Pugilists in Pluffmud
June 1, 2000• (0) Comments
In those days, if you braved quicksand, feral boars and rattlesnakes and arrived at Fripp Island’s westernmost edge, you would be rewarded with privacy, quiet fishing and the best sunsets north of Harbor Town. For ten long summers, I clung to that dock as my fortress of solitude and learned to live in rhythm with its tides.
On Fripp Island South Carolina, where I spent the best part of my boyhood and adolescence, there is a small dock on the island’s westernmost promontory that stands above a tidal estuary known as Old House Creek. A decade ago, this dock was rebuilt to accommodate the aesthetic preferences of a bustling real estate trade, but in the mid-60’s, it reflected that haphazard manner of construction familiar to watermen up and down the Carolina coast. That is to say, its pilings were hewn from the rough trunks of palmetto trees that were set into the alluvial mud of the creek bed amid oyster rakes and wading birds, then framed out in railroad cross-ties. True to the style, this structure was planked in a millrun of ancient cypress and daubed with creosote that, when heated under the bright lowcountry sun, spread to impart a rich mahogany stain. Atop each palmetto piling—installed inverted with the skinny-end down—a cap of galvanized tin was fastened as a kind of barrier against rot. These made comfortable stools from which to fish on all but the hottest days. By long custom, handrails were assumed superfluous, but mooring cleats sufficient to secure a fully laden shrimp boat in a gale were not, and it was likely that more than one trawler captain penciled the place into his charts. Where the dock joined the shore, its builders furnished a narrow apron of crushed oyster shells to stabilize the bank and buffer the structure from brushfires, but in all other respects they left it to weather the years untended. And until the site was selected for a small-boat marina and commercial hub, untended it was.