Editor’s Note: I had to leave the property due to that screaming message on the dashboard. “Level A Service Deferred 25 Days!” So, I am doing the proper thing. I am leaving the Farm for a day or two. There is no telling what I might encounter, and the clouds have obliterated the pleasant dawn. We will see where Marlow takes us this particular morning.
– Vic
Author’s Note: As the cabled, broadcasted and digitally streamed and webbed talking heads continue slandering my state of residence for the perceived crimes of widening the access to the ballot box and more easily curing inaccurately filled out absentee petitions and ballots, I was thinking about how our (TRIGGER ALERT, my pretties) integration into this Coastal Empire place was going.
-Marlow
Going Native
The line between the water and the overcast sky is obscured as we motor our way down our tranquil rivers to the endless sea that is immense with darkness.
Transplants living in Savannah can be divided in general terms into two separate categories. The majority spend their days and nights hermetically sealed in their own sizeable units inside gated American McMansion colonies. Any contacts with the natives are limited to waiters, Uber drivers, pool and lawn service employees, and of course, to such business communications as may be unavoidable.
But a romantic strain lives on in the Coastal Empire character. This finds expression in that minority among exiles who do indeed make quite determined, if sometimes futile efforts to participate in the social and cultural life of the city. We live close to or inside the old town section with all its eccentricities, angers, and aggressions.
We are part of this last. We work and live here, having fallen head over heels in love with everything Savannah. The town has a very strong appeal for this sort of immigrant. Our unique vision of the so-called “Savannah way of life” seems to combine the esteemed dignity of a long since gone culture with something of the tense simplicity of a good murder mystery movie. The key for us is that we cherish the place and its inhabitants as if we were 7thgeneration native born.
At heart we came to this upriver town as indoor people with a gardening addiction. Keen cooks, we became passionate and dedicated aficionados of farm-to-table. This was not surprisingly after living 16 years on a coral tropical island — hundreds and hundreds of miles away from small mainland farms’ ardently grown food for the locals.
We became entranced in the grasp of its gentle corroding. A slow pervasive deterioration took hold of us as primeval marshes and swamps always overcome, re-capture and destroy invaders, conquerors and exploiters alike.
Its attractions are obvious; its complications obscure.
During my seafaring days during the last century’s wars, I saw the world’s devils that drive and sway men. Violence, greed and the devil of hot desire. They were and remain strong.
But in this river town I found flabby devils — soft, pretending, weak eyed ones of avaricious and merciless folly. They are insidious. I only found out about them 100s of miles and too many years later up that river.
If we have one virtue, it is that W and I are adapters who manage to retain much of our original selves while settling into and becoming one with one strange place after another during our pasts. While we were and are always satisfied with the results we get, we never betray our “Hostess City” and its human hosts.
Savannah is different. It is as if we are canaries living inside a giant birdcage. Gigantic fingers now and then would offer us skewered, seasonal, aged cocktail olives. All we have to do is sing in return. And sing we have.
Only now after many, many years do we finally see what this gilded cage is — an ante chamber to the mortician’s slab complete with comfy chairs with leather arm and leg straps, head caps and chest restraints. Yet, we don’t so much see Savannah as much as it happens to us.
Savannah’s broad and lazy river and namesake rests unperturbed at the end of each day, having served its hurly burly people along its banks and their floating monsters inching along its river channels and along its quays as they trade with uttermost ends of the earth. The riverside is always a dignified and captivating scene.
The city’s great trade goes on into the deepening night upon its ceaseless river. Tidal currents run east and west in infinite rhythm, filled with memories of land-hugging people and ship-borne people to or from home or battles at sea — one and all of us are hunters for treasure or pursuers of fame. Much greatness and sadness floats in the ebbs and flows of the Savannah like so many childhood dreams.
Further west — on the river town’s upper reaches — are the monstrous cranes and semi-tractor trailer trucks and trains gorging on or disgorging the cargo of 1300 foot long 230,000 ton ships. A brooding gloom is whispered to be in the winds now and then on the western horizon as ominous rumors float about the ultimate automation of the world’s entire supply chain. The lurid unblinking glare of robots dance in the dreams of those whose minds are prone to be overly imaginative or fearful.
