In the Down Low

Jan. 14-17

We are well into the low country, and it’s beautiful.

The drive south from Santee on Monday took maybe two hours and a half. 

Hilton Head Island is a little more than 20 miles from exit 8 on I-95 in South Carolina. We arrived before one with no difficulty.

Pat and Bob waiting for us, and we shared a light lunch.

We took it easy in the afternoon and later Bob made a chicken casserole for dinner. Cheese, gravy and mushrooms, mashed potatoes on the side, a couple of glasses of a California red. This was good stuff.

Bob wanted to watch the basketball game, Syracuse (his home team) vs. Duke, which is top-ranked. Syracuse must have known Bob had put on his orange school jersey to watch, because they won in overtime with a 95-91 upset.

First stop on Tuesday was called Greenery. A short run down the highway 278, it’s a combination plant nursery, antiques dealer, and knick-knack store. Joanna wanted to buy cotton stalks to put in a vase by a window in her house. 

They were sold out and gave us directions to another store where Joanna might have better luck.

Greenery has two old wood-frame buildings. The principal one had an unusual, but somehow familiar interior. the center of the main room was open to the roof beam. It was surrounded by a plank balcony.

Was this a redesigned stable or small barn? Why was there a bumpout with a window at one end of the big room?

I asked the lady at the register. It is an old church. The company bought it years ago for $600 and had it transported by barge and then carried to its present foundation.

Pat had tried to to take Joanna there on Monday, but couldn’t get past the firetruck blocking the driveway. A parked car had lost its brakes and rolled into the bushes by the building next door.

As far as we could learn, no one was injured, but even so, there were cops and emergency vehicles all over the place.

Next stop was Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park. It’s a local park on the site one of the earliest American towns built and run by emancipated slaves. 

The town was named for Ormsby Mitchel, the Union officer in charge of the Department of the South, the Rebel territory occupied by the U.S. Army.

The park sits under sprawling live oaks and palmettos, drooped with Spanish moss, next to a vast salt marsh at the mouth of a stream with the folksy name Fish Haul Creek.

The entire low country here is spooky because of those trees and that moss like a torn veil. Mitchelville’s history makes it spookier.

Early in 1862, months before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, Mitchel on his own hook declared all the slaves free in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, the area where he had jurisdiction.

Mitchelville became an experiment in the self-sufficiency of the former slaves. 

There are replicas of the small wood-frame houses that families occupied and of a church that would have been a focal point for the community. This would have been a foundation for the Gullah culture that has thrived here.

There is also a bench provided by the writer Toni Morrison where visitors are invited to sit and think about the history of the place and the people. 

From Mitchelville, we left the island to visit the old town in Bluffton, a few miles away. 

This is a living town of bungalows and big houses with galleries. Like most places here, it’s framed by trees festooned in moss.

At the Red Piano art gallery, we met the owner, Ben Whiteside, who is the Southeast representative of Stephen Scott Young, a painter who divides his time between Florida and the Bahamas.

Much of the work on display is museum quality. Young’s work is realistic. Much of what we saw were portraits, frequently of people standing in front of tropical walls, doors, or windows. 

The subjects are rendered in extreme, photographic detail, which gives the works a dreamlike feel. They often portray youngsters in front of aged backgrounds—the paint peeling from the wood, a crack in the stucco.

Their youth contrasts with the signs of age. Their dark skin contrasts with the pastel and white of the buildings and the clothes. 

We stopped for lunch at a bar behind the gallery. The hit was an IPA from River Dog, a local brewer. It was fragrant and tangy, a strong and unusual flavor. 

We got to the Coastal Discovery Museum about 10 minutes before closing. 

A temporary exhibit consists of artwork, mainly paintings and also some sculpture, by various members of a locally based family named Palmer. I only had time for a fast walk-through.

The museum also has natural history exhibits, including a sea turtle skeleton.

Dinner was at a southern comfort food place called Annie O’s Kitchen, where they served a number of low-country standards. 

One of those is shrimp and grits. I’ve had it before, flavored with Old Bay and celery seed. That wasn’t bad, but this was completely different and much better, made with bacon in the gravy and, as far as I could tell, no Old Bay.

Joanna had fried chicken with mashed sweet potato.

