Song of the South

Ambrose Shitesworth, guest writer

I have returned from an all-too-brief journey to a place that meets all my gentle-manly needs. That place is S p r i n g_I s l a n d, South Carolina. Forgive the odd character spacing. It is a means of keeping co-workers from stumbling upon this blog, should they search for the name of my destination on the InterWeb.

I shared a rental house with my bride, her father & step-mother, her brother, and her brother's new lady-friend. We engaged in all manner of recreations: bicycling, horse-back riding, kayaking, target shooting, motor-boating, and of course eating, drinking, and conversing. It was everything a gentle-man such as myself seeks in a week-end retreat.

We arrived Thursday evening in the late daylight hours. After un-packing our belongings (sadly, an impoverished gentle-man such as myself must perform his own porterage), darkness set in, and no ordinary, city-fied darkness. It was a darkness that yielded it impossible to walk without aid of torch or lantern and not meander off the auto-mobile path or blunder into a tree trunk. While the absence of light pollution is certainly a refreshing change from the harsh orange-tinted lights of the city streets, the one major design flaw was the island's failure to reflectorize their low-mounted street signs. My in-laws called the house (as our cellular tele-phones had aenemic reception) to inform us that they could not find our street. Fortunately, I had packed not only a bright torch but also a reflective safety jacket, purchased for last year's Hallow-e'en fancy dress. These tools proved invaluable in guiding them from the main thoroughfare to our dirt road.

On Friday, after breakfast, my bride and I set out on a bicycle jaunt, covering great distances around the island and requiring a shower and change of clothes afterward. My step-mother-in-law prepared a fresh-baked turkey breast for the purpose of making sandwiches for lunch. We set out on yet another jaunt in the after-noon, then joined the in-laws on a drive to view the ruins of the plantation house. We engaged in pleasant conversation while waiting for supper to be prepared, which was a fabulous boiled feast of shrimp, sausage, potatoes, red peppers, and onions. My brother-in-law and his lady-friend finally arrived at half after eleven that night, at which time I repeated the task of showing the way with torch and reflective jacket.

On Saturday, after breakfast, my bride, her step-mother, and I bicycled to the nearby club-house, where we rented kayaks. I will interject here that kayak and bicycle rentals were all free of charge to residents and their guests, thereby preventing a gentle-man such as myself from having to trifle with currency or other means of payment. My bride and I piloted a two-person kayak, which proved difficult since neither of us had any kayaking experience. We left the step-mother behind so that she could soak in some sun (horrors! Why ruin an aristocratic pallor with the leathern swarthiness of a field-labourer?) and bicycled back to our house. My father-in-law and I attempted to go shooting, but the oafs who had reserved the time-slot before ours showed up an hour late, causing us to have to re-schedule for the next day. The family partook of a relaxing motor-boat excursion around the island's surrounding waters, then took tea and biscuits in the club-house. Supper consisted of thick T-bone steaks, baked potatoes, grilled asparagus, and marvelous green salad. We sat outside after dark by a fire and engaged in lively conversation, encouraged by all manner of spirituous beverages.

On Sunday, my bride, brother-in-law, his lady-friend, and I went on a pleasant horse-back riding jaunt, accompanied by a guide. We trotted through the island's nature preserve, seeing lush vegetation and wide open marsh-lands. At two o'clock my father-in-law and I went shooting. It had been many years since my last experience with sporting clays, so it took some time to regain my aim and stance. My shoulder was left reddened and sore from the unfamiliar recoil of the shot-gun. We finally departed at four, and arrived at home at half after ten, after a nerve-rattling drive through pitch-black back roads. Few experiences are more unnerving than listening to the opening theme from The General's Daughter while driving down S.C. Hwy. 452 at sundown.

The island is an ideal environment for gentle-manly living. Thanks to tight security and a private police force that keeps out non-residents and uninvited persons, doors are left unlocked with no fear of crime at the calloused hands of peasants. Bicycling is a pleasurable means of transportation instead of a terrifying ordeal as it is in any city burdened with automobile traffic. Motorists are courteous, as all know one another and would not wish to be seen displaying un-gentle-manly motoring behaviour. The roads are shaded by live oaks festooned with Spanish moss and the air is perfumed by magnolia blossoms. Picturesque ruins of a plantation house stand at the end of an avenue of oaks, as a poignant reminder of a slower-paced, more gracious way of life now vanished.

At this point in this post, many readers may find their panties in a knot, quick to wag their fingers and set out on a diatribe about the horrors of slavery and the evils of the plantation system. But have you not yet recognized that I have rose-coloured lenses permanently implanted? I ask only for license to drift into a reverie of a time when Southern gentle-men would swelter on the veranda in their linen suits, fanning themselves with large straw hats, imbibing mint juleps and gin & tonic, and chatting amongst themselves about matters of commerce and politics while the usual noises of a plantation in full operation would murmur in the background.

We can't deny, with the benefit of hindsight, that this method of agriculture and commerce would have faded away with or without a war. The farm machinery that would come along in the latter half of the 19th century would have rendered slaves cost-ineffective and obsolete. What we'll never really know for sure, and can only speculate upon, is what would have happened to the entire course of history of the South and the United States, had a blood-soaked war not ravaged the Southern states. Would the lives of ordinary people have been better? Worse? Would we have suffered two world wars and a great economic depression in the century to follow? Would blacks have received basic recognition as humans with fundamental rights to life, liberty, and property sooner, later, or not at all? These are the questions that pervade my thoughts whenever I visit antebellum properties. There's a dignified sadness to the remains of the Old South, like visiting the grave of a murder victim, wondering what could have been had she not been violently cut down.

Back to my fantasies about the life of the Southern gentle-man, my week-end of eating lotuses further reinforces my conviction that I am not meant to toil in a gray little cubicle 40 hours per week. Nor are my friends, who are thinkers and creators, not drones buzzing about a hive. We are the ones who deserve the leisure time to think, write, read, explore, travel, create, recreate, and pontificate, without sacrificing precious, irreplaceable hours of our lives in exchange for a pittance that barely covers the expenses necessary for a comfortable lifestyle. I was designed by nature to be a gentle-man who explores the world's places and absorbs the world's knowledge while all my basic needs are already met; but by unfortunate accident of birth, I was cast into a middle-class up-bringing, doomed to eke out a living in a soul-sucking office, surrounded by the constant hum of laser printers and the idle chatter of co-workers. With each passing week, I grow more and more weary of the day-to-day struggle for survival. It may not be a life-or-death struggle foraging for food, but it is nonetheless an environment wherein, if the work I produce is not pleasing to The Boss, my source of Federal Reserve credits which can magically be exchanged for goods and services will be cut off.

I feel as though Maslow's pyramid has been turned upside-down in my case. I already know what I want to do with my life, which is to live comfortably, observe the world around me, and partake of its simple pleasures without dirtying my hands with mindless toil. I simply lack the means necessary to sustain such a lifestyle. So, while I am already self-actualized in a way, I don't have what I need to make it a reality. While I bide my time, waiting for some sort of windfall, I turn to dreams, flights of fancy, and little week-end getaways to maintain my sanity and get me from one week-end to the next.