A Home Where the Alligators Foam: The Audubon Swamp Garden

December 29, 2012 — The only thing that Charleston’s Audubon Swamp Garden was missing on our visit was Kermit on the banjo and Dom DeLuise in a boat. Otherwise, it fulfilled quite a few of my expectations. Actually, with the African-American burial ground secreted within its depths, exceeded them.

The Audubon Swamp Garden is about 60 acres of (admittedly tame) swamp and is part of the Magnolia Plantation and Gardens, one of the many plantations-turned-attractions in that area of South Carolina. This particular plantation dates back to 1676 and is still owned by the Drayton family who originally built it.

But we weren’t really there to see the plantation. We wanted to play in the swamp. Unfortunately, to do the swamp thing, we had to pay the entrance fee to the plantation and then a second entrance fee to get swampy. But entrance fees inside of entrance fees was the only downside.

Not that the plantation isn’t cool. We just wanted to see spooky trees in scummy water. We did stick around the plantation proper long enough to watch its miniature horses chomping placidly in the fields, and then to hit up the petting zoo, where enough free-roaming deer, peacocks, sheep, and other creatures accosted us to make us feel like the Disney-est of princesses. There were also cages full of less-friendly animals like bobcats, hawks, and foxes, as well as a small reptile house. But then we were off for greener waters.

The swamp entrance was marked by a large wooden sign bearing the carved image of an alligator getting double-teamed by a pair of white wading birds. It was a promise I really needed the swamp to keep. Not getting to see any alligators in this swamp was just something I did not want to have to admit to you guys.

The entrance to the swamp was barred by a large wooden door with a keypad and flanked by a metal sculpture of swamp critters playing musical instruments. The frog played the fiddle instead of the banjo. Artistic license, I guess.

We entered the key code given to us when we paid admission at the plantation, and the door opened onto a boardwalk that elevated our shoe leather above the thick green surface of the swamp. Below us, the water was viscous and disgusting with algae, duckweed, and decaying detritus, while out of it grew the Spanish-moss-haired cypress and tupelo trees that create that soggy charm of southern swampland.

Incidentally, I did learn while wandering the plantation that Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor a moss, nor is the sickly-looking gray plant at all unhealthy for the trees it adorns. Also, that it’s related to the pineapple. I just fall more in love with that stuff every day.

The swamp was lonesome due to the fact that we were there in late November and about an hour before dusk/closing time. We were warned not to stay there after nightfall. Bad things happen after nightfall, they said. Things rise from the muck after nightfall. Eat your body if you’re lucky. Your soul, if you’re not. Here’s your change, they said. Have a nice day, they said. Restrooms are to the right, they said.

After following the boardwalk for a while, our eyes strain-sore from fruitlessly scouring the surface of the swamp for alligator eye-bumps, the path eventually deposited us onto a dirt trail.

Which led right to an African-American burial ground.

There wasn’t any information at the site and nothing really online that I could find about it. Obviously, there’s a lot I can assume, this being a plantation and all. The grave stones were scattered around a slight, but shaded clearing. I remember some two dozen of them, each bearing dates that spanned the turn of the 20th century, with some death dates as recent as the 1950s. I assume there were more hidden in the undergrowth and that the older graves weren’t marked.

From there we followed the trail around a large pond, and it was then we saw our first alligator. It was a juvenile, probably four or five feet long, and it was right off the bank, not ten feet away from us. Did I mention the pond wasn’t fenced?

The gator was mostly submerged and surrounded by branches and leaves, and it was just luck that we spotted him. That first pic in this article is me trying to get a shot of him. And that shot is further down.

As exhilarating as it was to find it (more like discovering the species than just spotting a small one in a stocked swamp), we eventually saw another three or four more of the reptiles on our trek around the pond, including one giant beastie sunning himself on one of the wooden ramps jutting from the center of the pond.

Again, no fences, but these guys must’ve been well taken care by the management since none of the wildlife seemed to be going out of its way to avoid the apex predator. And that wildlife, at least as far as we saw, was mostly egrets and herons alternately walking weirdly around the pond and then gliding elegantly across it. Some ducks. And another wooden ramp absolutely boiling with turtles. Now that I list them out, we were probably the tastiest things there.

After looping around the pond, the trail joined back with the boardwalk for a total distance of a mile and a quarter.

All in all, it’s a beautiful preserve, but obviously not the complete swamp experience that at some point I need to do. You know the one, riding around on a fanboat at night surrounded by beady eye-shine while some dude in a sleeveless T-shirt and missing fingers on one hand coaches me on how to avoid the giant pythons that have recently invaded North American swamps while I misinterpret swamp gas as way more interesting things.

