No Wonder They Voted for Strom Thurmond
So, it occurs to me that I didn’t give a detailed account of the trip to South Carolina since I returned last week, so, here goes.
The Westin hotel at Hilton Head Island is nice enough. The room was pleasant, with a large, comfortable bed, and a couch near a sliding glass door that opened to a balcony overlooking a courtyard with oak trees and a small pond with a fountain. To the left was a small circular pool, and slightly obscured by shrubbery was a hot tub. Beyond still more trees was the main pool, which was constantly in use by the children of guests. There was a cabana with yellow towels to the right, which guests used both at the pool, and at the beach which was to the left of our room, beyond the dunes. The beach access was via a boardwalk, and the sand at the end was white and deep, and at the shore a bit grittier, with bits of crushed shells.
We took a long walk the first evening, down the strand to where it curved out of sight to the west. North of the hotel were private homes, many of which had their own boardwalks over the dunes of sea oats to the beach. I was surprised by how wooded the beach was, with tall pine trees in several places coming right up to the sand. I have watched for years as Atlantic hurricanes head invariably toward the Carolina coast. It would seem, however, that this particular stretch of shore has been spared. The large beachfront homes had, in many cases, enormous unprotected windows. I wondered how expensive it would be to ensure these structures.
At a point far to the northeast of the hotel (visible at the bottom left of this satellite image), the shore curves sharply to the north by northwest, and marks the end of the island, and the opening of a channel into the inter-coastal water way. It was just past that point, at some wooden pilings driven into the sand, that we turned around and headed back to the hotel.
That evening we went to a local shopping center to pick up some supplies to get us through our stay. I bought Hawaiian Punch, which I love. That night, and each night thereafter I watched the Olympics on TV, though I was surprised and disappointed by the small low-def television in our room.
The next morning I attempted to begin reading Robinson Crusoe on the deck down by the pool, but the shouting and cavorting of children made it so that I couldn’t concentrate. The weather in the morning was overcast, and surprisingly cool, so that it felt and looked like Florida in the winter. Miriam had the afternoon off, so we went exploring the island, stopping first to have lunch at a barbecue place, which was tasty. Miriam had picked up a map from the concierge desk, and she had an idea to check out an area on the southwest part of the island which supposedly had a lighthouse. It was terribly disappointing, however, as we found that this was all merely stagecraft. The “lighthouse” was not a real lighthouse, but just a three or four story round structure built for show above some lame gift shops selling garbage nobody could possibly need. There were some large yachts in the marina there, and some smaller vessels for hire to wealthy vacationers wanting to fish for sharks. I say wealthy, because the fees were in the several hundreds of dollars per trip. Seeing how every structure on the island (except the fake lighthouse) was painted in one of only about three or four drab colors, and how entirely void of culture and imagination this whole place seemed to be, we went back to our hotel bitterly disappointed. It could not escape my notice that the whole Hilton Head enterprise seemed to rely on a type of caste system, in which every person I saw at leisure was white, and, almost without exception, every servant and laborer was black or Mexican. Some of the personnel at the front desk of the hotel were white, as was an employee of a bookstore I went to. But every person doing actual work was a minority, and it depressed me to realize how society there depended upon this social stratification. That isn’t to say that Oprah or Tiger Woods wouldn’t have been welcomed with open arms. Rather, what was so depressing to me was the observation that, for many scores of children living in Hilton Head, or visiting regularly, this hierarchy might reinforce the notion that it is the privilege of rich people to have endless leisure, while people of color exist to serve. I have traveled around the country, and to other parts of the world, even, but never had I seen such a degree of what was referred to in Samuel Johnson’s time as social “subordination”. As someone who lives in a diverse community, I found this to be shocking, and dispiriting. Vacation is obviously something that requires a certain amount of disposable income, and for many working poor, there is far less income to be alotted to liesure these days. But, in spite of its total lack of culture, inspiration and imagination, Hilton Head, South Carolina attracts a far less varied spectrum of society than Walt Disney World.
So, finding there to be only one worthwhile attraction (the beach), and finding the next two days of our stay spoiled by rain, I spent all the remainder of my time either in my room reading, or in the lobby watching the Olympics and drinking delicious lemonade. I am sorry to say that free lemonade was the best thing about Hilton Head, South Carolina.
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