence, in order to conform to local customs.



That New Old Look



It turns out that you have to find a mason who will do perforated fences (it took the New Yorkers three tries to find someone who would both start and finish the job), then you have to design your fence so that your fence will not look odd next to another perforated fence on Bay St. That means you have to go to Savannah and either find a stash of impossibly expensive old brick that someone has cleaned, or you buy a kind of brick called "Old Savannah Brick" that has been manufactured to look old and decrepit while maintaining its structural integrity. We are probably talking about a $12,000 wall here, if it has any length.



Then you have to determine the height of your new but old-looking perforated brick wall. Here you have leeway, since the existing perforated fences in Beaufort come in such varying heights, from two feet on up to six or seven feet. Do you want to keep your dogs in? Or do you just want to discourage the occasional visiting toddler from straying into Bay Street? Do you want privacy from tourists, or do you want to see over the wall to the Bay view? Do you want pineapples (sign of hospitality in the South) or no pineapples, as finials on the corner posts?




And what do you want on top of your perforated wall, once it is standing? In mossy, humid Beaufort, you have some choices. On one solid wall, at St. Helena’s Church cemetery, a very fuzzy species of fern, religiously interpreted as "Resurrection fern," is protruding from the top course of bricks. "Resurrection" in this case means that the fern dies down in dry weather but miraculously returns from dead-looking to vivid green after a rain. Some people paint buttermilk or liquid manure on the tops of their brick walks or walls, to age them quickly by giving moss or lichen or mold a growth medium. And some other people with perforated walls grow hedges on top of them (yes, seriously, though I don’t know how the little hedge roots itself). The prickly hedge on top makes the fence look even more like part of the garden, and so do the various kinds of moss.

To my knowledge, there are only two types of brick walls in the Historic District–the perforated wall and the kind of solid wall around St. Helena’s Church. The wall around St. Helena’s might well have been part of a fortification at one time, because it seems too tall for a Yemassee Indian to jump. The wall is a falling-down wall, and it must be buttressed and repaired yearly, with outlying props of more bricks and with re-mortaring, to keep the rain out. It has come to resemble an American Notre Dame, with flying buttresses to keep it upright. The St. Helena wall probably is the oldest wall in town, and, like the perforated walls, it seems to do something neat: it seems to pray, because two of the three top courses come up on either side like praying hands joined at the top by the course that keeps the rain out. If the wall is symbolically Christian, perhaps the three courses on top are supposed to represent the Trinity.

Live-oaks

Ohio axes can’t stand up to local Beaufort live oaks. The first time I tried to split a round slice of live oak, my Ohio ax began chipping. Little flecks of metal came out of the head of the ax with each blow. "Gee," I thought, "the metal must have grown brittle during the move to the south." The face of the slab of live oak barely showed a dent–and I am a fairly accurate, hard-hitting wood-splitter. I went and got another Ohio ax, a newer, better one. The blade of the second ax did not chip, but it turned into a wavy mess. Again, the wood was undented. This was the hardest wood I had ever encountered, in thirty years of splitting. Both axes were ruined. I was impressed.

It turns out that live oak is the densest, hardest wood known in North America–harder than black locust, more difficult to split than ironwood. Three weeks of occasional cutting will wear down the teeth of a chain-saw chain to little nubs . When you do manage to cut off a slice of live oak and put it in a fireplace or wood stove, it burns forever. Among woods, a slice of live oak is the closest thing to coal, in enduring burn and in BTU output. If you lay a fire with live oak in your fireplace, you need to stay around for hours to wait for it to finish burning. If you want an overnight burn in your wood stove, put in a medium-sized live oak log about ten PM and it will still be burning at 8 AM. As far as I can tell, the wood burns without popping; it doesn’t spit coals out on to the rug; it just glows quietly.

I see the local mossy live oaks as a national treasure, as did the outgoing Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, who visited Beaufort in 2001. The oaks are the ones in the pictures of all sea island houses, draped with Spanish moss and covered with lichen, with long and slightly sinister fingers groping upwards. They seem to signify Southern decadence as in Tennessee Williams’s plays or Edgar Allan Poe stories, but they are also eerie and beautiful, as if encouraging ghost story writers and painters at the same time.

