September in the Low Country

Life Along a Tidal Creek

The afternoons are still hot. The air is heavy with humidity, and the live oaks are as green as ever. Spanish moss hangs from their branches, and palmettos grow along the edges of the marsh. Yet there is something about the light that says the season is changing. Maybe that’s what I love most about September. No matter where I am, it’s a month that seems to exist between two worlds.

We’ve been staying on Bohicket Creek, southwest of Charleston, where my husband’s family has lived for more than half a century. Life here has always revolved around the water. The creek is tidal, which means the landscape changes constantly. At high tide, the water rises beneath the docks and fills the smaller creeks winding through the marsh. Then the tide goes out.

Suddenly, enormous stretches of pluff mud appear.

If you’ve never encountered Lowcountry pluff mud, it’s difficult to describe. It’s dark and soft and incredibly rich in organic material. It also has a very distinctive smell. And at low tide, it sometimes pops. Tiny bubbles rise through the mud and burst, making the marsh seem almost alive. I could sit on the dock and listen to it for hours.

A few days ago, my husband went down to the dock to catch some shrimp. When we were teenagers, he sometimes caught our dinner of shrimp and crabs pulled straight from the creek. There aren’t as many shrimp as there were back then, but he hasn’t forgotten how to catch them. There is something wonderfully satisfying about eating food that came from the water just beyond the house. Maybe it’s the same reason I love growing vegetables or preserving fruit in the summer. The distance between the food and the table becomes very small.

Of course, it’s impossible to write about the Lowcountry without writing about the live oaks. Some of the trees here are enormous, their branches stretching outward instead of upward, creating wide canopies of shade. They’ve survived hurricanes, floods, lightning, insects, droughts, and generations of people coming and going beneath them.

One of the oldest oaks on the property is registered with the Louisiana Garden Club Federation’s Live Oak Society. Another registered oak was lost several years ago. The remaining old oak is carefully tended, and standing beneath it always makes me feel very small. Not insignificant. Just small in the way you feel when you’re standing beside something that was here long before you and, hopefully, will remain long after you’re gone.

You can’t spend much time in the Charleston area without eventually hearing someone mention Hurricane Hugo. Hugo struck South Carolina in September 1989, and for many longtime Lowcountry families, it became a dividing line in their memories. There was life before Hugo. And life after.

My husband’s family property flooded during the storm, with the water rising astonishingly far inland. Trees came down. The landscape changed. Across the Lowcountry, homes, docks, roads, forests, and entire communities had to be rebuilt. More than three decades later, people still tell Hugo stories. Maybe that’s another reason September feels different here. Hurricane season isn’t an abstraction when the landscape itself remembers.

For me, though, this September has mostly been quieter. We’ve sat near the water. We’ve wandered down the long dock toward the deepest part of the creek. We’ve watched boats go by. We’ve watched the tide come in and go out. We’ve listened to the marsh. And I’ve taken far too many photographs of trees.

Soon I’ll be back home in Virginia, where my own garden is waiting and fall will be moving much faster. There will be pumpkins to harvest, food to preserve, work to finish, and preparations for the colder months ahead. But for a few days, I’ve been living according to a different clock. Not hours. Not deadlines. Just tides. And perhaps that’s one of the gifts of traveling in September. It’s a reminder that seasons don’t arrive everywhere at once.

Sometimes autumn comes with cool mornings and falling leaves. And sometimes it comes quietly, on a warm Lowcountry afternoon, beneath an ancient live oak and sipping sweet tea, while the tide slips out toward the sea.