And then Dom convinces me to go to Hollywood.

I still have trouble seeing him in this picture. Don't know how we saw him in real life.

A Krushing Nostalgia: Meaning from a Monster

December 26, 2012 — Today I was supposed to be at the National Museum of Natural History ogling Titanoboa. Instead, bad weather and bad health had me snowbound and Suda-fed at my parents’ house, watching Richard Pryor in The Toy, reading Edgar Allan Poe’s The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall, and playing with a 14-inch-tall piece of X-shaped green rubber.

Maybe it was a better day as a result, I don’t know.

Anyway, I like monsters. That’s why I was really looking forward to seeing Titanoboa. And why I slaver over visiting oddities like this one. Or this one. This one, too. Too many to link to, actually. And the whole thing can probably be blamed on this guy:

His name is Krusher, and he was put out in 1979 by Mattel. He’s about 14 inches tall and made of a thick, soft rubber than you can compress (“krush”). A valve on his orange plastic belt allows you to freeze him in krushed form or automatically reinflate him to his original impressive size. Here’s the commercial:

Of course, it was also the Eighties, a time when 3 3/4-inch action figures and heavy TV tie-ins began taking over the metal shelves of toy stores. So Krusher found himself at the end of an era and without a chance. He didn’t sell well, and, to some reports, only 3,000 were made.

That’s too much for you to know about this toy.

But I got one of them. When I was three. At a Christmas long past. Krusher cost $17.95 according to this toy catalog advert that grouped him with such other toys as Gre-Gory, a vampire bat with a chest full of pumping blood, and Suckerman, a glow-in-the-dark creature that stuck to whatever surface you threw him at (God-damn childhood is so much better than adulthood). I’m not sure what $17.95 translates to in today’s money, but mom apparently thought the reptiloid was a worthwhile investment for a kid showing a burgeoning interest in lizards, snakes, and turtles.

I don’t remember that Christmas, but I do remember carrying Krusher around. He was about a third as big as me and a constant companion, one of the many “rubber uglies” of my youth and a precursor to my fascination with all monsters of myth and movie today.

At some point not too long after I got him, Krusher broke in half at the belt and mom tossed him.

For scale, an original 1977 Kenner
Chewbacca, one of the Davids
that slew this Goliath.

This year, some three decades later, thirty years of guilt boiled over and she got him for me for Christmas again. Because I’ve gotten to the end of the gift cycle and have to start all the way from the beginning.

Krusher has always been a loose end in my life. For some reason, he’s popped into my thoughts more regularly than any actual person from my past and, unlike just about every one from age 23 on, is a memory that just won’t go away. I’ve come close to getting my hands on him again a few times. Once as a child, two other times in the Wild West early days of eBay. But he always eluded me.

The thing’s actually in better condition than I am after all this time, and that seems to be about the norm. The few forward-thinking mavericks who’ve written about Krusher online talk about his amazing durability and still-working gimmick.

The soft rubber, solid weight, and nice texture of scales makes holding him a real pleasure and his subtle paint application is more or less intact. Two of his scales have been charmingly colored in with an ink pen by his original owner who is now undoubtedly an adult and undoubtedly wishing he never got rid of his Krusher.

Unfortunately, the seal is broken on mine, so he doesn’t krush, but that’s nothing that can’t be fixed with an open Saturday, some sealant, and a small bit of initiative. And I regularly have two out of three of those.

Anyway, it’s a gift way better than the latest tech or fashion. One that I’ll treasure long after everybody else has moved on to the iPad 27.

Most important, I’ve learned a valuable lesson. I can’t wait to break my own kid’s most beloved toys to give her a better Christmas in a few decades.

So, thanks, Mom and Dad and my older brother who helped track the thing down. Perfect gift.

Merry Krush-mas

There is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean: Hopewell Rocks

December 22, 2012 — They were only cheap Sketchers, but the loose, brown mud wanted my boots bad. Each step was a disgusting, sucking mess, and my efforts at walking flung it as high as the tail of my shirt, making me wish modern fashion allowed for the inclusion of mud flaps. But I didn’t really care. I was walking on the bottom of the ocean.

At least, that’s how the marketing materials described it.

Hopewell Rocks is a group of rock formations at the northern tip of the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada. Known as “flowerpots,” the dark, reddish sandstone columns and arches rise up to 70 feet, and get their names because the continual ebb and flow of the ocean tides erode them into vase-like forms topped by trees and other plants. At low tide, they’re like air islands. At high tide, when most of the rock is submerged, island-islands.

