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.

A Dog Party

The life and adventures of the Taubs, my daughter-in-law told us, would make a great coffee table book. David Taub takes his Harley to motorcycle rallies, but he is not a biker in the old sense (no pigtail, no tattoos, no loose women). He is the former mayor of Beaufort, and he is still on various civic boards around town. He used to be the proprietor of Morgan Island, in St. Helena Sound, nicknamed Monkey Island, the center for primate research, and he has thousands of slides of macaques, among other monkeys. He knew Richard Leakey and worked with Jane Goodall; his work is listed alongside monographs by Dian Fossey, and he knows most of the other luminaries of the primate world, since he wrote Primate Paternalism in the Eighties.

Pam Taub, well, she is perhaps the most colorful well-dressed woman in Beaufort, tall, vibrant, funny, bright, always a good time to be around, natural, unforced. You could say she lives for her dogs, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, but she has more of a life, and she lives it fully. The dogs are beloved and lovingly cared for: Harley (of course), Spangle (for Star-Spangled Banner, since patriotism is real and intense in the family), and Sunny (short for Davidson). Cavaliers are sweet and loving dogs (David calls my Cavalier, Keats, "sweet boy" in a Texas inflection), and their love is returned by David and Pam Taub.

A dog party might be outrageous in almost any other household, or a community less individualistic than is Beaufort’s. For the Taubs, it is perfectly natural to celebrate Spangle’s birthday along with that of his sister Roxy, and to invite dogs and their owners and their friends and their godparents from Hilton Head, Charleston, and even from New York, to their backyard in Beaufort. There is no embarrassment involved: the dogs deserve it, they love the toys and the treats, and they sit in the laps of the humans who cherish them, as needy and as loving as any co-dependent relative, and probably much less demanding. Neediness in dogs is much less demanding than greediness in humans.

Certainly, keeping these luxurious dogs is luxuriously expensive, but, according to the vet Mark Guilloud, who owns two Cavaliers, dogs are now like people: they are healthier, better fed, better nourished, better medicated; and they live longer lives with better quality in those lives. I don’t think Cavaliers are like SUVs, by which I mean useless and expensive status symbols. They are family adjuncts, and they are supposed to think of their human owners as "Mommy" and "Daddy." They are comfort dogs.

My dog, Keats, is a great chick magnet. He is fluffy, has those big bug eyes, and he moans and mumbles to himself only when taken for a walk. Women say "Aw, he’s talking to me," and come up in droves to talk back to Keats and be loved by him. I mean, Keats is really adorable: after I feed him, he comes up next to my chair, puts his paws up, and gives me a little burp of gratitude. If I reach down to hug him and ruffle both his ears at the same time, he gives little moans of pleasure and his eyes water and his nose gets wet; and if I scratch his butt, his tail wags even harder. He does all that with women, and they love to see and hear him do it. Keats affirms the need for love in the world.

At the dog party, the men and the women were happy with the dogs and each other, and utterly unembarrassed by having a party in which party favors and cake and treats were shared separately but equally between people and animals. Keats got a lolly-pup (carob and raisins, peanut butter, organic) and a chewy bone; we gave Spangle some patriotic tennis balls to chase; Keats got a doggie treat like beef jerky and the humans had M&Ms and piece of cake with a Cavalier head carved into the icing. The dogs were exhausted with running around all afternoon and they all slept well that night.

A Tabby Tomb

Rick Whiteman, who has lived in Beaufort since 1979 and now works as a restoration expert for tabby and brick, was trenching around a unique tabby tomb inside the walls of St. Helena this afternoon of June 9, 2008. Tabby is the oyster-shell cement used for foundations and walls of fortresses, houses, and tombs, probably since the Spaniards who came to the southeast of the North American continent in the 15th century figured out how to slake the oyster shells and use the lime and sand combination to make a cement not quite as long-lasting or as substantial as classical Roman cement (the stuff of aqueducts and triumphal arches).

Tabby seems to vary quite a bit in its holding power and stability. In 1800, it was the building material of choice, since bricks imported from Savannah were too expensive for Beaufortians to afford. This tomb, wherein lies William Eastwood Graham, one of the rectors of St. Helena, was constructed in 1800, probably at the direction of family members. A marble slab, now much cracked and mended, covers the tabby foundation, which was uniquely ornamented, originally, with pilasters covered with stucco, in a faux marble effect, as in Greek and Roman columns. According to the person who knows more about tabby than anyone else in the world, Colin Brooker, colors were sometimes bled into the stucco mixture to simulate the grain of marble.

The tomb is quite a find, since free-standing tabby tombs, especially decorated ones, are a real rarity. Colin Brooker explained, as I talked to him on June 9, that the remains of Rev. Graham were likely to have been interred below where a tabby slab was poured, the slab itself poured to the depth of almost a foot (for stability). Then forms were laid in the wet tabby and a solid (not hollow) memorial structure, looking like a grave box but too small to hold an adult body, was constructed above, again out of tabby but tabby poured within a carefully sculpted wood forme, constructed by at least a semi-skilled carpenter as a mold for the tomb. The tabby tomb simulator was decorated with pilasters, carefully stuccoed smoothly over the tabby, and then probably the pilasters and the sides of the tomb were decorated as faux marble. On top was laid a real marble slab, now so worn it appears to be sandstone, with the memorial message about William Graham carved into it.