Damn Yankee is another local ale. Made by Southern Barrel Brewing Co. in Bluffton, it’s billed as a New England style IPA. It has a mild fragrance and OK bitterness, but not as much character as River Dog.

I also asked for an IPA from Westbrook Brewing in Mt. Pleasant, S.C. The brews at Annie O’s are served in a can. I didn’t notice the label on the can. I just poured the brew into a glass.

This one had some citrusy aroma, but at first sip almost no flavor. I looked at the can. It was another Westbrook brew called White Thai. They served me the wrong beer from the same brewer. It was a witbier, way too light for me.

Wednesday Bob and Pat drove us to Beaufort (Americanized to “Byoo-fert”), which is in the neighborhood of Parris Island, the U.S. Marine Corps boot camp. 

We decided to take the carriage ride through town. The driver and narrator, Kathy, was full of information.

The carriage horse, Angus, was, as she put it, unflappable. That is until we passed a carpenter working with a table saw. There was something about the whine that made the horse want to go the other way, but Kathy got him past it and he settled back into an easy stride.

The metal canopy of the carriage would scrape from time to time would scrape against the low-hanging branches of the live oaks and the Spanish moss.

This is a very colorful area. It’s lush country and yields plenty of food.

The Indians lived here for thousands of years, but so far we’ve come across no traces left of their culture. The Indian cultures that lived here didn’t build permanent structures like those in the Southwest, Mexico, or central America. If there were mound-builders, we haven’t crossed their path in the Carolinas.

The Spanish were here. Then the French. The Spanish came back and for a while Beaufort, under the name Santa Elena, was the capital of Spanish Florida. 

The English eventually took over until the American Revolution. The Carolinas are named for Charles I, the king that Oliver Cromwell executed.

During the Civil War the Union forces occupied the area. The white population, knowing they could be charged with treason for supporting the Rebellion, evacuated, leaving a population of thousands of slaves with no masters. 

One of them was Robert Smalls, who had been trained as a boat pilot. He worked on a Confederate tender that supplied the forts protecting Charleston.

He was very good at his job, to the point that his obedience was taken for granted. 

Get this: The officers and crew left him in full charge of the ship one night when they went into town to party. Smalls was ready.

He put on the captain’s uniform and collected his family and several other slaves. He knew the signals so there was no trouble getting past the forts. He put up a white bedsheet as a flag and surrendered the ship and its cargo of artillery to the Union forces.

He received a bounty from the U.S. government and a commission in the Navy. He commanded the ex-Confederate tender for the rest of the war. He later served in the state legislature after the war.

He later bought his former owner’s house. After his former owner died and left an ailing wife, Smalls took her into his home. 

Kathy said she had come up through the South Carolina school system and had never heard of Smalls until she was an adult. His name had been written out of the state’s official narrative of history.

Beaufort before the Civil War was a party town for rich planters of the region. They built mansions with galleries and ballrooms.

Many were lost in a catastrophic fire in 1907, but at least as many originals are still standing. A few replicas have been built, and at least to my untrained eye, they are indistinguishable from the authentic. Tin roofs, clapboards, brick, stucco, all blend in.

That’s required in the old town by the municipal building codes. One house has a pleasant, but modern blue coat of paint. The owner had to get a waiver from the town to do that.

Bob drove us out of town to a restaurant called Gullah Grub, but we found it closed. Across the highway was an art gallery, Red Piano Too, apparently related to the gallery in Bluffton. It specializes in Gullah art, painting, carving, and handiwork developed by the descendants of freed slaves along the southern coast. 

We went back to Beaufort to Plum’s, where Joanna had an oyster po’ boy and I had oysters and grits, which for me is even better than shrimp.

I finally got to try the Westbrook IPA. I picked up six cans at the Publix supermarket and drank a few while we watched HBO back at Pat and Bob’s apartment.

Thursday morning we went to Plantation Cafe for breakfast. I was pretty well filled up with grits, so I opted for eggs Beauregard.

This is the cafe’s southern take on eggs Benedict. It keeps the poached egg, but subs a biscuit for the English muffin, sausage patty for the Canadian bacon, and sausage gravy for the Hollandaise. It was delicious, no surprise.

How can you go wrong with biscuits and gravy?