And it only takes billions of tons of water rushing in at eight vertical feet per hour twice a day for millions of years to create them. Do it as a science project with your kids. Your great-great-great-infinity grand kids.

In addition to the speed and volume, it’s the height of the water that’s really impressive/terrifying. The Bay of Fundy is rinsed by the highest tides in the world, with water rushing in to attain heights of fifty feet. That means (relatively) dry land becomes (relatively) deep ocean fast and daily, and the area is in a constant, dangerous flux.

But it’s cool if you want to go down there and check it out.

According to its website, we had about a six-hour window between high tides before getting trapped. Possibly drowned. It’s like that scene in every other movie where water fills a room to the point where the protagonist has to balance on the back of a chair and sip air bubbles from light fixtures…and then multiply that by the Atlantic Ocean.

The place has official hours, with a visitor’s center and cafeteria and such, but anybody can visit the flowerpots any hour of any season. And sometimes the timing of the tides makes it smart to do so. You just have to be mindful of a few things, most importantly that the path to them can be difficult in the dark or snow. Also that they dismantle the stairway access to the beach in the winter. Basically, your chances of wet, lonely death increase if you go at this thing on your own.

We took the more conventional route, hit it during open hours, and timed it for approximately the lowest tide. Because we’re wusses, sure, but also because I wanted to take advantage of that whole walking on the ocean floor thing.

From the visitor’s center, it’s a brief walk through a cliff-edge forest. Every so often a trail would diverge that dead-ended at a lookout point over the flowerpots. Worth doing for the perspective, and if you’re there at high tide, it’s probably the only way to experience it.

Eventually you arrive at the top of a tall set of stairs that lead down to the base of the formations.

On my visit to the Peter Iredale in Oregon, I exulted in the fact that I could walk through the ribs of a 100-year-old shipwreck in situ without having to put on a wetsuit. Same here, except without any real artifacts for evidence. No seashells, no beached fish, no strange creatures flopping in tidal pools and wondering pathetically if life was no more than that. Just mud, rocks, and shag carpets of slimy rockweed. Still, that was more than James Cameron saw at the real bottom of the ocean.

But the tides have carved some absolutely master landscapes. Shallow caves and hourglass pillars, frame-like arches and balanced columns decorate the mile of exposed beach. And all of it surrounded by steep, red cliffs that form the walls of the basin. Every once in a while sections of the base were roped off to bar access to the more unstable areas.

Some of the formations have names: Dinosaur Rock, Mother-in-Law, Castle Rock, and even one named E.T. Actually, with their brown color, oblong tops, and thin necks, most of them kind of all looked like E.T., at least as an Impressionist might paint him.

It’s a magnificent natural wonder, and, with its shaped rocks and record tides, make me wonder why I never heard about it until (and I’m divulging trade secrets here) I specifically Googled “Bay of Fundy” and “awesomeness”. Canadians just don’t boast enough, I guess.

To ultimately experience the grandeur of Hopewell Rocks, you’re going to want to be there at low tide and stay through to high tide, watching as your deep footprints (and possible the boots you left behind) rapidly get covered with water until the whole place is ocean. It’s like watching millions of years of environmental change compressed into a few hours.

Or you can just watch the whole thing time-lapsed here.

Want to read about some more OTIS trips to rocks? Well, you're weird, but here'go:

Madison Boulder (Madison, NH)
Dighton Rock (Berkley, MA)
Cliffs of Moher (County Clare, Ireland)
Vasquez Rocks (Los Angeles, CA)
The Burren (County Clare, Ireland)
Haystack Rock (Cannon Beach, Oregon)
Giant's Causeway (County Antrim, Ireland)
Dungeon Rock (Lynn, MA)
Skull Cliff (Lynn, MA)

Pirate Sway: The Execution Site of the Gentleman Pirate

December 18, 2012 — I was in a pleasant harborside park on the southern tip of the main peninsula of Charleston, South Carolina, at the intersection of Southern charm and salt air. I was walking with my wife beneath a grove of massive live oaks dripping hermit beards of Spanish moss from their serpentine branches.

It would have been romantic, but all I could think about were dead bodies hanging from those staunch tree limbs and slurping their way inland from briny graves in the harbor.

All because of what was inscribed on a nearby stone.

It’s something I’d expect to read on the welcome mat of a naval prison. Or fast-forward through on some menacing-looking screen at the beginning of a DVD. Or mishear in the bedrooms of dirty wenches in the shantiest of sea towns.

“We hanged pirates here.”

But that’s what it says on the tall, thin, rough granite monument in Charleston’s elegant White Point Garden.

