Think of life here in the Empire as drifting upon magnificent barge where large, feathered fans stroke the warm river air and time moves differently from the time of everywhere else. Everything is better on the barge with a kind of ease scenting our nights. The barge passes through towns up and down river, through the countryside, and through major events, local and international, without ever disturbing the thick layer of protective ease between it and the outside world. Perhaps the reason is that, surrounded by the Empire’s multiple layered walls as it is, barge life is further protected from most disturbances by hungry, bitey critters waiting, like snakes, in the brown creek, marsh and river waters that surround us.

Undeluded that we are walking on water, all of us on this barge have iron constitutions and never awake tangled or confused, otherwise we couldn’t survive past 45. The place’s und(erl)ying glee will never crumble away. There are no Morning After’s here, with candles burnt down to the end and cigarette butts and old crusted Bloody Mary glasses are all that remain.

Native-born Savannahnians luckily grow up on a distant edge of America with their feet in the ocean and their heads bobbing atop the breaking waves, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of the kind of reading matter, regional and international, that puts them in sometimes communion with the rest of the world. Spirited and sensitive to the needs of others, they live without organized religion’s spiritual taint; religious books often fail to subjugate their imaginations; they select their own “civilizing influences” not those that other places enforce upon their young. They have manners and a sense of right and wrong but none of “sin.” They know their way around their Empire like Bedouins on their own two thousand square miles of trackless desert waste.

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Meanwhile, we love living in a place where TV and radio commercials blare “Don’t be a victim, buy a gun.” This is mostly why I am always polite when being introduced to those decked out church ladies at Sunday’s post service beer parlor brunches. Even stylish party gowns and tuxes like ladies’ purse size no longer announce someone isn’t packing serious heat and caliber.

Savannah cocktail party scene stills from the movie In the Garden of
Good and Evil. She’s waving around a .45 Long Colt American Deringer
that she kept inside her ball gown, while he’s showing off his stainless
Berretta Jetfire .25 ACP kept in his tortoise shell cigar case jacket pocket.

This is paradise with a view . . . Just watch its morning ocean turn blush pink, then yellow, then breezelessly humid and tell me it’s not with a straight face.

Notes to self: I must be careful not to get barge blues by writing too much . . . about barge blues or sharing real secrets that many, if not most, would consider “not nice” and ask me to go ashore for jeopardizing their positions by giving away their plots. Or putting them fully exposed in some online center fold.

That would be a true sin. Mortal to those trying to keep their personal banner of truth before them, untarted up with “ideas” and “facts.”

I would never consider asking them “Do you mind if I write pseudonymously about your very personal issues?”

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We have befriended the staffs of two small recently opened places near our home called Squirrels and the Water Witch. Yes, one has an original artwork wall of eccentric squirrels while the other is a full-blown throwback Tiki Bar with a Pu Pu platter menu. Despite their misfortune to have opened during the early months of the plague in 2020, they have become successful. They have wound up getting us to sample and drink all their concoctions while spit-balling new ones and cute catchy names. They seem to like having us around, intoxicated or not.

Some of their clientele are pushing them to celebrate their 100th Opening Monday anniversary.

These are places where losing our countenance and not being cool is okay, since you‘ll find the first and get a big chilled case of the second after an hour or so there.

Whereas Squirrels has that old feel of a shotgun style dive bar, the Water Witch looks to have been designed by two young SCAD student artists and looks like a Flying Down to Rio banana-leaf ode. Its walls are leafy and rattan covered. Thankfully, they skipped adding artificial flamingos in the front windows among banana leaves as well as the color chartreuse and Miami Vice pastels.

Together these two places seat about seventy people. Ninety-five if their crowds go SRO. Neither charges the going downtown rate of “New York prices” for cocktails or food

The waitresses and bartenders do not wear tropical or sailor bar uniforms, are ever efficient, do not upsell or rush their patrons — just more or less take kindly possession of us.

No matter our BAC, we always try for an elegant old-fashioned good manner despite our faded old jeans and ragged out sandals.

No matter the hour of the day or the day of the week, they either are upon our arrival or will soon be thereafter jammed.

30 minutes after these places reach max occupancy the tale telling starts to crest with voices confident and full of soft intimate lies.

Most tale tellers came in one of two varieties — either writers who have drinking problems or drinkers with writing problems. So, based on personal observation, it is true nowadays what they say about writers — they can only write for three hours a day at the most, so what else is there to do but drink thereafter?

Regardless, the marvelous tales they spin make our stays joyful. We love these places despite our being known by the staff because they know we like them the way they are and wish ourselves to be — anonymous. Hiding in plain sight.

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Savannah shimmers like glorious turquoise-blue postcard-sky. A Matisse-like blue inland sea. Petrified when it was caught inland as the rest of its mother ocean departed. So shallow of a sea that you see down to its bottom. All of its original sea and land life didn’t belong in or by an inland body of salt water, so they departed. It became clear, pure and quite ancient. It doesn’t move unless you touch it — unbidden by the moon, it has no tides, it’s just there in perfect beauty and stillness with us on the barge floating on top eternally surprised and pleased by our friends exclaiming “You’re here!”

More often than I care to admit about this Empire is how anyplace could — by sheer brilliance and instinct of its people and the natural beauty of its landscape — know, really know, that it is what W and I needed!

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