To the monsters’ east is River Street where newfound wealth has erected gleaming towers and new old-style warehouse-like buildings of multi-million dollar pieds-à-terre, boutique hotels, chichi restaurants, jungle themed dive bars, retail stores, and first-rate, live music venues scattered throughout.
The river’s great bridge, the gentle parkways that lead up to it from both shores, the exquisite lighting designed to delight the eyes of tourists and residents alike, along with the floating behemoths moving up and down the waterway as backdrop make for an exciting place to spend time and money.
As people move down the river promenades, various pocket parks and memorials dot the shores with snatches of jazz or blues music softly play as if on a soundtrack marking the rise of the river’s visitor nightlife. The smell of grilled meats and wonderfully prepared seafood and sauces rise and fall as one walks down the street’s cobbled way.
Yet the observant’s eyes are always drawn to the hurrying crowd of ferries, tugs and mammoth ships as they move about the harbor and the luminous stretch of the ocean reaches just beyond.
Each time during these darkness walks, I am drawn to the time 300 years ago when civilized Europeans cast off their self-proclaimed Great Britain from a magnificent, impersonal, somewhat aged but still capable-of-paying-its-bills port town to these unknown shores at the ends of the earth on featureless maps.
I always strive to imagine their trip up this coffee brown river’s waters to find this high yet narrow plateau jutting sixty plus feet above the endless sea level marshes. Death, rot, hostile insects, snakes and predators lurked and skulked in the air. They must have died like flies back then from the bites and fevers that assaulted them. Yet, the spaces they found in the woods, fields, creeks, marshes, swamps and their inland posts felt like savagery, yet the mysterious life of this Dark Colony’s wilderness bound them up and to this place in utter fascination.
To venture these days further upriver from the Savannah plateau is to encounter a sameness as if one hasn’t moved, just endless marsh grasses and occasional Spanish Moss draped live oaks and cedars. Riverbanks are the edge of an endless colossal jungle that seems to glisten and drip with steam. Just as for the settlers it remains an enigma before us moderns as it smiles, frowns, incites, insipidly or savagely, yet always mute with an air of murmuring “come and find out.”
So, do we find ourselves bound to it after our years of residence.
The old settlers became conquerors of course. They grabbed what they could from it as it had no real defenders. The land redeemed what it could from them requiring ever more fresh boats of folks who wanted their turn in the taking and making.
Even years later I can still see at times brief reflections on the river of that process repeating itself here during my riverside walks in the darkness. This weaving snake is ever charming me as I trudge up its centuries’ old staircases from the riverside to the car parks above.
I am fortunate to have escaped signing any documents forbidding me to disclose any secrets I learn of my surroundings. Yet I still feel an infrequent twinge when I do so. I wonder why. Perhaps it’s the dank, grey gloom and severity of the staircases at night. Or the old clapperless Cotton Exchange bell that rings at odd nighttime hours?
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Sometimes, if you listen carefully to the nighttime’s offshore winds, you may hear a mournful lament, the pad of feet upon soft red earth and the jingle of chains that announce the approach of a chain-gang of 30 headed by a shotgun-armed man. These gangs are carrying enormous stone drainage pipes to dry out more of the local wetlands for agriculture and kept the growing city high and dry during the rain and fever seasons. This whole picture is one of desolation and despair. But it fades into the night as another honkytonk’s karaoke music blares up in intensity and beat as we move onwards toward our car. Soon the smell of cheap champagne becomes stronger as we pass by the bar’s open front door.
As we pick up the pace towards the garage, our shadows compress and expand on the buildings’ brick walls depending on the streetlights position and height. Sorta like a Pink-Elephants-On-Parade thing.
We are silent for the most part during these walks home. There are only the droning sounds of wheels on pavement as cars navigate their way southward and the grave, deliberate churning of dried live oak tree leaves in their wakes.
I have been on a lot of different boats on oceans and seas across the world. I didn’t know much about river towns, particularly this one. Most of what I knew was its downtown bustle and its green and leafy park squares — not the dark emptiness beyond its outer limits.