Old Ironsides, the U.S. S. Constitution, the historian Larry Rowland tells me, was built of slabs and whorls and gnarls of live oak. The ship-builders had to make a template for the ship they wanted to build and then take their blueprints to the forest, finding the live oak with the perfect bend in its elbow, the one that would fit a bend in the ship’s skeleton. Then they had to saw out that branch and soak the wood in "pluff mud," the yucky mud found out in the marshes next to the channel, to impregnate it with salt and age it at the same time. I can’t imagine how they sawed out the planks, but they probably had to be hand-hewn rather than split. The planks were so strong that cannon balls (like my Ohio axes) just bounced off the wood.

Beaufort has beautiful old houses, but they would be nothing without the complement of live oaks and moss hanging from them. There is even a Live Oak Society, to support their continued existence. The oaks are so important even to local architects and builders that they cause new housing starts not to have gutters. Local live oaks and pines shed leaves and needles timed so as to clog any gutters on any houses surrounded by live oaks and pine trees–which are most of the houses in Beaufort. Live oaks are evergreen, but they shed their leaves. Their name is taken from the fact that they always look alive.

Beaufort might have much less to offer without live oak trees. If you walk or bike or drive down a street in the old parts of Beaufort in the early morning (try Greene Street, aiming toward the water), and you haven’t been here long enough to be jaded by the sight, the combination of live oaks covered with Spanish moss, low country front-porch architecture, and the peculiarly bright light of early morning is enough to stop you in your tracks with wonder at that combination of natural and man-made beauty.

Live oaks can be ancient: they outlive humans by 300 or 400 years. They are so venerable and beautiful that they look as if they should be part of a Japanese painting. They can live right up against the shore line and take all the abuse of the weather, because they are among the few deciduous trees that can withstand salt spray. It takes the most powerful of hurricanes to blow one down, because their root system spreads out to the ends of their branches. Even if you cut them, they come back strong from their stumps, as suckers. Because they are so persistent and even invasive, they are kings of the sand dune and the salt marsh, and they squeeze out longleaf pine. The largest live oak on record is 11 feet in diameter, and 55 feet tall. They protect us and our houses against all but the worst hurricanes. Ferns and lichens grow on them freely, giving the bark varying shades of green and gray. Birds love to live in any vacant knothole: you may even see a bluebird in one. You can picture a colonial panther or cougar draped from one of their fingers, and human-built swings hang from their strong limbs. Today I saw a great blue heron enjoying the hospitality of a gently sloping live oak branch while standing on one leg and itching it with the other.

Humans used to eat live oak acorns and also feed them to their pigs, but deer, quail, squirrels, and wild turkeys eat them still. As climbing trees, live oaks are almost as good as old magnolias. Southern planters used to plant magnolia and live oak in tandem along the stately avenues leading to their mansions.

A live oak is a tree to love. For greenery at Christmas, mistletoe grows in the topmost branches, and boy hunters used to shoot it out of trees with shotguns in order to be able to kiss girls. Perhaps the city planners of Beaufort should hire some latter-day Druids to come worship around some of the most impressive trees of the Low Country. Druids like mistletoe and oak trees.

Southern Flirting

Brays Island Croquet Tournament: Flirty Lady collects prize as best-dressed

I. Adolescent Flirts

When I was about twelve and on a passenger train in Virginia heading west towards such unromantic places as Covington and Clifton Forge, a girl about my age got on the train, plunked herself down across from me and started flirting seriously, batting her eyelashes, adjusting her dress, squirming in her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, fluffing her hair, and staring at me. I didn’t know what in the hell was happening. At that time, I barely knew that girls were different from boys. She was a flibbertigibbet.

Within about ten minutes she had had a private discussion with the conductor which resulted in her being moved to the vacant seat next to mine. She immediately started talking to me and wiggling around so that our legs touched. I should say that she seemed to want to get things done in a hurry, because she must have known she was getting off at a stop coming up soon.

Anyway, at one point in our conversation, she hauled off with one hand back along side her face but aimed at my face. "Oh, you’re so exasperating [I wasn’t, really], I could just slap you!" she said, and then she quickly added, "but that would mean I loved you."

I was dumbfounded and blasted at the same time, as only an insecure teenaged boy could be. But I was also flattered. When she got up to get off, I think she may have kissed me on the cheek. Of course I have never forgotten her. She was, even as a teenager, the consummate southern flirt.

