South Carolina, Oh Wandering Shore

Remember this: It is not as it once was.

I guess by now, the Great Flood of 2015, is slowly fading in South Carolina. Now there is news that water levels have not crested yet.

I have been reading reports the dams are failing. A lot of negative things are being said about the inconvenience of rain from the sky.

Are the dams really failing or is it that the capacity of the dam has been met? Excess is the problem overriding the volume. Not sure, I don’t work in dams.

It was odd to see. Flooding by the ocean and flooding in the upstate, but the area in between wasn’t that bad.

During those torrential rains, where I live the ground was mushy. In the low spots where the water would settle, or the low spot drainage ditches were overfilled, it was ankle deep. By the next day, when the rains final disappeared, the water was moved along. This might be because of all the holes dug for sand to be shipped out to other places.

I looked at Nature’s shenanigans in the Upstate. Not that we weren’t having a hard enough time with Church Shootings and non-state people calling us racists, baby stealers, and ignorant backwards people. Roads were cracked in half and bridges tested and failed. Caskets were coming out of the Earth, people were taking chances with their lives, evacuees were being robbed while away from home, and everyone wanted to point their anger at the Governor. The Governor couldn’t point her finger at the sky and say, “Now you stop that right now.” Give her a break, she has been busy trying to find us a job. Yet, this isn’t entirely new to us. Repeat after me, "Hurricane."

I just wrote about upland water being held back and it affecting the shoreline. I guess higher powers have decided water needs to be freed a little. I was wondering when we had a drought back in May and June, why some of that water wasn’t released onto the lower half of South Carolina. No one foresaw all this rain, and water was being held back, I assume. If the water was released that would have dropped the volume and garnered more room for rainfall. Everyone that lives here knows in August it starts to rain.

You can’t suck that excess water up and send it to other states because of the content containing invasive things, or carrying something you could pass off onto another state.

Of course, the powers that be could pull another town of Ferguson. There are places Upstate that are ghost towns flooded by water and turned into public scenic areas for locals and tourists.

I live in the Coastal Plains which extends from the Atlantic Ocean inland a distant from 120 to 150 miles to the Fall Line. It adjoins the Piedmont section of the state.  This area is 2/3 of the state. ± 30, 981 square miles and ±494 square miles of that is varying degrees of water. The Coastal Plains are drained by three rivers. The way in which water was to be drained was determined by pre-history but then man got involved and starting damming up the water, which had already plotted its natural course. This damming was to make land more available and control the water.

One must also consider the wandering seashore. The impermanent seashore is affected by the boundary between Coastal Plains and the Continental Shelf. Things that cause a seashore to wander are: Winds, tides, warping of the land, and fluctuations in the sea level.

When you think of land moving, we can skip back to August 31, 1886 when an earthquake happened in Charleston, South Carolina. The faultlines shifted, causing a lot of damage. There were 438 reports between 1754 and 1971; 402 were in the Charleston and Summerville areas; 36 formed a southeastern trend. Four shocks occurred in 1971 in the central part of Orangeburg County on three occasions. One report occurred in Seneca.

Where did my thinking of earthquakes come in on this?

I hiked on this one State Park near Orangeburg, South Carolina and you find volcanic pumice stone on top of the ground by the shoreline. I wish I could find the account I read about someone hypothesizing the presence of underground or submerged volcanic activity. Don’t quote me on that, but I read it somewhere. Not my monkey or my circus.

Here is where I take you by the hand and go back in time. Yes, back in time, once again. Crack, Crack, Pow! Black smoke pores from the time machine motor. I guess I have to get that updated with clean energy. Shame on me...

Enter the Sandhills and archaic oceans (20 million years ago).

There is a place called the Sandhills. The Sandhills State Park and Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge is ±35 miles away from the North and South Carolina Stateline.

The Sandhills was a portion of ancient beach dunes that divided the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain; a former coastline just thirty miles from the North and South Carolina state lines. The coastal plain is shaped by previous ocean levels rising and falling.

Is there any visual proof of a previous beach? There is plenty of geological research illustrating terracing on the Coastal Plains, digging up fossilized shells, etc.

One place I lived was fifty minutes from the beach. After my father would cut fire breaks in the woods behind the house to do equipment testing, you could walk along and find fossilized 12 inch whelk shells. I found a gigantic Knobbed Whelk shell just jutting out of the ground.

Ten minutes away from my present home, there is a coquina plant. Coquina is a sedimentary rock composed of shells of mollusks, trilobites, brachiopods, etc. Coquina is the Spanish word for “cockle” or “shellfish”. Coquina is dumped out and smoothed onto driveways because it has a cement quality. This place is ±50 miles away from dipping your foot in the ocean.

When you consider this coquina, it accumulates in high-energy marine and lacustrine environments where currents and waves do a good job of mixing the oceanic stew. These coquina beds could have been barrier bars, beaches, raised banks, and channels.

The question that is obvious is: how does coquina appear underground fifty miles from the shoreline? Why is there beach sand dunes ±139 miles away from the present shoreline?

When you live your life in a place without knowing prehistory, you forget to remember there is water under the ground, outside of the river, lakes, and creek systems. People are afraid of the water they can see with their eyes. Damming water up settles lots of water in one place, when that water is being filled by rainfall, even a glass will crest from the volume exceeding the amount it can hold.

There you have it. South Carolina, even looking at it from a residential aspect of land, is really just a gigantic shoreline well into the state’s interior waiting to happen...again. Most people do not know that. It is just the place they live, with its flooding, hurricanes, past earthquakes, and those terrible television southern drawls that even I have to change my voice to match.

