Silence Among the Driftwood

Coastal Georgia is a place where the earth and water wage an old, quiet war, the marshes encroaching ever closer to the live oaks that stand guard at the edge of their world. Few people know Georgia has a coastline at all, and because of that it has kept a wild kind of beauty, the sort that only shows itself to those who wade in deep enough to find it.

 

The egrets, white cousins of the heron, stand statue-still in the brown shallows, their feathers aflame in the tangerine glow of dusk as they hunt between the sawgrass, which looks soft when the breeze pushes through it, though every blade is edged with fine teeth that’ll draw blood if you rub it the wrong way. Kingfishers hover like hummingbirds, orange and blue, then fold their wings and drop, disappearing beneath the surface only to rise again, shimmering, with their catch.

 

At night the lightning bugs flicker like twinkling stars, weaving their glow through the needles of the longleaf pines. When the rain falls on the marsh like a fisherman’s net, the air hums with the chanting of frogs. On nights like that, Georgia is a slow dream more than a place, hidden in the pulse of a world around it moving too fast.

 

Along its coast stretch a total of fifteen barrier islands, pearls strung across the edge of the Atlantic, and no two of them alike.

 

There’s St. Catherines, home to a troop of wild ring-tailed lemurs, the only place on Earth they live wild outside of Madagascar. They leap through the branches with striped tails and strange curious eyes, like they wandered in from a far off place.

 

Then there’s Cumberland Island, where hundreds of wild horses roam free, descended from mounts the Spanish conquistadors left behind. They move through the dunes and the marsh grass like they answer to nobody, because they don’t.

 

Between these two sit St. Simons and Jekyll Island. St. Simons is where southern decadence drips like honey from every grand estate and moss-laden oak, and beside it lies Sea Island, a billionaire’s playground where movie stars and magnates go to be rich in private.

 

But long before the money came, St. Simons gave the country something else. In the 1790s, when the young nation needed a navy, shipwrights came south for the live oaks, whose crooked branches already grew in the shape of a ship’s ribs. They felled them at Gascoigne Bluff and hauled the timbers north to Boston, where they became the bones of the USS Constitution.

 

In the summer of 1812 she met a British frigate in open water, and the sailors watched the enemy’s cannonballs strike her hull and bounce off into the sea. One of them hollered that her sides were made of iron, and the name stuck. Old Ironsides. She never lost a fight, and she floats in Boston Harbor to this day, the oldest warship still afloat anywhere in the world, held together by Georgia oak.

 

Jekyll Island keeps an older kind of time, its forests dark and tangled, passed over by the money that found the other island. And yet at the old Jekyll Island Club, America’s wealthiest men once gathered in secret and sketched out the Federal Reserve beneath a canopy of live oaks.

 

Across the river is Brunswick, Georgia, a forgotten place, hidden behind worn highways and cracked country roads that the modern world abandoned long ago. Folks who live there will tell you old stories, one being that the devil himself came hunting souls here and left empty-handed, run off by the heat, the mosquitoes, and the sour breath of the paper mill.

 

The sea takes what it can from this coast. But every now and then, it gives something back.

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And on a bruised morning, the tide brought the body of Jannie Hope home.