That almost brings me up to date. We got to Savannah yesterday, but that is part of another story.

Be well, all, and may the grit in your life be fine.

Harry

Winter Dodge

January 11-13, 2019

We started an evasive action on Friday. 

Just like the fiddle-playing Devil, we’re going down to Georgia. Then we’ll turn right and stay south of winter as long as we’re able. We expect to be in Arizona sometime in February.

I’ll be happy never to see snow again.

So far we’ve stayed well ahead of a southerly blizzard. South Virginia had a forecast of 6 or 8 inches of snow. I wouldn’t know how much fell there, because we were already in North Carolina and heading due south through rain.

We’ve been pushing it a bit. We left Friday afternoon and reached Dover, Delaware, before dark, because I was unfamiliar with the area and needed to find the Comfort Inn. 

The route involved a couple of turns and then a search for the place. I wanted to do that in daylight. 

Good thing, too. It wasn’t easy to find. The marking of the side streets is exceptionally discreet. 

I was following Google Maps directions and knew I had missed the place. So I turned around. I was pretty sure that we’d passed it again going back and turned into a side road where I could phone the place to ask for help.

By dumb luck, I had turned into Leipsic Road, the one we were looking for.

The stop in Dover put us close to McGlynns Pub, apparently one of a regional chain of decent restaurants.

They put us at a table that looked out on the lake next door. the traffic lights left streaks of red, yellow and green on the water. It was like Van Gogh with cars.

Joanna had jambalaya, which came with tasty dirty rice. I opted for beef stew. Both were terrific. 

I started with a pale ale called Taylors Grog, made exclusively for McGlynns by Mispillion in Milton, Delaware, which is also the home of one of my favorite brewers, Dogfish Head. 

I also had an India pale ale, whose name I have forgotten, that was stronger and served in a 12-ounce chalice.

It was good, but I went back to the grog after that. 

Joanna has never crossed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I’ve done it only once. So we were taking the Delmarva Peninsula route, mostly U.S. 13 south. It’s out of the way and slow going, but the spectacle of that crossing is worth the detour. 

We crossed from Delaware to Maryland without much to see, and then came to Virginia. Across the highway from the “Welcome to Virginia” sign is another, much bigger sign in front of a gas station declaring, “Dixieland. The South starts here.”

Maryland was a slave state too, but didn’t secede from the Union. So maybe that disqualifies them.

And in case that Jim Crow monument isn’t clear enough, there is also a scaled-down replica of the CSS Virginia next to the parking lot. 

It was the Rebels’ ironclad ship that in the north we call the Merrimac.

That was the ship’s name before it was captured and reconfigured with iron armor by the Confederates. Later the Union came up with an unseaworthy rival called the Monitor.

The two ships fought each other with no effect at Hampton Roads. The cannons couldn’t damage either ship, so the duel ended in a draw.

The Monitor was later being towed to the Carolinas when it was swamped and sank in a storm around Cape Hatteras. 

The only problem with Saturday’s travel was that I had underestimated the time it would take. It’s about seven hours of solid driving from Dover to Weldon, N.C., our next stop.

So we bypassed a number of signs for parks and historic towns that we might otherwise have detoured to see.

A return to the peninsula is on the list.

The official website describes the bay crossing as a 20-mile-long trestle bridge. 

The bridge starts with a high arc that lets ships pass. Then it levels out to a height that may clear some fishing boats. That’s the trestle part, I guess.

After a while, you descend into a tunnel. When we were crossing, a freighter in the distance was making for the gap where the tunnel ran under the bay.

You come up for daylight some distance away and travel a while more before you drive down into a second tunnel much like the first.

When you come out of that one, you’re getting close to Virginia Beach.

It’s a fun ride, on a par with the bridge from Hong Kong to Macau. Apparently not as long, but long enough to be satisfying. Especially if you like bridges.

Knowing that we had a long leg ahead of us, we left Dover early enough that we got to Weldon around 5 or so. We checked in and then drove across the highway to Ralph’s for some fried chicken and barbecue.

I’ve written about Ralph’s before. It’s the best BBQ shop I know. This is North Carolina pork barbecue, done with vinegar, not as sweet as the red barbecue.