There will be a lot of consideration to some engineering feats in South Carolina, or a better way of looking at the way we manage water in lieu of further potential rainfall in mass. 

If someone builds a house right on the shore, it should be expected that house could face some problem with flooding or being knocked down. If you live around a place where water is settled for a period of time with no consideration for breaching its carrying capacity, you should expect flooding. When you live in a place that use to be a gigantic beach, expect a lot of water at some time. 

It reminds me of Pompeii. People built a city by a volcano. The volcano eventually erupted. All was lost. 

Hopefully, all the South Carolinians suffering from this disaster will be surrounded by their state family. We have each other, Liberty or Death.

When you see a casket floating by you think to yourself, “You can’t keep a South Carolinian down.”

We Salute You.

Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore

The Breach

Remember this: Things don't change much, or so it appears.

My eyes were reading an outdoor educational plaque. The plaque read:

“the suffocating heat…was the most insufferable I ever felt, not a breath of air stirring-thick cobwebs to push thro’ everywhere, knee deep in rotten wood and dryed Leaves, every hundred yards a swamp with putrid standing water in the middle, full of small Alligators, a thick cloud of Musquitoes every where and no place entirely free from Rattle Snakes.

…spiders, their bodies as large as my coat Button…Crocodiles are very frequent and large in these places, we killed one nine feet long, which attacked a Soldier, it was with difficulty he got from him…nothing to eat and drink but salt Pork, bad rum and brackish water, no other bed than the Sand and no other covering than the Sky.”

British Surgeon Thompson Foster on Long Island (Isle of Palms)

During the American Revolution, British Troops were on the Northside, and the Americans and Catawba were on the south. The distance between these two warring forces was a mile wide body of water pouring into a marshland. A couple of piled up logs defended off gun fire. Imagine that. When you go by the description of the doctor, the area was a wild place full of treacherous conditions.

I looked out over The Breach. Even in 2015, the air is hot and steamy. There is hardly a breeze to be felt. Lingering to long makes you feel like your oxygen has disappeared. The water pulls you when the tide goes out like a sucking vortex. Care has to be taken because the shore will collapse and pull you into deadly waters, with strong currents, that are deceptive to the human eye.

There is only one patch of trees. If visions could be conjured up of a coastal forest stretching for miles with this particular tree, it must have been fantastic. Now there are mansion-types and beach houses littering the shoreline. This is an image of all that is left in the way of trees at this one location.

The longer you stood the more you felt like you were being pulled into something; something a little threatening. You get the feeling of a person being swept away, just standing there, on the shore.

This is an odd feeling. A wide shoreline, bland and bare, with nothing more than the view further out of shorebirds holding court on some mirage-like sandbar out where the mouth of the Breach and the ocean meet, stretches before you. Dried dead grass litters the areas near the smaller plants on higher ground. This doesn’t seem to illustrate the amount seen back during the American Revolution. You could go through The Breach where it feeds into the marshes where grasses abound.

Rattlesnakes and crocodiles are rare to see. Sometimes a noted shark may appear in The Breach to feed.

I went along the shore to the small jetty. The jetty is as wide as a truck. Oyster shells litter the black rocks jutting out of the sand. When I read accounts of pre-history during the Spanish exploration, oyster beds were in great number on the coasts. Now, it could go in the back of a mid-size truck, if that.

An oyster is a bivalve living between two shells. It has the heroic capacity to help build reefs that lend to the human problem of dealing with waves and currents during disasters. When you think of sediment deposits lending to building barrier islands in coastal regions, this little oyster helps the submerged aquatic vegetation to deposit sediment that stabilizes the area and maintains the conditions to help food sources grow.

You don’t see large oyster beds. We see things all the time and are told this is normal, but compared to past reports, it really isn’t a stone in a bucket of water.

Oyster die off helps form the foundations for reef systems, and this die-off forms the substrate for living oysters to carry on their work through layering. Oysters filter the water and reduce turbidity by extracting phytoplankton, organic and inorganic particles. By doing this work, the oysters provide water clarity. Water clarity promotes the growth of aquatic vegetation that is submerged. Submerged aquatic vegetation feeds transient, local populations of creatures. The oyster, by building on itself, fixes a stationary substrate for other organisms such as sea anemones, barnacles etc. The oyster is as busy as the bee.

All these little shell-covered creatures work together, even if not willingly, toward the overall health of the filtration capacity of the reef.

People could learn from an oyster. 

Back to the Poe-like, creepy loneliness.

Isolation is the feeling The Breach slowly injects you with; that barren sense of a disappearing event horizon between ocean and land.

Edgar Allan Poe was stationed at Fort Moultrie between November 1827 to December 1828 when he was 19 years old. This is what he had to say about the Sullivan's Island (which is on the south side of The Breach):

“The island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than the sea sand and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter mile. It is separated from the mainland by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands and where are some miserable frame buildings, tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and fever, may be found the bristly palmetto; but the whole island, with the exception of this western point and a land of hard, white beach on the seacoast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of sweet myrtle….”

I did not see sweet myrtle or the bristly palmetto. Yet Poe reports the plants were there. Come to think of it, the Sabal palmetto tree is on the South Carolina flag, yet one hardly ever sees it. I think it moved to Florida?

There are a lot of mysterious stories about this place.

I was playing in tidal pools, looking at the shells inhabited by tiny sentient beings, slowly moving in the water. I found a small impression in the sand, filled with about a cupful of water. With no wind, there was a substance floating on top of the ocean water and the substance moved about like a compass needle.

Warning signs abound, “Don’t go in the water.”

When I arrived back home, I felt drained. There is something there, and it pulls on you, seductively.

Written by: Angelia Y Larrimore