Photos by Luke Frazier
I gave up drugs and alcohol twenty years ago but still get high on a regular basis. It probably won’t surprise some readers that of course I mean I get elevated by the natural world and superb sights here in the Lowcountry.
When I engage with our local environment, I feel ripples and buzzes in ways that are like the best parts of being intoxicated: an overwhelming sense of things being beautiful and wondrous all around you. An embracing and rewarding feeling of simply being in the time and place you are and how grand it all is. A propensity to grin and chuckle at everything and nothing.
Until my substance abuse turned from having fun to just having problems, that is how getting high felt to me. And the place where I now get waves of that kind of feeling is Boneyard Beach on Hunting Island. You can access it via a half-mile trail from the Nature Center and crossing a short bridge or by walking south from the South Beach parking lot. Either way yields mighty rewards.
I’ve written a couple of things that have touched on the beauty of Hunting Island, one column described a magical walk on the Diamondback Rattlesnake Trail. But I’ve hesitated to
write about beauty at Boneyard Beach because, well, it just felt simultaneously too easy and too hard. Low hanging fruit and the Gordian Knot squaring off on my keyboard.
The easy part is to describe how gorgeous it is, e.g., likening it to a love letter delivered to your heart, written on God’s stationary. Or comparing it to swallowing a rainbow with an amazing sunset chaser. Or living inside the guitar solo in Hendrix’s version of All Along the Watchtower. You could even say it is like having a visual orgasm that feels like Meg Ryan sounded in the movie When Harry Met Sally.
Stunning, magnificent, exquisite—take your easy pickins’ and be done with it.
The hard part is the “you know if you know” factor. Everyone I meet who has been out there doesn’t need a flowery description of the self-evident majesty that awaits you among the downed tree clusters and otherworldly elements weathered by storms and shifting tides. What else can you say? You nod knowingly along with them and stutter a few inconsequential platitudes. Talk about who you brought there and what they said.
Of course there is the jolt of excitement if someone who hasn’t been there overhears your conversation with other Boneyard Beach have-beens. It’s a chance for all us acolytes in the Church of Dem Bones to turn together and sing choruses of praise.
So my hesitation in writing about this shimmering altar of transcendent landscape is based on the unfair fight between words and vision. But there is a reason to struggle and seek to spread the good news of Boneyard Beach. More people than you think, even people who have lived in Beaufort County awhile, have never been out there or hardly ever do.
My testimony is that your soul is going to be happily rewarded if you visit this unique place on planet earth. It’s got a mood and a vibe, a presence and a weight. You can wander and wonder: how can walking among the dead make you feel so alive?! Perhaps the trees aren’t dead after all, just a different kind of animated spirit.
The Gordian Knot was famously solved by Alexander the Great not by untangling, but by simply cutting it in half. I think I’ll take my cue from him. The bold solution to the mystery of Boneyard Beach is to witness it for yourself, no words required.