It is supposed to have started with Eve talking to the Serpent, the act of flirting. According to Milton, she is supposed to have said something like "You might have spared bringing me to this fruit, Serpent," after the Serpent, or Satan in the Serpent, a great flatterer and flirt himself, has called her a goddess. Eve’s reply is flirtatious, and eventually she falls for the Devil. That’s the danger in flirting.

Here is expert advice from a champion flirt, whom I will call Julia:
Something important to remember. Flirting comes in many forms. If it’s done right, the gentleman does not feel like the lady is flirting. Rather he feels that she finds him fascinating.

This is a higher form of flirting.

My flirty friend Julia adds:

Men with slow Southern voices are ahead of the game in flirting. Most women need to pitch their voices lower, esp. in the south. My friend who flirts the best rarely says anything. She listens.
So, according to a champion southern flirt, the man doesn’t know what happens to him when the woman flirts with him undetected; he just thinks he deserves the compliment or is all that she says he is. But at least southern men with a drawl have some advantage over women, because they can sound sultrier and sexier through a deep-pitched voice. Southern women just have to practice talking like Talullah Bankhead, lowering their register and slurring their words a little.

II. Historical Flirt

One of the great flirts of all time was Anne Boleyn. She teased poor Henry until he just had to marry her to bed her, then she could not produce a living male heir, so Henry blamed her for all her earlier flirtations. One of those was with the poet Thomas Wyatt, who wrote brilliantly about being flirted with by Anne Boleyn:

THEY flee from me, that sometime did me seek,

With naked foot stalking within my chamber.

I seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild, and do not remember

That sometime they put themselves in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be Fortune, it hath been otherwise,

Twenty times better ; but once in special,

In thin array, after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown did from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small,

Therewithal sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.

But all is turn’d, thorough my gentleness,

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go, of her goodness;

And she also to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindely am served,

I fain would know what hath she now deserved.

Wyatt pictures the scene of Anne Boleyn with her doe’s eyes and her deer body, flirting, showing off her slender arms after her gown has fallen seductively off her shoulders, giving him a spontaneous kiss, and then boldly asking the rhetorical question, "How like you this?" He pictures the event so skillfully that the reader can’t help falling in love with that fickle woman Anne Boleyn, even as Wyatt tells you that she dumped him, presumably for the King. She dumped him because he was a gentleman and let her get away with it. That sounds like the South to me.

The example of Anne Boleyn, who got her head chopped off (a neat sidelong slice by a skilled French swordsman hired specifically to do a good clean job), shows again how dangerous flirting can be. I wanted to say something about the connection between flirtation and teasing, and teasing and seduction. Of course flirtation leads to teasing, and teasing can often lead to seduction. That is what makes the game of flirtation dangerous.

III. Clothes Make the Flirt

Flirting hasn’t changed much since 1515. My friend the mature flirt writes,

This dress (find the dress on http://www.barriepace.com) is used for flirting. One can’t flirt in ugly, oversized clothes in muddy colors unless only is 20 yrs old and beautiful. The rest of us need beautiful clothes.

So, like Anne Boleyn, modern flirts are still wearing flirty, flimsy dresses in order to show off their good legs and handsome bust-lines and soft shoulders. Even the twenty-somethings in the South are apt to wear flirty, preppy Lily Pullitzer dresses with flower prints or Versace (if they have the money) dresses with darker spiderweb patterns to emphasize the dark-lady seductiveness of a brunette.

Julia adds: I think that an accomplished flirt has more control over seduction than a serious innocent female. Often the flirt knows exactly what she wants........

Well yes, of course she does, and a good flirt remains in control of the situation (unless, like Anne Boleyn, she loses her head).

IV. Gross seduction vs. subtle flirting

Flirting is different from outright seduction or just blatant, brazen, or, to put it less delicately, slutty behavior. One of my attractive male college students told a story of a 55-year-old recent divorcee, more than a little tipsy, who was seated amongst others in the back seat of his car. I don’t know what the occasion was, but the car or SUV was full of people. He had called to her, "You are welcome to come up front," and she had answered in a way he had heard but no one else had listened to, "I’ll ride with you as far as you want to go," which makes her sound as if she should be a candidate for the Country Music Hall of Fame (or Shame). I could write a dark country music hit based on her words.

There was nothing subtle about what she did, except for her wording. The other passengers did not notice her pass at or coming on to the young man. Her behavior was outrageous, even it if was colorful and tipsy. It wasn’t flirtation; it was invitation, or solicitation.