Ralph’s also has Brunswick stew, a thick soup made with chicken, yellow corn, potato, onion, and other savory ingredients. There were no black-eyed peas to be had, alas, but they did have collard greens, so I was set. 

Joanna opted for chicken, possibly the best she has had anywhere, she tells me. One of her sides was green beans. They were tasty too, done my favorite way, cooked to death.

No beer here, so I had lemonade for the first time in as long as I can remember, years maybe.

Day three, Sunday, was a four-hour drive to Santee, S.C.

Everything south of Weldon was new country to Joanna.

She had never seen South of the Border. Hadn’t even heard of it. Wow, was she in for a treat.

It’s billed as a weird place, and it certainly is. After all, the billboards say “Pedro no shoots ze bool.”

It’s just inside South Carolina as you go south. The first thing you see as you approach the state line on I-95 is a tower with a yellow sombrero on top of it. 

I learned that it isn’t a parachute drop, but an observation tower. I don’t know what there is to observe in this part of the Carolinas, but then, I haven’t been up there, so I can’t judge.

South of the Border is like Wall Drug on steroids. It sprawls on both sides of U.S 501, just off Interstate 95.

We stopped in the Mexico Shop to pick up a couple of t-shirts that we’ll take to Joanna’s grandkids in Phoenix. We walked through Hats of the World. We skipped the restaurants and the reptile lagoon.

We stopped at Waffle House for some breakfast food before we merged back on the Interstate.

About 95 miles later, we were at Comfort Inn in Santee. 

A billboard said that Clark’s was a historic restaurant. Google told me that it was around the corner from the hotel. 

We could walk.

As we neared the place, Joanna noticed that the sign said it was established in 1946. That’s the year I was born.

We’re walking, she said. If they ask us where we’re from and we say New Jersey, they’ll ask how long did it take you to walk here. We can say since 1946.

We shared a plate of fried oysters. I was still feeling the effects of the grits and eggs at Waffle House, so I opted for shrimp cocktail instead of a full meal.

The heat from the cocktail sauce, which came with both the oysters and the shrimp, was exquisite.

Joanna had prime rib. I helped her with it, especially the parts that were too red for her taste.

On the way into the dining room we passed a small tray displaying samples (maybe inedible replicas) of desserts. One was pecan pie. 

I had to have that. And so we shared a piece of it.

I started with a Canyon Road Pinot Noir. I’ve had that before. It’s one of the wines that I drink at Houlihan’s, a chain restaurant near La Quinta in Fairfield, where I frequently stay when I’m in New Jersey.

To go with the shrimp, I changed to a Chardonnay from a label called La Torre. Then for dessert, I followed up with another familiar red, Canyon Road Merlot.

Tomorrow we go to Hilton Head to see Joanna’s friend Pat and her husband, Bob.

Be well, everyone, stay warm.

Harry

Days at the Museums

December 5-7, 2018

We had a date to meet Greg and Eugenia at the entrance to the Hong Kong History Museum on Thursday morning. 

We knew the museum was across Chatham Road from Rosary Church, but didn’t know where the entrance was. Or if the museum had more than one.

It’s a good thing that we did, because it can be pretty confusing.

We crossed Chatham by using an overpass at Granville Road. We rode up an escalator and found ourselves in a gentle maze of walkways, ramps, stairs, and more escalators.

We saw a small tour group forming up on the plaza below us. We went down a helical ramp and saw they were standing outside a recess with double doors. 

It didn’t look very main, but it was an entrance. It turned out to be the handicapped access to the building. 

We rode up a long escalator to another plaza on higher ground and saw that it wasn’t only the wrong entrance, but also the wrong building. It was a way to enter the science museum. 

The history museum was across this upper plaza. We went into the museum lobby and looked over a display celebrating Ying Wa College. 

It was founded in Malacca 200 years ago by Rev. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant minister to China. It was originally called the Anglo-Chinese College, and its main purpose was to train Chinese preachers. “Ying Wa” is Cantonese for “English Chinese.”

In the 1840s, after the Brits won the Opium War and took over Hong Kong, the London Missionary Society, which funded the school, decided to move it the new Brit colony.

We didn’t go into the museum itself because we were coming back the next day. So we went to the neighboring science museum instead.

