Originally published by Monadnock Underground – monadnockunderground.com
“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.” – John Fitzgerald Kennedy
July 28, 2019
Edisto Island, South Carolina
1:45 A.M.
We turned onto SC 174 in Adams Run. The road runs straight south, a direct line to the coast, over the salt marshes of the Ace Basin, through the Lowcountry, over the Dawhoo Bridge, onto the island of Edisto. Adams Run isn’t much to see. Blink and you’ll be past it, just a small post office, and a couple other buildings. But like so many things in life, it’s not the places as much as the journey — all the waypoints that make up the ride. The real joy here is the road itself.
As we pass under the cool shade of the trees, I remember the first time I drove this road back in the nineties: the road lined with broad live oaks, and cabbage palms, the oaks covered in weeping Spanish moss hanging from every limb. Today, we pass under the same trees draped with the same moss. We have looked forward to these last few miles for weeks. Somehow, turning that corner onto 174 is like seeing an old friend.
As the trees became salt marsh we rose up onto the great Dawhoo Bridge, which looks over the vast estuaries of The Ace Basin. The Ace Basin is in fact one of the largest undeveloped estuaries along the east coast, a river of grass and brackish waters. A great conduit for life on the southeast coast. A great refuge.
We push the BMW fast across the flatlands of Edisto Island. The wind blows Kathy’s hair around like a chaotic ballet dance.
The South Carolina sun and humidity were pressing down hard on the island, and we were hot, tired, and well-kissed by the sun. We had driven for two days and over one thousand miles with the top down, country air in our lungs. We talked and talked — and over those two days we got our shit square, our shit dealt with, hatched a plan for the next part of our lives, and really found something maybe we didn’t know was even lost or missing.
Best fucking ride ever.
Skeletons on Boneyard Beach
The BMW threw large plumes of dust into the air, coating the loblolly pine and cabbage palm of the island’s sub-jungle as we drove down the arrow-straight dirt road that cut across Edisto to the East. The day was hot, tipping into the lower nineties. The road cut through working fields upon entering The Botany Bay Plantation, formed in the 1930’s from the colonial-era Sea Cloud and Bleak Hall plantations. As Kath and I drove through its long roads lined with large old pines, I thought about the past. I thought about the skeletons that are buried here. This whole area is permeated with skeletons of the past. Shipwrecks, slave trade, war, my mother-in-law’s ashes — all here on Edisto Island. Then there are the trees, great giants succumbed to the sea. Root balls turned on end, cleaned bare by the ocean and wind. Like bones. Like giant skeletons.
I have a deep memory about bones. Several years ago my dad passed away. He had a wish to have his ashes scattered in several locations, which I facilitated. The first time I encountered the plastic bag full of ashes,I didn’t expect the bone fragments. Things you don’t expect.
Boneyard Beach, accessed through Botany Bay Plantation, is as wild a section of beach as you can get on many parts of the east coast. Its moods are determined only by the tides, the wind, the sun. A short walk on a cart path across tidal marsh — small crabs moving everywhere, seabirds wheeling over the Island — yields the textures of the subtropics: spikey and pinnate leaves, course sand, and fishbone clouds. I can smell the salt in the air, I can taste it. It tastes like oysters.
Years ago on another beach, Siesta Key, the universe spoke to me loudly. It was profound and life altering, and has led to my questioning of what our shared “reality” actually is. Kathy and I were enjoying the warm late April Gulf Coast of Florida, relaxing, drinking, swimming, blowing smoke rings. I was watching the columns of seabirds spiralling upwards into the sun like Icarus. I don’t remember what I was thinking about, but a voice kind of came to me, unlike a normal thought. It was imperative: “Your father will die this year.” Understandably, I was taken aback by this sudden communique. I was also immediately very emotional. My wife looked at me with a “what the fuck” look on her face as I explained myself. She also, understandably, was a bit skeptical, reminding me that, though my father had a host of chronic ailments, he was, in reality, in pretty damn good health. So we let it go.
Less than 5 months later he was gone. I had no way to know, yet I had. I’ll always have that connection to the Gulf Coast and my dad, but Kathy has a deeper connection to her mother, Janet, here on Edisto Island.
Kath’s family has been travelling from all corners of creation since the mid-eighties to spend a week in the balmy low country of South Carolina. This is no small affair — with four siblings and a dozen aunts and uncles, all with their own children and grandchildren, we literally take over the island. Condo units are filled, and beach houses too. It’s not just family either: a large posse of close friends come down for the madness also. For years Janet was the chief cat herder, planning beach outings, family dinners, and birthday parties. In many ways, her life revolved around that yearly trip. When Janet died of cancer a decade ago, it was no surprise that she would want her ashes here, at the place she loved more than any other.
I am so glad Kathy has a place like this to feel a proximity to her mother. A place away from real life, a special place, a remote place, a strip of empty beaches strewn with the waste and wreckage of a thousand storms rolling in off the Atlantic. There are few places like this, and fewer times to feel as connected.