The best flirts are not just seductresses like the drunken divorcee or the sweet airhead on the train, who haven’t much of a clue where their behavior might lead. The best flirts, like Julia, are quite level-headed, and they know exactly what they want.

Flirty behavior at Harold's Country Club:

Cowboy and Country Girl

How to Walk into an Old House and Snoop, without Annoying the Owners

When you are on the front porch, look at the ceiling over the deck. It should be sky blue–something to do with helping the cool breezes to make their way through the house. Look at the columns that support the roof of the porch: are they round? Fluted? And what sort of capital (Doric? Ionic? Corinthian?) do they have? Is there any "gingerbread" woodwork around the upper porch? Are there shingles shaped like little shields in the horizontal walls? Is the roof cedar shakes? Tin? Tile? Slate? Is the porch original? Then look over the door: is the glass work in the shape of a sunburst, or is it all square or rectangular? Is it composed of mullioned windows or diamond-shaped panes? What about the glass? Does it look all runny or is it clear? Are the windows three-light mullions or six-light mullions? How many times do you think the doorway has been painted, in its life? Is the front door painted "Charleston green," which is as much black as green? How large is the front door? Could you get a piano or a large fourposter bed through the opening? What about a lady in a bustle like Scarlett O'Hara? What is the threshold like?

Where does the hallway go? Could people have danced in it? Where are the stairs to the second story? If you are in the rear of the house, are the stairs narrow and steep, for servants? Or are they wide, expensive, and curvy, in the front to impress front-door visitors? Are the stairs back stairs or front stairs? How wide is the hallway? How tall are the ceilings? Are there chandeliers? Are the chandeliers crystal, brass, or tin? Are they meant to hold candles or did they at one time provide gaslight? Are the windows draped in draperies to shut out the sun in July or August, or are they ornamented somehow with heavy fabric, perhaps a velvet or a brocade with silk backing? Is there a jabot–a side portion of a window treatment where fabric is draped in soft folds vertically?



Look at the floor. How wide are the beams? How dark is the floor, from use or from dark staining? Do you smell Murphy’s Oil Soap? Can you tell from the grain whether the wood is heart pine or oak? Are there gaps between the boards filled with oakum?



Look at the moldings and ornamentation–chair moldings and crown moldings and ceiling bosses. How finely made are they? Are they all hand-carved and do they show some eccentricities or irregularities in the carving? Is there dentile cornicing? How well are the corners of the crown molding put together? Do the fireplaces have mantels? Of marble, painted wood, or stained wood? How large are the fireplaces? Do they have metal hanging pot-racks that swing out for kitchen pots to hang on? Are the chimneys central to the house or on either end? Was the kitchen of the house detached from the house? What sort of chimney pot is at the top of the chimneys?

Chimney pot

Does the house have painted walls? Murals? Wallpaper? Or are the walls wooden or paneled? Do the windows have small panes or large?? Do the windows have rope supports that go to hidden weights? Is there a kind of shutter below the front, bay-facing windows, to let air pass through (never mind the noseeums or mosquitoes)? That is called a jib door, and it is usually hidden in the wainscoting. Do the doors between rooms slide back into the wall? Those are called pocket doors. Do most of the doors have doorknobs and locks? Are any of the doorknobs crystal? Are there keys still in the locks? Are the keys and the locks solid brass?

Are there no closets in the old house? Are there wardrobes instead? Does period furniture include commodes (fancy wooden enclosures for chamber pots–porcelain toilets with handles)? Highboys? Blanket chests? Basins and pitchers for washing?

If you can identify all these things and give names to them, you will impress the owners of any old house you enter.

The Big Chill and Beaufort

I was at the intersection of Church and King Streets one afternoon about a month ago when a Jeep, open to the breeze, drove by. There were three or four youngish men in it. Just as it passed the wall of St. Helena’s Church, the Jeep’s stereo blasted forth with "Jeremiah was a bull-frog; was a good friend of mine . . . ," and suddenly I realized what the men were doing. They were re-living a scene from The Big Chill. Part of me said "Get a life!" but another part said "That’s cool."
Perhaps they couldn’t jog down a deserted, foggy Bay Street in the very early morning as did Kevin Kline and William Hurt, and perhaps they couldn’t drive into Hilda Holstein’s driveway in a vintage black Porsche like William Hurt, with the dope hidden in the car’s undercarriage. But they had gotten the Jeep somewhere and they were going to by-God drive by that church wall with that particular late-Sixties song blaring from the stereo–they wanted so hard to be a part of the movie they loved. (Actually, the song playing in the very short Jeep scene was Credence Clearwater Revival’s "Bad Moon Rising," but what the hell: "Joy to the World" begins and ends the movie.)