The place was full of kids. We went up the escalator, which took us through a huge pinball machine. On either side of us and overhead was an elaborate track of ups and downs and turnarounds that looked big enough to handle bowling balls. It was at least three stories high.

But alas, it was not operating. I’m not sure if it was still under construction or closed for repair. It would have been a spectacle to see it run.

A new exhibit displaying a scroll with a map of the Silk Road also was closed, due for its debut in a few days. 

The second floor was terrific, full of logic puzzles and quizzes on nutrition. An interactive display asked which part of a pig was used in various products. You had to push buttons till you got the right one.

Hooves in glue and hair for bristles were easy. It got tougher with paint and cosmetics. I don’t even remember the right answers for those categories.

My favorite puzzle was a pair of wood blocks that fit together to make an X. Metal pins inside would slide into place to hold them together. 

Your challenge was to separate them.

Turning the piece one way to slide the pin out caused another pin from the other side to take its place. This happened no matter which way I turned the puzzle.

I had to look at the solution: Spin it. I tried a couple of times with no luck. Then it hit me that I needed to be more vigorous. 

I gave it a spin that lasted a couple of full turns. Centrifugal force moved all the pins out of the way.

There was a model of a ship from the 15th century, Zheng He’s Treasure Ship. It is built according to descriptions from the time, because the plans for the original ship have been lost.

This was part of a fleet of huge ships that traveled with trade goods, including Chinese porcelains, to the east coast of Africa and into the Red Sea to Arabia. 

This was several decades before Vasco da Gama made it to India from the opposite direction. 

We had a dinner engagement with Ron and Mei and several other of Joanna’s friends from the old neighborhood at the Golden Palace in the iSquare Building, where we met them a few weeks ago.

This time there were more people. 

We had a little bit of just about anything that walks, swims, crawls, or grows in the ground, including grilled abalone served chilled, sliced pork also chilled, shark fin soup (made probably not with real shark fin, which is discouraged), steamed grouper, roast chicken. There may have been some goose and duck in the mix too.

When a dozen people sit at the table, everyone gets to try a little of everything. It all adds up, though, and by the time the chicken came, I was full. 

I managed a piece of it. The skin was magnificent, both crisp and dark brown.

The conversation was lively. I could tell by people’s reactions. Most of it was in Cantonese, so I could only pick up a word or two now and then, and had no idea what was going on.

Every once in a while someone would break into English for my sake. 

The restaurant is on the 26th floor with huge windows overlooking Victoria Harbor. John, who was our guide in Tai Hang Sai, was sitting next to me and pointed out the balcony outside the windows. 

My knee was starting to seize up, so I needed to stand. I really liked the idea of going out there.

The door was locked. Someone asked Mr. Wu, the manager, if we could step out there. 

He asked us to wait till the dinner crowd had thinned out. If you go out there, everyone will want to go out there.

So I waited. It was worth it. There was something about being in the breeze with the light drizzle that made the grand view even more stunning.

True enough, not only were the dozen of us out there, but we were followed by a group from a nearby table who were also taking photos.

I had put on a clean shirt for dinner and managed to splash soup on it.

I packed dark shirts so I could get more wearings out of each one, but the sauces and soups, especially when I’m eating noodles with chopsticks, have been frustrating that plan. 

Dessert was sweet soup, as it often is in Hong Kong. Some people had the red bean soup, but most of us had something different, a tan soup made with walnuts. 

It’s an interesting flavor. The walnuts come through the sweetness, which isn’t overwhelming to begin with, and make for a pleasant combination. I’ll opt for this one again sometime.

We met Greg and Eugenia Thursday morning at the history museum, as planned. 

The lobby was mostly screened off because they were taking down the Ying Wa College exhibit. So for the first couple of minutes it seemed that we were in the wrong place. 

We started with the geological history of how the land formed. Rocks and fossils are all right, but maybe you need some training in geology to really find them exciting. 

More to my taste was the jungle diorama. There’s a tapir between two trees and a few feet away a large tiger checking him out. There’s a large black bear looking up a tree at a Burmese python.

It’s like Cabela’s.

More interesting yet are the sections devoted to the local people and their customs. 

I had heard about the Hakka and thought they were the indigenous group before the Cantonese moved in. But no. The Hakka are the “guest people.”