White Point Garden is a six-acre park that overlooks the harbor and three historic forts: Moultrie, Sumter, and Johnson. The park’s most notable feature is the aforementioned rows of live oaks (so called because they never lose their foliage). Their branches are so long and wending that the trees almost look upside down, their stretching limbs like gigantic root systems exulting in the ocean breeze.

Interspersed among and around these trees are antique cannons and various military monuments and statues, but to me, the most interesting monument was a door-shaped one that says this:

This picture is worth 71 words.

Stede Bonnet was known as the Gentleman Pirate because he was a wealthy sugar plantation owner in Barbados and not at all a seaman. In fact, his strange exploits really should have gotten him his own sit com—called The Gentleman Pirate, naturally. Theme song by Jesse Frederick.

The pilot episode took place in 1717, when the thirty-something retired British army major decided to become a pirate. Because they hadn’t yet invented the Ferrari. The lore says that he was having marital problems, which he dealt with by going out and buying a ship and hiring a crew of experienced brigands like it was some kind of respectable business venture. He gave it the traditional pirate name of the Revenge, and I’m assuming he wore a fake eye patch.

He had some early success thanks to his crew, but it soon became apparent that the guy was kind of the SpongeBob version of a pirate captain. He became famous for tossing in his lot with old Blackbeard, and was a part of Blackbeard’s infamous siege of South Carolina. Blackbeard enthusiastically added the Revenge to his fleet, assigned it a more capable captain, and then kept Bonnet around as a “guest” on his own ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, where I assume hijinks happened episodically.

At one point, while Bonnet was ashore in North Carolina, Blackbeard scuttled Bonnet’s old ship and marooned the crew. Bonnet was able to become a captain again by recovering it and rescuing them. But it was during repairs of what he had rechristened the Royal James in a bid to be a sanctioned (and pardoned) privateer against the Spanish, that South Carolina caught up to him.

He and his crew were in the Cape Fear River, when Colonel William Rhett, acting on behalf of the governor of South Carolina, spotted them. In August of 1718, they fought and he and his crew were captured by Rhett’s larger complement.

On December 10, 1718, his short pirate career ended at the end of a short noose somewhere the area of White Point Garden, along with some 29 of his crew. According to the memorial, the pirate Robert Morley would follow in Bonnet’s dangling footsteps at the same spot with 19 of his crew. The bodies of all 50 of those pirates were tossed out into the harbor.

And while I kept imagining their limp corpses hanging from the copses, they were actually strung up in mass from a temporary gallows like morbid garland. They still might sop out of the harbor on certain moon-lit nights, though.

The pirate marker is on the side of the park that parallels South Battery Street, across from a line of opulent mansions owned by rich people who are probably never tempted to go out and plunder anything but the economy.

All in all, the White Point Garden is a unique place that can be both a nice spot and a morbid one, the kind of place you could both tie a wedding knot or a hangman’s noose.

Some more pirate oddities from the OTIS archives:

Blackbeard's Home (North Carolina)

Site of Blackbeard's Death (North Carolina)
Dungeon Rock (Massachusetts)

Disheveled Decay: Unitarian Church Cemetery

December 15, 2012 — I don’t know what they preach at the Unitarian Church in Charleston, South Carolina, but man is their graveyard a revelation. Located in the city’s historic district at 4 Archdale Street, this tiny cemetery is allowed to run wild over its deceased wards.

The large, Gothic church was built at the beginning of the Revolutionary War by a religious group called the Society of Dissenters. Today it’s Unitarian Universalist and not at all an abandoned property. They just happen to dig a shaggy cemetery.

A few thin pathways allow visitors to navigate this thicket of palm trees, magnolias, Spanish moss, and all kinds of other plants and trees thriving on a soil rich with death. I hear it’s even more striking in the spring, when all the wildflowers are blooming.

The place has a very secret garden feel. It’s hemmed in on all sides by buildings, except for where it connects to the adjacent St. John’s Lutheran Church cemetery, yet four steps into it I felt as if I were making an archaeological discovery on some distant continent.

And it’s in great contrast to the rest of historic Charleston, where every historic home shows off ridiculously manicured gardens in what I assume is some never-ending competition for the covers of the local guidebooks.

The graveyard also has some tenuous and probably false connection to Edgar Allan Poe. The story goes that his poem Annabel Lee was partially inspired by the legend of a woman of the same name who’s supposed to be buried there. In the story, she falls for a sailor, but has to meet him in secret in the cemetery to avoid her disapproving father. The girl dies while the sailor is away at sea, and when he returns he can’t find her grave there because her father left it unmarked out of spite for him. And then there’s probably ghosts somewhere in that story mix.

