Southern Belle

17 December 2009

Savannah and Charleston are like Buffy and Dawn: they're both real pretty girls, but one's just got a bit more going for her than the other. It's two hours from Savannah to Charleston, and sadly I was not feeling very well on arrival. And I'm sure that had nothing to do with the Sonic Peppermint Blast tub-o'-ice cream I'd recently devoured. David went off to see the city on his own while I holed up in the Days Inn, directly beneath the flight path of the largest assembly of Air Force C17 transport planes to hit the east coast for military training exercises in some time. Three hours of prime-time TV later (good god American tv is crap), he returned with tales of a city even more beautiful than Savannah, if that's possible.

Feeling better this morning, we went into the city together on yet another gorgeous, sunny day. We're close to the end now, and planning to be in DC on Saturday. Apparently snow is expected there shortly (hard to comprehend for people in flipflops), so we've really only got the one day here, and hence have booked ourselves on a city tour. Turns out we've got the entire bus to ourselves, along with the world's most enthusiastic tour guide, who is wearing a shell suit colour-matched to his sneakers and hat. He spent an hour and a half passionately telling us about his home town, chanting College of Charleston fight slogans, and generally being vastly entertaining. David is right, Charleston is a real beauty. Sort of Savannah times four...about 100,000 people live here on this little peninsula, in hundreds of long narrow houses oriented so that the porches are strung down the long side (taxes were assessed by frontage, but you just can't not have a porch in Charleston summers). Mainly wood with clapboards, painted every pastel under the sun, graced with lacy ironwork by the master blacksmith Philip Simmons, and with grander versions in stucco and brick studded throughout.

The Battery at the end of the peninsula has a lovely embankment overlooking the vast harbour, home to Fort Sumter. This of course is where cadets from the Citadel military college fired on Union supply ships in 1861, thus beginning the Civil War—and that turned out so well for them. Boys. We've found a lovely and decrepit big ol' white house on the Battery, crumbling and enormous and full of porches and calling our names. If not for that pesky unemployment, we'd move in tomorrow.

Went up and through the Citadel itself, which looks like some sort of imagined Spanish fortress and contains a decorative ballistic missile aimed at the North (just in case). The mascot is an English bulldog called Spike, who has his own statue at the football stadium. Saw the CSS Hunley, the first submarine, home and grave to eight tiny Confederate men who did however manage to sink the USS Housatonic. Uh-huh.

Off to the City Market, which lives beneath the saffron-coloured Confederate museum. Lots of t-shirts and Chinese fans scattered among local baskets. These are twisted-grass and pine works of art, which were first made by African slaves for use on plantations and now are made for tourists, incorporating bulrushes, sweetgrass, and pine needles, and made with s-shaped handles and loops and twisty bits. So lovely. So expensive. All are priced, all the makers tell you right away that the prices can definitely be discounted. The ones I loved seemed to all start around $100—except for Jennifaye's, and so her lovely fruit basket is coming home with me. Wherever home is or will be.

The afternoon we spent at a place I've wanted to see for about 10 years, the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Drayton Hall. Uniquely, this palladian house dates to 1738 and is almost completely unaltered—no one ever installed electricity or plumbing, the paint is original, and the place is empty of furniture or decoration. It's atmospheric, nothing to distract from the purity of the house itself. The yard is bare except for a serpentine pool and live oaks, the previous formal gardens were lost to phosphate mining in the late 19th century, and only the Ashley River frontage remains. So stark and so perfect.

Tonight we're in the summer heaven of Myrtle Beach, birthplace of the shag (not the naughty kind, the American kind!). Because it's not the high season, we're currently holed up in an ocean view room for all of $40, overlooking the palmettos and crashing surf in a rapidly cooling evening, while we're warm and cozy and had pizza delivered to us. Can't really complain.