How to Expand Your Sense of Place
An important kind of travel.
To get on Sapelo, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—beautiful Georgia, my songland—you have to be invited by someone who lives there1. One good way to get invited is to arrange a private tour with a local guide.
I like staying home. When I leave, I worry about the farm animals—What if the automatic waterers quit working? Shouldn’t I have put fly masks on the horses?—but when I make myself leave, I fall in love with the beautiful world outside my farm again and again and again. I return thrilled and inspired.
This is my husband’s birthday weekend, and one of Raven’s plans for his birthday year is to immerse himself in a study of Georgia’s 100-mile chain of barrier islands. He wanted to start with Sapelo.
Something like 90 percent of Sapelo is owned by the state, protected from development and mostly managed as a refuge and wildlife management area. Originally a plantation, it was owned by Thomas Spalding until 1851, when he died, then Howard Coffin (Hudson motor car), and finally R.J. Reynolds (tobacco) in 1934. The state purchased part of the island in 1969 and part in 1976.
What is left in private hands are some inholdings that wealthy folks have bought and a community called Hog Hammock, where descendants of Sapelo’s enslaved citizens were forced to live.
I didn’t make arrangements to visit the island until yesterday. Lucky for me, I got Mr. JR Grovner with Sapelo Island Tours on the phone, and he invited us over.
We live 73 miles from the coast, so we were up this morning at 5:30 am to make sandwiches and coffee then leave by 6:30 to arrive at the Meridian dock by 8.
I had my journal with me, of course. And binoculars. I almost never go into the wild without those.
Stories are a lot like life-partners. Sometimes one just finds you. Same with story—a good one may find you. A place can pull you in to tell its stories, for example. Or a place can birth you and hand you eons and generations and neighborhoods of stories. Here are some stories for you, it will say. Go tell these.
Again like a life-partner, sometimes you have to go out and find stories. You can’t sit at home waiting.
Mr. JR Grovner of Sapelo Island Tours also runs blacklandmatters.org, which helps prevent landowners from losing their land due to issues like inability to pay exorbitant property taxes. He invites you to come tour with him and donations to his nonprofit are appreciated.
Mr. Grovner took us to Hog Hammock and showed us the post office, community center, a defunct medical clinic, a tiny public library, an unused school. (Now the children get up at 6, take a bus to the dock, ride the ferry to the mainland, and there catch another bus to school.) Mr. Grovner stopped so we could take photos at a pretty little brackish creek. He pointed out painted buntings, including a pair learning to fly, and alligator tracks along the sand roads.
We got to see the sugar mill that David Shields writes about here in his Substack
. We peeked at the Reynolds mansion and the UGA Marine Institute lab. We hung out on Nannygoat Beach, where now there aren’t enough seashells to make even a dollhouse of tabby.We saw a museum with skulls lined up in a row—dolphin, loggerhead, alligator, Kemp’s Ridley. We saw salt marsh, sand dune, tidal creek, and mudflat.
A sense of place refers to the attachment bonds we develop with the geography in which we live. This sense can be nurtured by studying the history, culture, and ecology of our place. Knowing our place can add meaning to our lives; help us feel more rooted, with a greater sense of belonging; and build our stores of memories. We can get more connected to our communities, and we can feel less homeless. We can be spurred to local action. When we explore our place, our particular concept of home (and here I’m thinking of home as refuge, as security, and as center) can extend beyond our own doorways.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
—T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
—T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”
So that was our morning on Sapelo. Soon the time arrived for the ferry ride back to the mainland and the drive home, where even in 93-feels-like-100 heat everything had gone fine without me.
The world calls us out into it. Home calls us back.
Sometimes the world calls us out into it so we can broaden what we think of as home.
This is the land. We have our inheritance.
—T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”
More or less an invitation is necessary to visit Sapelo. That can be accomplished by arranging a private tour or a stay at a private rental on the island. You can also sign up for a state tour or arrange to stay at the RJ Reynolds Mansion, which would count as an invitation from the State, I suppose.
Hi Janisse, and Happy Birthday Raven.