The original people, or at least the earliest recorded here, are the Punti, who came in sometime around 1000 A.D. 

There are a couple of other groups, too.

One of those groups, the Hoklo, used to have a marriage ritual in which female relatives of the groom rowed a dragon boat to pick up the bride on her wedding day.

Now, the practice has evolved into a parade of women in traditional clothes who use colorful sticks as props to pantomime rowing. There is a film of them in action. They are led by a couple of women carrying a dragon figurehead.

Many folk festivals used to be an occasion for puppet theatricals. But that practice has been in decline as people’s tastes have changed and Cantonese opera has replaced it. 

Only a few years ago, I had heard that the opera was a rare thing in Hong Kong and tickets almost impossible to get—like the Rolling Stones, maybe. This year, though, Joanna and I had no trouble getting tickets, even in Hong Kong. 

There are several exhibits showing shrines and places of worship. The photo of the day shows three ceremonial figures about whom I know nothing.

There are also replicas of festival pillars made of steamed buns that rise to heights above 10 meters.

There is a mockup of a small fishing boat, probably of the sort they tied up together in the harbor so Jean-Claude Van Damme could run over them in a chase scene.

A fascinating mockup shows one of the early local industries. There is a device for raising water from one pool to another, where seawater can evaporate to leave salt for harvesting.

For lunch we repaired to a hotel with a Western menu. I had a turkey club sandwich. I haven’t had anything like that for years. It was delicious, even if they did get too prissy and cut the crust off the toast.

Much later Joanna and I went to Tai Woo near the hotel. The place was packed, but they still found room for us.

We had another pigeon, roast goose, and Chinese broccoli. Instead of beer, this time I went for a half bottle of a red Bordeaux. You can’t go wrong with any of this.

Friday was moving day. We’d been in Asia for a month, and it hardly felt like any time at all.

We checked out and left our bags at the concierge desk. Then we walked to Kai Kee on Kimberley Road for some pastry to eat later.

We were hacking and coughing as if it was a sport. Joanna said, let’s go to the airport; maybe the air is better.

Indeed it was better. 

We had lunch at Maxim’s Jade Garden again. We had three dim sum dishes. One was a group of dumplings of pork and shrimp wrapped in tofu skin called fu chuk, one of my favorite forms of tofu.

We also had taro cake, gray rectangles that tasted almost like potato pancakes, but not quite. Also very good.

In a nod to good health we had a leafy green, choi sum.

Our flight wasn’t leaving till 6:30, so we headed toward a sign that read the magic words, “craft beer.”

The bar, Beef & Liberty, seems to be connected in some way with a Hong Kong brewery called Moonzen (maybe even owned by them). All the brews are from Moonzen.

They had several taps including two ales. Jade Emperor, an IPA at 7 percent ABV, is bitter and pine-flavored with a mild fragrance.

Air Nimbus is a pale ale, at 4.5 percent not as strong as the IPA. According to the menu, it is made with yuzu, ginger, and white coriander. Joanna read the Chinese for me, and that’s how I learned that yuzu is pomelo.

I can’t say I picked out all those flavors, but the result is certainly spicy. Not unpleasant at all, but like sour ales, not something I’m going to want a lot of in one sitting.

They had a bottled amber ale called Monkey King. The label read in part: “Heavenly rebel to monk warrior, we have caught his beloved tale in our amber ale—a cheeky brew boasting a beautiful heart of caramel and fruity aroma of Queen Mother’s immortality peaches stolen by the Monkey King himself.”

I got the flavor of bitter chocolate, not unlike mole. 

We left on time, and the plane was delightfully uncrowded. Lots of people were able to take rows of seats and sleep lying down.

We were facing the wall where there is extra legroom. I was able to recline in coach for a change, and so was able to sleep for part of the trip. Joanna lay on the floor and slept, too. 

The flight lasted a little more than 14 hours, but wasn’t torturous because we were unconscious for part of it. 

Joanna said I was snoring for part of the way. Must have been the Monkey King up to his old tricks.

We’ll be in New Jersey for a month and then we plan to escape winter by driving to Hilton Head, S.C., for starters. The we turn West for a few weeks toward Phoenix.

We’re still hacking and coughing but not as much, so I guess our lungs are clearing.

Be well, all. 

And breathe easy.

Harry