Upon arrival, we had old maps, but they didn’t help much. Still too much unmarked territory on them. So, we made voyages to fix and mark our maps of discovery of the river and coastal wetlands hiddenness. We were never sure how we’d be greeted when we stopped. Sometimes friendly — mostly by other transplants. Other times warily by natives. We didn’t care when they were curt to the point of rude. Fortunately, very few tried for an affectation of cruel and ruthless. Yet, we as Midwesterners were taught to despise cowardice — especially when out and about this free country of ours. Even before the plague lockdowns we weren’t about to wait for some British-sounding schmuck on TV telling us what flora and fauna he’d discovered out in our local wildernesses. It wasn’t easy at first, but the more we returned to certain places, the more locals let on about the place and wanted to know about us, our travels, and — particularly — in some sense our ability to be mobile.
Occasionally during these travels did we happen upon snakes — the sunning-themselves slithering kind and the bipedal ones who intended all-comers harm. We didn’t bother the first — harmless and in need of rest like most of us — while we either steered clear of the second or steeled ourselves with backs to the wall in the event we needed to interact with them and their hidden fangs.
During these countryside voyages the road surface becomes a bit rough so as to produce a drum like patter that alternately strengthens then dissolves. Sometimes it’s like 100 drums rolling and a-tumbling as the car tolls mile upon mile, slowly or quickly, as the scenery and our discovery frenzy dictate.
Our reactions are almost prehistoric at times to the land seemingly cursing us, welcoming us, praying to us — who can tell because we are too far down into an unmarked portion of our old gas station paper or the car’s un-updated digital maps. It’s similar to our first bumbling around in the city well after midnight. Those early times are long gone but these roads drumming speaks to us. You don’t know the men on these drums, and their sounds’ frankness and humanity are unfamiliar. Like in my old ports of call, there’s a howl and dancing going on somewhere out there. Unsurprisingly, I never dock our V8 powered vessel in the wildernesses and go ashore for a howl and a dance. No sir, I don’t — I have to man the wheel towards the next inhabited port call.
As our travels expand into the interior, we travel back in time to before the settlers when vegetation rioted and trees were singular kings. We see many empty streams and creeks empty of human activity or travel but chockful of life and silence. Silence, but not peace, I think as memories of early settler times of predators’ presence flood in.
And on we drive into that silence, into the empire’s upper reaches and quiet, untraveled bends when pavement gives way to gravel and then to sandy, tractor wide, dirt paths out beyond the farming belt. Fields of crops give way to walls upon wooden walls of trees, tall ones, short ones, fat and skinny ones, leafy and piney ones. Our progress slows to that of a ladybug tittering jerkily forward pell-mell along the ground.
Still, we trust in the road despite its ever-menacing sound, closing in, deterioration and the darkness at its heart. These trees were once soil and before that stone, even the slenderest twig, the smallest and greenest leaf. We are entranced and gaze out at these rolling scenes amazed. We had been deaf and blind to this until we were struck by the drumming of the road and the dawn of understanding.
All that we can see at times is just our car and the outlines of the road’s edge and the tall trees that lined it. Our eyes are no more use to us than if we were buried ten feet deep in bales of cotton. It’s warm, stifling yet comforting. I am not disclosing any Savannah trade secrets, but we are now being offered seats among the lesser local devils.
Most transplants can’t or won’t understand. How can they? With solid pavement under their feet, surrounded by friendly neighbors ready to cheer with them, easily stepping into and out of the super-Kroger’s but gingerly around the barbed fences of locked-down, insane asylums, afraid of personal digital and analogue scandal, the gallows, and the ICU. That’s the complete map of their fears and knowledge. The solitudes we’re seeing take us back to when there were no neighbors, public opinion, or technology just the utter silence and indifference of a raw world of invisible tiny biters and predators when all one had was their strength, savvy, skills, and faith in themselves.
All of this ends like how we Americans misstate our wanteds “Dead or alive.” We’re one until we’re the other for eternity.
Since we quit, we can’t smoke ‘em, even if we got ‘em. So, all we got left is to enjoy going native as we drift on out to sea.
Like the settlers, we think we know best. It’s not for us to question. Someone will take our place. We aren’t, like the settlers were, burdened with arranging for someone to take our place. We aren’t like the conquering gods like they were. They subdued these wild places and brought many benefits. Their methods — unusual, harsh, cruel, but the circumstances . . .
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