Poe did spend a year stationed at Fort Moultrie on nearby Sullivan’s Island in the late 1820s, so I guess that’s why he’s dragged into it. But all that’s unnecessary for the allure of this graveyard. It just has an extremely unique feel, and in a city with quite a few cool cemeteries, this one might’ve been my favorite.

At the very least, it made me adjust my definition of what makes a great cemetery.

It Takes a Village to Sell a Candle: The Yankee Candle Village

December 13, 2012 — In this glorious season of peace on earth and good will toward men, approximately 75% of our time is spent either shopping or thinking about shopping. The other 25% is watching Christmas-themed commercials.

I’m not complaining. I like Commerce-mas. Even though buying things for loved ones is like bad charity, it does give me the opportunity to wrap presents, which is the pumpkin carving of Christmas. And, while I might be wrong, I think my season is better for having Miser Brothers action figures, Charlie Brown Tree™ table decorations, and breakfasts of gingerbread Pop-Tarts and Christmas Crunch.

So, to make the most of the season while spending, I try to spend some of my season amidst the twinkly pine ambiance of Christmas-themed stores. Like the Christmas Loft. Like Hershey’s Chocolate World. And, like the Yankee Candle Villages.

The Yankee Candle Villages are Yankee Candle’s flagship stores. There’s one in South Deerfield, MA, and another in Williamsburg, VA. This is an account of my experience at the former. Actually, experiences, since I’ve been there twice. Once in the off-season a couple of years back and once last weekend, right in the middle of the madballs Crazy-mas season.

We pulled into the parking lot just about a half hour after it opened…and the lot was packed. Attendants were stationed to direct traffic, and I counted at least 12 tourist buses…no hyperbole. All there for jars of wax. To set on fire.

Honestly, the store doesn’t seem too huge from the outside, but that’s because it’s only one floor. One massive, sprawling floor. On one side of the building, the slogan “Scenter of the Universe” is spelled out in big white letters that must’ve got some marketer somewhere a bonus. Also “The World’s Best Christmas Shop,” because they celebrate Christmas year-round, not just when they need parking lot attendants.

The whole place is a warren of interconnected stores full of a variety of stuff: home goods, kitchen supplies, fashion accessories, toys, candy, Christmas decorations, and, of course, hundreds of thousands of jars of strongly scented paraffin. You can even make your own candles there. I called mine “Molotov Cocktail.”

But people aren’t just there to shop (although people do buy candles there like fire isn’t the devil’s only friend). You can find most of that in any mall. The Yankee Candle Village is as much spectacle as it is store. With spectacle defined by the type of person excited by the false smells of awesome things that aren’t in their house. So, not really spectacle, I guess.

Take the toy store. Sure, it’s got toys, but right in the middle of it is a permanent Santa’s Work Shop, a festive, shed-size room where you can hang out with the Kringles and ask him why he insists on such tiny screws in battery compartment lids. He and his wife are there at predetermined hours throughout the year, but during our peak-season visit, they’d moved him to the Yankee Candle museum. For space reasons, I’m assuming. Also, Because it has a museum.

Or you can go to the Christmas village section where they have large displays of those tiny electronic Christmas villages, including a Mt. Crumpit for Grinch collectibles and the obligatory small Halloween section.

Or you can go to the café, which is decorated like the outdoors, with large fake tree trunks and leafy ceilings. There’s also a small stage there where they host performances.

The best part of the whole place though, is that they celebrate Christmas Bavaria-style, that ancient German state that is as much a part of the Christmas consciousness as Dickensian London and Culkinsian New York. Which makes sense. I mean, sure the candles are Yankees, but if you want a New England Christmas you just have to step outside, at least for the one in Massachusetts. I’m not sure what goes on in Williamsburg.

The places features a Christmas village, with Bavarian cottage-facades lining the walls, a ceiling made to look like a night sky, and a large Christmas tree in the center. There’s Nutcracker Castle, a giant castle façade fronted by a moat full of koi that opens onto a shop of carved gifts of the German persuasion, and even a Black Forest of Christmas trees where fake snow falls from the ceiling every few minutes.

I didn’t see any Krampusnacht stuff, though.

Anyway, even though the place is huge, the individual sections and stores can get pretty crowded during Yule-time. But it’s worth a few elbow bruises in your ribs and tree ornament shrapnel in your forehead to eat fudge and wassail like you’re in central Europe.

And now everybody in my family knows that the reason they’re all getting scented candles from me for Christmas is because I wanted to hang out at the Yankee Candle Village. Merry Candle-mas, guys.

Oh, they do have candles.

A 20-year-old, 1,377-pound candle
that would burn for 7.5 years straight.

Obligatory Halloween section.