Graham was obviously important to his parish. The height of the tomb indicates his standing and importance, and the classically-inspired pilasters, like the combination of Ionic and Corinthian capitals on the Secession House two blocks away, ties him with the glory of Greece and Rome. Graham had been rector for less than a year in 1777 and 1778, then he was asked to return to the parish in 1795, where he served until his death in 1800.

Tabby in its building sense was "A concrete formed of a mixture of lime with shells, gravel, or stones in equal proportions, which when dry becomes very hard" (OED noun, 6). The etymology of the name is uncertain, since it might be associated with the mixture of brindled colors of a tabby cat, or a district in Baghdad where certain fabric patterns emerged, but it is likely of Spanish or Moorish origin, a word transliterated from Arabic as "tabia" or "tapia." The historian Ibn Khaldun, in the 1300s, according to Colin Brooker, describes exactly how to make the aggregate, and Khaldun’s formula is essentially the same as that used in Beaufort.

Tabby structures are found in Beaufort, Savannah, on various barrier islands, and in St. Augustine, suggesting that the origin of the material was indeed maritime and Spanish. It is likely that the European settlers stole their oyster shells from native-American middens, shell-heaps and garbage heaps used by the native tribes, known as a source because Indian pottery often turns up as part of tabby. The Beaufort tabby, so far as I can see from personal examination, was usually composed mostly of oyster shells, possibly clay, and sand, with the oyster shells not crushed especially fine. In other words, it was a crude building material, meant to be hidden by a brick facade or stucco, which itself weathers off to expose the tabby and hence is not a permanent finish. It really is like rubble cement, in the sense that old pieces of brick or anything laying about might be added to the hidden mixture and made part of a wall.

Corner restored with a new tabby mixture

Talking Headstones

"I love you, a bushel and a peck. A bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck." (If you want to hear the music and words, by Frank Loesser from the 1950s musical Guys and Dolls, try http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/bushelpeck.htm.http://www.niehs.nih.gov/kids/lyrics/bushelpeck.htm..) Those words are on the back of a headstone, where you don’t expect any text, on one gravestone in the sunny, walled-in rectangle next to St. Helena’s Episcopal Church. It is nice to laugh in a graveyard, or to think about a song you haven’t heard since childhood. There is some joy in this sunny graveyard, and no fear of death, that I can tell. For some reason, there are no oppressive moss-encrusted live-oaks–there are a few, but they aren’t overbearing–or weeping willows, sentimentally reminding us of fears or superstitions. Of course there is reverence and respect for the dear departed ancestors, and the church makes sure that the grass is mowed at least every other week, and the leaves blown, and the concrete walks edged, and mulch laid down around the shrubs and flower beds. The graves are not sunken, the stones are upright, and the graveyard is respectful.

James Edwin McTeer, "the High Sheriff of the Low Country," is buried there, having left behind all his tales of facing the Land’s End Light or having sometimes defeated the sometimes questionable forces of Dr. Buzzard through equal white magic, in court. "Dirt from a graveyard taken at midnight" is one of the ingredients a Root Doctor might put into a token or charm that casts a spell benefitting a client, according to Sheriff McTeer (High Sheriff of the Low Country [1970], p. 22). I didn’t notice that the dirt around the good sheriff’s grave had been disturbed, thank goodness.

A Mr. Pinckney is described as "a great raconteur," and a Mr. Bradbury simply as "a Virginia gentleman" on their respective gravestones. One local gentleman of means was "a hunter and a salt water fisherman, a respected employer, a loyal friend, a loving husband, a generous father, and an affectionate grandfather." Another "listened well and counseled wisely, with warmth, humor, and love." The memorializers chose their words carefully.

Children who died young are represented by small headstones, sometimes surrounded by several Tonka Toy trucks and cars, as if the child were still playing at the beach, and some of the adult graves are decorated not with the usual chrysanthemums or artificial roses but with seashells. Recent graves may be planted with euonymous or another pretty ground-cover. I saw a camelia laid on the grave of a beloved grandfather. Some families seem to have planted a special tree like a cypress at the bequest of the deceased or of his or her relatives. There are no weeping willows in the St. Helena annex cemetary. Some sets of graves are in regimented rows, some apart from all the others, like row houses in Charleston or like a suburb near a city. Some graves distinguish themselves or their occupants by the marble slab’s being raised over a brick base, and some proclaim their importance with a headstone that sprawls over twenty or thirty feet, with arms to embrace a large or self-important family. Some of the gravestones are quiet or understated, on purpose. The body language of some gravestones says "New" or "Pure," and some says "Prematurely Aged," or "Distressed," or "Antiqued." Since this is not an ancient cemetery like the one around St. Helena’s Church, the stones start with birth dates in the 1870s, though some are from recognizably older Beaufort families, like the DeTrevilles, who have been here since the eighteenth century. Other families that appear often in Larry Rowland’s magisterial history of Beaufort County include the Pinckneys, the VonHartens, the Rhetts, the Verdiers, and the Trasks. Tombstones all seem to be of marble or granite, but I guess that has always been true. I was told that marble holds up better than granite in Beaufort humidity, but I had better not say that without authority.

