Fried Green Tomatoes & Alligators
Three Days in Folly Beach, South Carolina (plus Paris Plages)
At the end of June, we took the five-hour red-eye flight from San Francisco to Charlotte, NC. The ultimate destination was Winston Salem, where O would be attending the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Summer Film Intensive. We thought a short beach vacation would be a nice way to overcome jet lag before O’s Southern escapade. In Charlotte, we rented a car, envisioning a leisurely three-and-a-half-hour drive from Charlotte to Folly Beach, South Carolina.
The flight and the subsequent drive along a two-lane highway clogged with 18-wheelers, many of them in a sore state of repair, pretty much explains why we rarely take family trips to the Southeast. It is just so darn difficult to get there from here. We were a little over an hour into the drive on a clogged highway littered with burnt-out tire treads when O remarked that the big rig truck in front of us was swerving. Every time we tried to get around it, another big truck would speed up beside us, hauling tanks of chemicals or janky piles of vehicles or flats of lumber.
About half an hour later, still stuck behind the same truck, we heard what sounded like an explosion. K’s instincts kicked in before any of us consciously registered the tire flying off the big rig toward our windshield. He swerved and missed it, and as we passed the rig, which was now jerking back and forth, we saw that the driver looked barely old enough to shave and completely unperturbed by the incident. I got the feeling he shed tires all the time.
Marshes and Golf Carts
By the time we exited the highway in Charleston, South Carolina, we were too worn out to check out the charms of historic downtown and instead drove straight to Folly Island, over the wide, flat marshes under a blistering sun. It was humid and hot and smelled pleasantly like the coastal South, a combination of green growing things and saltwater. People were wearing bikini tops and flip-flops and driving around in golf carts, as one does. From the looks of things, open container laws are not heavily enforced in that particular region of the Carolinas.
We pulled up in front of our pale green airbnb just past noon. The place was in a pretty if uniform development of similar condominiums and looked a lot like my memories of Seaside, Florida from decades before—clean, two-story, cookie-cutter buildings in various shades of pastel. Like all good Southern dwellings, the air conditioner was already set to a blissfully arctic temperature upon our arrival, the overhead fans in every room gently spinning.