“I sat in Maine and read his account [Nathaniel Holmes Bishop, The Voyage of the Paper Canoe] of the trip down the Waccamaw – 150 miles in all – and it seemed to me that I should retrace this part of his journey.” – The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country, by Franklin Burroughs
The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country, by Franklin Burroughs (Athens : The University of Georgia Press, 1998)
The map notwithstanding, it was a long way to Freedland. The river was serpentine and the serpent was coiled. I had not quite understood how Bishop could have found himself paddling down stream, but up current, but I could understand it now. On a small-scale map, the Waccamaw runs approximately south-southwest from Lake Waccamaw to Georgetown. On a somewhat larger scale map, you can see that it makes a shallow, backward-facing S – flowing southeast until shortly below the South Carolina line, then swinging back the other way, reaching its westernmost point near Conway. It looks straightforward and simple, with that appearance of unconfused motivation which we attribute to life in an earlier age of history, or to people whom we do not know well. But the moral of the river was that there is always room for deviation, even within the confines of a straight and comparatively narrow fluvial corridor. – from The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country, by Franklin Burroughs
In The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country, Franklin Burroughs returns to the Waccamaw River, the river of his youth. He left Horry County, South Carolina, in 1960, but during visits home he notices the changes taking place, the move to a “gung-ho, synthetic, commercial culture” and wonders if a loss of community and remembered history aren’t partly to blame. Searching for books that connect with his homeland, Burroughs stumbles across The Voyage of the Paper Canoe, by Nathaniel Holmes Bishop. Inspired by Bishop’s time along the Waccamaw River, Burroughs decides to retrace his 1874 journey.
Burrough’s voyage begins in March of 1985 when he slips his canoe into North Carolina’s Lake Waccamaw, the river’s headwaters. His destination is the river’s end near Georgetown, South Carolina. Burroughs is an ideal guide as he interweaves family, regional, and natural history, during the 150-mile journey. In the Waccamaw’s upper reaches, the river runs sinuous and slow. Along this stretch, he meets a few of the old-timers, “their lives and stories carrying in them the old lore of this river.” He’s also alert to the vegetation, animals, and birds, including a “red-shouldered hawk” and “pileated woodpecker.” The Voyage of the Paper Canoe serves as his guide, a chance to compare past and present.
Just past Pireway, the Waccamaw slips into South Carolina and closer to family memories. It’s a landscape of “low swamp, the tangled oblivion of second-growth cypress and tupelo, pine and poplar.” Beaver, wood ducks and owls share the landscape. In the 1880s, the land “had been the country of the turpentiner, the tar-heel,” but there are few remnants of that culture today. Today, it’s “prosperity” that threatens the river. The river pulls Burroughs ever deeper into the places he remembers, including the family fishing cabin on a bank of the Waccamaw, it’s “horizontal sweetgum…look[ing] no bigger than it had thirty years before.” As he passes, an otter swims across the river. While paddling, he thinks about his father’s stories as he “renews images from the past.”
At Red Bluff, Burroughs moves into the “middle Waccamaw,” where “it grows less serpentine, slower and wider.” Sidewheelers used to dock at Red Bluff, “picking up barrels of tar, pitch, and turpentine, bales of cotton, hogsheads of tobacco.” He paddles through the stretch called the Wild Horse,” with its “accelerated current” and “sharp bends.” The river is deeper here, with “a new power in its movements.” The “current of [his] own family history” also runs strong here and, at Conway, he disembarks at his parents’s home on high ground above Kingston Lake. We learn about his family and how they came to be placed here along the Waccamaw.
When Burroughs returns to the river for “the last part of the trip,” Ricky McIver joins him. “The last of the sandbars and sandy levees so characteristic of the upper river” are left behind as they enter the wetness of swampland. The river grows larger and busier after the Intracoastal Waterway joins the Waccamaw, so they take a detour, “the prettiest way to Georgetown…up Bull Creek, through Little Bull and into the Pee Dee.” This is the route Bishop followed, the way “anybody in a small boat would.” There are alligators, snowy egrets, ibis, and the “deep blue of the sky.” This was “the land of the rice planter” and, here, another voice, Elizabeth Allston Pringle, is added to that of Nathaniel Holmes Bishop. Burroughs finds in her journals a realistic look at plantation life during the 1800s.
Burroughs ends his trip at Georgetown, “with its brownish haze from the local paper company.” As he disembarks at “an informal landing of shell, mud, and sand,” you realize that you’ll miss this bookpath, this time along the Waccamaw River. Burroughs has been the perfect guide in The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country. His affection for, familiarity with, and curiosity about the river brought it to life and made us care deeply about its future.
I learned about Snow Hill and my family slowly, unsystematically, and by osmosis, about the same way that children learn to talk. Later, thinking that my own children might one day be curious about it, I did a little reading and asked a few questions, to bridge gaps and fill in blanks. Family tradition was something like the river – parts of it I knew very well, and other parts more remotely, by hearsay twice removed. But it was not long or intricate enough for me to get seriously lost. -- from The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country, by Franklin Burroughs
Related Links
The Voyage of the Paper Canoe, by Nathaniel H. Bishop
http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/nhb/paperc/intro.html
A Woman Rice Planter, by Elizabeth Waties Allston Pringle
http://docsouth.unc.edu/pringle/menu.html
Winyah Rivers Foundation / Waccamaw Riverkeeper
http://www.winyahrivers.org/waccamaw.htm
Of course the arrangement of these rivers wasn’t simply a metaphor of history; it was also a determining fact of history. The Waccamaw led nowhere but back into its own isolated swamps. Watching it disappearing beneath the Pee Dee while still retaining the name of Waccamaw, I thought how that pretty well emblemized what had happened to the county in Ricky’s and my lifetimes – it had gotten lost in something bigger; it still had its name, but was now indistinguishable within the vast influx of the present. – from The River Home : a Return to the Carolina Low Country, by Franklin Burroughs
