Harrell: The river was our highway

Annelore Harrell
Annelore Harrell

The sandbars have shifted just enough to be aggravating, oyster beds are given a lot more attention, the shrimp have been shrimped, the crab have been crabbed and it's the rare flounder that can be found on a moonless night spent gigging.

Other than that, the May River is almost the same as it was years ago.

The land around it is not. And that's a good thing. Sometimes.

The other day, I wandered down to Calhoun Street where it dead ends at the May, where there has been a public landing since before Bluffton was Bluffton.

In those summer days of the 1940s when I came up the May River to Bluffton there was a public dock, a sorry mess of barnacle-covered pilings and rickety boards. Functional. If you were an artist, you might call it picturesque.

Standing on the bluff now and looking across to Myrtle Island, it's hard to believe that I once rowed all the way from there to here.

Mostly, we had a 3-horse-powered Johnson that pushed our heavy wooden bateau slowly but surely against the tide that could run hard as it emptied into Calibogue Sound.

It's been a long time since I've seen an outboard motor that small, much less a bateau.

From the time we were old enough to handle a pair of oars, we spent a lot of time out on the river. For us teenagers without a car to get around in, we went by boat.

The river was our highway. You knew every boat, who it belonged to and where it came from. There were no two alike, a lot of grey bateaux, but mine had a blue stripe.

Lane Whitman, whose family bought Potato Island from Father Peeples, had the first aluminum boat. We weren't sure if we liked it or not, even though it was light and easy to push off a sandbar when the tide went out and left you sitting high and dry.

Going to Bluffton by boat or any other way meant going to Calhoun Street because that was pretty much all there was if you wanted to buy anything.

That's where the post office was, the south half of a small wooden building, only one room wide, that sat at an angle on the corner of Calhoun and Bridge streets. We'd ask the postmistress, she wasn't the friendliness of women, if we had any mail. General Delivery. It was always a surprise if we did, but once in a while, friends in Savannah, all of 30 miles away, would write.

Postcards were a penny, stamps 3 cents to mail a letter unless you wanted to send it airmail. That was expensive, 15 cents.

On the other side of the building was a filling station with two pumps out front, orange gas in one and purple in the other. There was no concrete apron, just hard dirt.

Topsy and Eva Evans' mama had a gift shop catty-cornered across the street, where the Montessori school is now. She called it the Libo and sold things like bath powder with big fluffy puffs and lotions like Aquamarine by Revlon that smelled citrusy and cool.

She had beautiful boxes of stationary that made wonderful birthday presents and she had cards, too, if you needed one.

Right inside the front door was a tall metal rack that was a bit tippy and squeaked when you turned it to see all the picture postcards in the slots. A nickel got you a card, but then you would have to put a penny postage stamp on it before it went in the mail.

There weren't any sidewalks, so we had to walk in the street or alongside where it was an indifferent combination of dirt and weeds. Calhoun Street from the dock to Bridge Street was crushed oyster shell that blinded you in the sunlight but stayed fairly cool even on the hottest of summer days.

It was the asphalt pavement, the tar, that got really, really hot, and you had to run like mad if you forgot your shoes and were barefoot and had to cross a street.

We'd get a banana popsicle at Planters' Mercantile from Mr. Goodman. He didn't use a modern adding machine. I never saw him even use the abacus he kept on the counter. He could add the longest stream of numbers in his head. Whether he was right or not, I don't think many people argued with him.

Funny books and magazines were on shelves next to the front door and he kept an eagle eye out that we didn't “sample.” But then, there always seemed to be a few children who would sit on the floor out of sight and happily read away.

I can't remember the last time I had a popsicle or read a funny book and the Planters' Mercantile is now a shop for hand-painted furniture.

The little stores where we bought sugar cookies and penny candy are gift shops.

Art galleries and restaurants and clothing boutiques are everywhere.

There are sidewalks and streetlights.

It boggles the mind.

I sat in my Volvo  in front of the Church of the Cross with its pristine lawn overlooking the May River and the Bay of Bluffton, where young folks dressed in their prom finery have their picture taken and neighbors come to watch the sunset and bridal couples exchange wedding vows and dear ones visit the church's columbarium so lovingly tended, and I remembered how once this church yard had been bare, a scattering of grass, gray sand so soft you couldn't walk across without it filling your shoes and there were cockleburs that stuck to your Sunday dress and drew blood from your fingers when you pulled them off.

Across the street, the town of Bluffton and Beaufort County along with the Rural and Critical Land Preservation Program have purchased Mary Wright's house and now her front yard on the May River is a public park landscaped with pathways and benches for all to enjoy, to sit and visit.

Already, there are “Thou Shalt Not” signs posted, parking places laid out neatly, none of the scooch-your-car-in-the-corner sort of thing anymore.

There is a new dock there on the end of Calhoun Street, in front of Mary's house and the church, big, sturdy, impressive, designed for all things nautical from kayaks to yachts.

Annie Mae Mulligan told me how there used to be a pavilion on the dock and they had dances on the weekends in the summertime.

We don't do that anymore. Dancing, that is; at least nothing that seems civilized.

A shame.

We used to dance at Bailey's Pavilion on the Okatie.

But that's another story.

Annelore Harrell lives in Bluffton and can be reached at anneloreh@aol.com.