The Big Chill is a movie that deserves its cult status. It is a Baby Boomer movie, and a reunion movie, yes, but it is serious, and funny, and life-affirming, even if its title is a joke about death. By now we know that the corpse in the coffin, never seen except for the top of his head, his feet, and his wrist with the stitches from his suicide, is Kevin Costner (his living scenes were cut from the movie), and we know how just about all the actors in the movie went on to at least semi-brilliant careers, the most outstanding being Kevin Kline (who has played Hamlet, Bottom, and Falstaff). Glenn Close has performed very well in everything from Fatal Attraction to Broadway musicals; William Hurt has played his intellectually cool sex appeal in Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat and many other films above B grade; and Tom Beringer is perhaps at his most memorable as the military sergeant sociopath in Platoon. Jeff Goldblum gives his bright intensity to everything from the re-make of The Fly to Jurassic Park. Together, in the movie, they seemed to be genuine friends, and they probably became so during the fifty-some days they worked together in Los Angeles and in Beaufort.

Mrs. Holstein’s house on The Point is often just referred to as "The Big Chill house," and it is true that in the movie the house develops a personality of its own, from the attic to the basement. The kitchen scene where all the actors wander in and eventually start dancing, so gracefully, to the Temptations’s "Ain’t too Proud to Beg," is etched in the memory of America. The scenes on the porch or on the dock make the viewer want to live in that house, and, for us Baby Boomers who lived through the loose and lecherous Sixties, the basement scene with Meg Tilley coming to the door in her chemise and panties has ever since been a mnemonic turn-on for more than just Jeff Goldblum. And then there is the vivid scene with Glenn Close, vulnerably naked, weeping unashamedly sitting in the shower, which, rather than just engendering desire for Glenn Close and earning the movie an R rating, brought home the power of grief at the useless death of a young man who has been loved by all those once-idealistic and radical University of Michigan students during the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

The director Lawrence Kasdan and Barbara Benedik wrote the witty script, remarkably timeless considering that the movie was released in 1983 and concerns fictional characters who were in college in 1969. Kasdan even allowed his adorable son to sing "Joy to the World" in the bathtub and his wife to play an airline hostess serving vodka to Tom Beringer, betraying a low budget for extras but sending family postcards to the friends of the Kasdans.

What is rich about the movie is the characters of the fiction, and the house and town where the main characters live. Glenn Close was the only actor in the film nominated for an Oscar, perhaps for that scene in the shower, but, because the cast is an ensemble, her nomination was for Best Supporting Actress. All eight major actors equally deserved the nomination.

The Big Chill put Beaufort on the map and made it part of American mythology. The mythology was persistent. The Big Chill taught 1980s movie-viewers to snort coke as William Hurt did in the movie, if they had enough money to buy it, but the dope-dealer in the movie, the William Hurt character, is not a role-model or a happy man, since he "hates his life," though his sarcasm and cynicism is often funny. (Some reviewers have called the movie a "comedy of manners," and so does its director). The dope-dealer gets away with his possession of quaaludes and various other illegal pills, his stash of marijuana, and his cocaine, even if the Vietnam War has made him impotent. At least he gets to drive the Porsche, even if he can’t make love to the luscious ballerina flower child Meg Tilley. Though she is a latter-day hippie and out of synch with the self-reflexive Sixties radicals, the character that Tilley plays is allowed to say "I haven’t met that many happy people in my life. How do they act?" which shows that she is not a complete air-head but has a thoughtful side as well as a beautiful body. Actually, the William Hurt character will be living with her in a cabin in Beaufort after the movie ends, if you pay attention to the contrived happy ending.

The town is a character in The Big Chill, and Beaufort has character that the movie is sensitive to. It is no accident that the wonderful ensemble of actors (including Jobeth Williams and Mary Kay Place) returned to Beaufort for a reunion, I think ten years after the movie came out.

No, I won’t ride around Beaufort in a Jeep in order to re-live the movie, but I appreciate The Big Chill because it taught me something about how enchanting the town is, as well as reminding me about all the joys of living in the era of sex, drugs, camaraderie, and rock and roll.