My favorite memorial is so well-written it makes you wish for the return of the dead, and it happens to have been written by a gentleman I know, about the wife of a friend of mine:

"Bright, intelligent, and wonderfully educated, talented in music and literature, she was a lady of exquisite taste, grace, elegance, and fervor for life. A faithful and loving wife, a caring a nurturing mother, a loyal and devoted friend, she brought joy into the lives of everyone she knew.
Graceful, poised, and determined, she pursued life with candor, frankness, and a keen, enduring sense of good humor. She lived in happiness and died peacefully." Without a memorial cliché in them, those words are one of the most beautiful, thoughtful commentaries on a the life of a good human being I have ever read.

I have been talking to the great horned owl who lives in St. Helena’s Church steeple. He (or she, since I am not sure which sex does the territorial noise) starts calling soon after dusk–two louder whos and a series of fainter whos in a row. It is a noise I can imitate, tone for tone, rhythm for rhythm, so I try to engage the St. Helena owl in a conversation, and sometimes he seems to be answering me. Perhaps we are squabbling about territory.
I am assuming that this great horned owl roosts in the bell tower because the highest architectural point in town is an excellent lookout post. From it you can see if the French are coming, or the Yemasees, or the rats. There are no branches to get in the way of a line of sight to a delicious small mammal or rodent among the gravestones. During the day, an osprey sometimes perches on the cross on top the steeple, to look for fish. I have seen two ospreys sharing the two sides of the cross, demonstrating universal brotherhood.

The great horned owl swoops silently, I read, and I can back that up because I haven’t heard any of the Beaufort owls swooping, nor am I as knowledgeable as a National Geographic photographer about exactly when they might decide to swoop.

It is good, I think, that we have predators in the air at night, to catch and eat some of the rats that live in the Historic District. Owls are so intelligent-looking that they were associated with the goddess Minerva, who herself was born out of the brain of Jupiter, supposed to be a smart cookie himself, because he was the king of the gods. The great horned owl, despite his intelligence, cannot turn his head all the way around his body, like some owls, but he is said to attack animals as large as a possum or a porcupine (how, I don’t know, or from which end). He is indeed a noble-looking bird, but the only time we humans are likely to see a great horned owl is after it is stuffed.

The ecumenical orange tabby cat, whose name I do not yet know but who lives between the front walkway of St. Helena’s and the parish house of First Presbyterian and can be petted or fed by either denomination, had better not go out in the early evening, but perhaps both the owl and the pussycat live under some sort of divine injunction against the killing of church animals.

The noise of the great horned owl is in the air at night, in town. I haven’t heard a screech owl, which doesn’t screech but warbles in an eerie way, as if his cry were designed to make a human feel lonely, or a barn owl, who does screech in a very frightening way, sounding like a banshee, if you are near to it. Whip-poor-wills live in Beaufort County, but not around the town. I think they require space around them, and they are country birds. They can wake you up at night, they are so loud, if they roost in the eaves of your house.

There are great horned owls in at least three or four locations in downtown Beaufort. If you walk the town at night, you will hear them proclaiming their territory from street to street. Beaufort is an owl town at night, as well as a rat town and a palmetto bug town.

The great horned owl seems to go to sleep, or stop whoing, late at night or early in the morning, because he isn’t around at dawn, when the larky, chirpy, tweety, and raspy wren and crow types get up and tell you that you too should be getting out of bed, you sleepy head, to begin to carry out the duties of the day. Then the ecumenical pussycat can come to the sidewalks of either of the two churches and get his pets from the passersby.

This will be a blog about where I live: Beaufort, SC. In the eight years I have lived here, I have tried to re-acquaint myself with the customs and the morality of living in the South and living with Southern U.S. history. This is a very old port town, first settled by Europeans in the sixteenth century; thus we have sections of the town known as "Spanish Point" or "Frenchtown." Because the old sections of town have evolved more than they have been treated as a concept, the town is beautiful on a human scale, and it is famous for its live oak vistas, framed by Spanish moss, looking out on the water.

I have thought quite a bit about the remnants and the present existence of segregation and racism; about the kind of sexism that treats women as ornamental; about homophobia that damages the potential conversation between gay and straight. But I am also interested in the polite society of educated and gracious people on the one hand, and the dispossessed and alienated underprivileged society on the other. In fact, I am interested in everything about this little town, including its changing demographics as it absorbed more and wealthier people in from Ohio, Wisconsin, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Washington State, or Arizonia.