He had a leaf blower, a noisy contraption with miles of flex snaking back into the building behind him. I had never seen such a thing before. It looked something like a vacuum cleaner-actually, it looked like one of the Martians in It Came from Outer Space-and it was very noisy. The idea, I gathered, was that you would blow all the leaves into a pile and then gather them up by hand. But every time the man assembled a little pile of leaves, a breeze would come along and unassemble it. Sometimes he would chase one leaf half a block or more with his blower, whereupon all the leaves back at base would seize the opportunity to scuttle off in all directions. It was clearly an appliance that must have looked nifty in the catalog but would never work in the real world, and I vaguely wondered, as I strolled past, whether the people at the Zwingle Company were behind it in some way.
I left Savannah on the Herman Talmadge Memorial Bridge, a tall, iron-strutted structure that rises up and up and up and flings you, wide-eyed and quietly gasping, over the Savannah River and into South Carolina. I drove along what appeared on my map to be a meandering coast road, but was in fact a meandering inland road. This stretch of coast is littered with islands, inlets, bays and beaches of rolling sand dunes, but I saw precious little of it. The road was narrow and slow. It must be hell in the summer when millions of vacationers from all over the eastern seaboard head for the beaches and resorts-Tybee Island, Hilton Head, Laurel Bay, Fripp Island.
It wasn't until I reached Beaufort (pronounced 'Bew-furt') that I got my first proper look at the sea.
I rounded a bend to find myself, suddenly and breathtakingly, gazing out on a looking glass bay full of boats and reed beds, calm and bright and blue, the same color as the sky. According to my Mobil Travel Guide, the three main sources of income in the area are tourism, the military and retired people. Sounds awful, doesn't it? But in fact Beaufort is lovely, with many mansions and an oldfashioned business district. I parked on Bay Street, the main road through town, and was impressed to find that the meter fee was only five cents. That must be just about the last thing a nickel will buy you in America-thirty minutes of peace of mind in Beaufort, South Carolina. I strolled down to a little park and marina, which had been recently built, from the look of it. This was only the fourth time I had seen the Atlantic from this side. When you come from the Midwest, the ocean is a thing rarely encountered. The park was full of signs instructing you not to enjoy yourself or do anything impertinent. They were every few yards, and said, No SWIMMING OR DIVING FROM
SEAWALL. NO BIKE RIDING IN PARK. CUTTING OR DAMAGING FLOWERS, PLANTS, TREES OR SHRUBS PROHIBITED. No CONSUMPTION OR POSSESSION OF BEER, WINE, OR ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES IN CITY PARKS WITHOUT SPECIAL PERMISSION OF THE
CITY. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. I don't know what sort of mini-Stalin they have running the council in Beaufort, but I've never seen a place so officially unwelcoming. It put me off so much that I didn't want to be there anymore, and abruptly I left, which was a shame really because I still had twelve minutes of unexpired time on the meter.
As a result of this, I arrived in Charleston twelve minutes earlier than planned, which was good news. I had thought that Savannah was the most becoming American city I had ever seen, but it thumped into second place soon after my arrival in Charleston. At its harbor end, the city tapers to a rounded promontory which is packed solid with beautiful old homes, lined up one after the other along straight, shady streets like oversized books on a crowded shelf. Some are of the most detailed Victorian ornateness, like fine lace, and some are plain white clapboard with black shutters, but all of them are at least three stories high and imposing-all the more so as they loom up so near the road.
Almost no one has any yard to speak of-though everywhere I looked there were Vietnamese gardeners minutely attending to patches of lawn the size of tablecloths-so children play on the street and women, all of them white, all of them young, all of them rich, gossip on the front steps. This isn't supposed to happen in America. Wealthy children in America don't play on the street; there isn't any need. They lounge beside the pool or sneak reefers in the $3,000 treehouse that Daddy had built for them for their ninth birthday. And their mothers, when they wish to gossip with a neighbor, do it on the telephone or climb into their airconditioned station wagons and drive a hundred yards. It made me realize how much cars and suburbs-and indiscriminate wealth-have spoiled American life.
Charleston had the climate and ambience of a Naples, but the wealth and style of a big American city. I was enchanted. I walked away the afternoon, up and down the peaceful streets, secretly admiring all these impossibly happy and good-looking people and their wonderful homes and rich, perfect lives.
The promontory ended in a level park, where children wheeled and bounced on BMXs and young couples strolled hand in hand and Frisbees sailed through the long strips of dark and light caused by the lowering sun filtering through the magnolia trees. Every person was youthful, good-looking and well scrubbed. It was like wandering into a Pepsi commercial. Beyond the park, a broad stone promenade overlooked the harbor, vast and shimmery and green. I went and peered over the edge.
The water slapped the stone and smelled of fish. Two miles out you could see the island of Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began. The promenade was crowded with cyclists and sweating joggers, who weaved expertly among the pedestrians and shuffling tourists. I turned around and walked back to the car, the sun warm on my back, and had the sneaking feeling that after such perfection things were bound to be downhill from now on.
CHAPTER 9
SOUTH CAROLINA was boring. For the sake of haste I got on Interstate 26, which runs in a Zoo-mile diagonal across the state, through a monotonous landscape of dormant tobacco fields and salmon-colored soil. According to my Mobil Travel Guide, I was no longer in the Deep South but in the Middle Atlantic states. But it had the heat and glare of the South and the people in gas stations and cafes along the way sounded Southern. Even the radio announcers sounded Southern, in attitude as much as accent. According to one news broadcast, the police in Spartanburg were looking for two black men 'who raped a white girl.' You wouldn't hear that outside the South.
As I neared Columbia, the fields along the road began to fill with tall signs advertising motels and quick-food places. These weren't the squat, rectangular billboards of my youth, with allur ing illustrations and three- dimensional cows, but just large unfriendly signs standing atop sixty-foot-high metal poles. Their messages were terse. They didn't invite you to do anything interesting or seductive. The old signs were chatty and would say things like WHILE IN COLUMBIA, WHY
NOT STAY IN THE MODERN SKYLINER MOTOR INN, WITH OUR ALL NEW SENSU-MATIC VIBRATING BEDS. YOU'LL LOVE 'EM! SPECIAL RATES FOR CHILDREN. FREE
TV. AIR COOLED ROOMS. FREE ICE. PLENTY OF PARKING. PETS WELCOME. ALL-U_
CAN-EAT CATFISH BUFFET EVERY TUES 5-7 PM. DANCE NITELY TO THE VERNON
STURGES GUITAR ORCHESTRA IN THE STARLITE ROOM. (PLEASE No NEGROES). The old signs were like oversized postcards, with helpful chunks of information. They provided something to read, a little food for thought, a snippet of insight into the local culture. Attention spans had obviously contracted since then. The signs now simply announced the name of the business and how to get there. You could read them from miles away: HOLIDAY INN, EXIT 26E, 4 MI. Sometimes these instructions were more complex and would say things like BURGER KING-31 MILES. TAKE EXIT 17B 5 MI TO US49 SOUTH, TURN RIGHT AT LIGHTS, THEN WEST