This was a special piece of your perfect prose for me having lived for so long on a barrier island.
We had a chunk of tabby foundation from our old house on the fireplace hearth to remind us what had been under the 1950 cracker cottage before we lived there. The cottage was rebuilt after the ‘50 hurricane tore the front porch and the tin roof off the tabby place and the roof ended up fifty feet in the air tangled in the top of the live oak tree across the street.
Oliver Miller knocked down what was left of the two story tabby shack and built our little place with yellow heart pine framing and cypress novelty siding. The remaining tabby stem walls stayed quietly under the wooden replacement home. Now, new folks from Indiana live there and love the place. They rent our little office studio as an Air B&B for weekend sports fishermen. Those sports-fisher people have long since replaced the mullet cast netters whom we’d hear leaving the harbor every morning at sunrise in their bird dog boats.
Mr. Brooks Campbell built the island’s cypress bird dog boats and also sold his home remedy potion that smelled like turpentine and tasted like it too. Mr. Brooks swore that his concoction was responsible for his long life and good looks, and, if you asked him, he’d tell you, “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, and I don’t mess with widow women!” We miss Mr. Brooks and hearing him tell tourists his secret to a long life.
Once you replace a barrier island ferry boat with a bridge or two or three, eventually the local young people leave and are sadly replaced with tourists and “folks from away.” The population changes its completion. The souvenir shops with their t-shirts and political crap replace the biscuits, gravy and mullet breakfast joints operated by the Rains family or Pat. Expensive three wheel motorcycles driven onto the dock by a retired insurance salesmen are parked where twenty-five year old pickup trucks with an old yellow dog sleeping in the truck bed used to be parked facing the wrong way. Pat’s full breakfasts used to cost under five dollars, but now the soft ice cream cone costs that much. People talk about the old south, but if you didn’t see and live in it, you’ll never know the people you missed meeting.
I’m sending a donation or buying some swag from the blacklandmatters.org website today. I want to own that t-shirt.
I had the privilege of staying in Hog Hammock a number of times in the mid to late 80’s, on the property of the late Cornelia Walker Bailey. She and her husband, Frank, were eager to ensure my friend and my dog, Maddie, and I had everything we needed in the immaculate mobile home adjacent to the little store that supplied most of Hog Hammock with ice cold beverages from an old Coca-Cola cooler -- the type that opened from the top and had two compartments. One door slid to the right, the other to the left. We broke bread with Cornelia and Frank and one Labor Day weekend, Frank cooked ribs in their back yard, on a sheet of metal he’d placed over hot coals. He gently covered them with a special sauce by sopping up the sauce in a small mop head and carefully dabbing the ribs while they sizzled...the first time I’d seen this technique. All I can tell you is that those were the best ribs I’ve ever tasted. Crunchy pieces of fat on the outside and moist and tender down to the bone. I had hoped to go back and see Cornelia before she passed but like many plans, they gave way to my busy life in Atlanta where I lived at the time.
I’ve resided in Fannin County for 23 years now and live within walking distance of Loving Road and New Hope Church and Cemetery. As I read your book about Morganton and the Loving Community, I could see many of the locations you described in my mind. I followed the trips on foot through Hemptown and felt I had a general idea of the motel and old store locations. Nevertheless, we had a small gathering at the Fannin County Library some months ago, to review slides, photographs and newspaper articles about the Woods family, and listen to a local historian tell of her interpretations of some of your anecdotes. As cruel as it may seem, when someone asked the historian what ever happened to Ruby, the crowd was not at all sad to hear of her death from cancer. Each of us felt such deep compassion for those children. It’s a true testament to the strength (especially in numbers) of sibling love and unbelievable resilience, that any of those children were able to have productive lives free of alcohol abuse, drug addiction, prostitution or worse.
I hope you and Raven continue to explore the coast of Georgia. I’ve frequented Saint Simons Island for 30+ years and though it’s really changed, I still love to ride my bike all over the island and the beaches at low tide.
Blessings and Traveling Mercies
Lisa