Conversations with the dead
When I was a small child, more or less an infant, my folks were looking to buy a home. If I recall the story correctly, they were being asked to leave the house they had been renting in Newtown, Connecticut. They had looked at a few homes, and my mother went to view an older home on Main St. Most of these homes on Main were quite old, some being there since the Revolutionary War.
As the story goes, when my mother and I went inside the house, I immediately started wailing.
I had been fine outside, but was troubled by something inside the house. The realtor asked if she wanted to leave, but my mother declined, saying I’d likely be fine, but as they went further into the house my anxiety became more pronounced. My mother took me back outside, and once out of the door I stopped crying. Thinking things were better, she brought me back into the house, only to have the same thing occur. Something about that house had touched me deeply, and my mother took it to heart, bailing out of the viewing and consideration for the house at all.
The realtor later divulged that the home was known to be haunted.
Later, as a young child laying in bed at night before sleep, I would talk with my grandfather. This sounds normal, but he had died years before. I can remember having whole conversations with him. I never really knew him. Though he had been present after my birth, he passed away before my second birthday. Occasionally my mom or dad would poke their heads into my bedroom asking who I was talking to. “Grandpa,” I’d say. This went on for years, stopping around the time I went to school.
I often feel like I communicate with “something else” when I play music as well. I’ve been known to call it “dipping your ladle into the magic pool”. This is the birthplace of many songs, and much musical inspiration. When I play music, usually when improvising, I can sort of feel myself becoming quiet, a meditation of sorts. The deeper I go into this, and the quieter my mind becomes, the more easily the notes flow out of my fingers with no thought, no conception of where I’m going. I like music best like that, born of spirit and heart from the great connection between within and without.
The hypnotic effect of beaches can do this same thing to me. I’ve had plenty of other conversations with the universe on other wild beaches, but in those cases I didn’t speak with the dead, nor did the dead speak through me.
It was a rare moment during a week of madness that I found myself alone with Kathy on the main stretch of Edisto Beach. We brought our beach chairs down to the shoreline so our feet would be in the water. The sun bore down its early August weight on us. Sweat made its way to the sea. Cocktails went down easily. Soon another revelor joined us. Jenny was a close friend of Janet’s, more of an adopted child in many ways. The whole family considers her family, and she joins us in Edisto each year.
Kathy and Jenny have a unique connection: they were both with Janet as she passed away. Kathy had spent the whole summer in Pittsburgh at Mercy Hospital, by her mom’s side. She went through it all with Janet, and watched as the last breath of life left her body. Jenny was there too, very shortly after Janet passed. Jenny and Janet had known each other for years. The two had worked together at Mercy, and Jenny was a nurse in Janet’s unit while she was in the hospital. Jenny was there each day for Janet, making certain everything was done right. She was a light for Janet. Though there was a large gap in age between Janet and Jenny, the two were as close as any friends — or family — could be.
So there we were all together on Janet’s Beach. Jenny kept her chair up the beach a bit, I think realizing that Kath and I don’t often get any alone time. Or maybe she just somehow knew that we were in a process of reconnecting, rekindling. The universe does have a way of getting its point across if you can hear it.
So can the dead.
Now, I have my own sense of spirituality, my own “how shit works” philosophies. I am just a small insignificant part of the whole. That’s enough for me. I don’t practice religion, I don’t follow any great texts, I don’t twist voodoo dolls nor drip blood on chicken altars.
But I can talk to the dead.
The sun was hot, but small cells of rain showers were dancing up and down Edisto Beach, adding to the humidity. Our chairs slowly sank into the beach sand as the waves rolled lazily under us, occasionally crashing into our laps. Bliss, sheer bliss. Hypnotic. I suddenly felt a different . . . sensation . . . presence . . . I am not sure what to call it. But I immediately knew that I needed to do a favor for an old friend. I had to tell the girls each something — from Janet.
I turned to Kathy and told her I thought Janet just spoke to me, telling her “Your mom wants you to know that she is always around you, and that she knows what you did, what you went through.”
She just looked at me, and her lips got a little pursed as she struggled with her emotions. She was there, after all, when I suddenly knew my dad would pass. But that was not all she was thinking about. A few years earlier, a close friend of Kathy’s whose son had died at 21 went to a medium to try to communicate with him. What ended up happening was that Janet spoke to her. I’ll skip all the details — suffice to say it was truly odd, and happened in a way that the medium could not have guessed at. I had forgotten entirely about this, until Kath reminded me that those words that I said were that very same that Janet had “spoken” at the seance.
But it wasn’t done there — I had a message for Jenny, too. Those words I can’t recall at all, except that I said more to Jenny than Kath.
I also told her how hard it is for me to rationalize what happened, as I don’t really believe in talking to the dead — or do I? I, for one, won’t ever say for sure.
WJM
William J Mullen 