#1 Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

Moved to start blogging by the extraordinary piece called "Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph And The Hard Year Ahead" by Chris Floyd, I'm creating Scott's Shot as my medium.

To shove the thing out to sea, let me start by posting a paragraph from an account I wrote last week of an August family reunion near Myrtle Beach, S.C. Here's what I said,

That particular stretch of US 17 (business) near Myrtle Beach has become bizarre to a European eye. The four-lane road, with a grass divider, must be over a hundred yards wide. It is bordered for miles and miles in the style of an extended amusement park with malls, giant advertising signs enormous models of dinosaurs and other animals, bars, fireworks shops, drug stores, water parks, restaurants, souvenir shops, mini golf courses, driving ranges, batting nets, banks, filling stations, and scores more enterprises, many exhibiting architectural eccentricities that would make San Francisco seem dowdy. The sole industries locally are services and fishing, and the fishing is fading away. The existence of schools proves that there are year-round residents. When questioned, natives told us that everyone services the tourists in one way or another, even in winter. Evidently there is as great a concentration of golf courses in Myrtle Beach and district as there is anywhere. The speed limit varies between 45 and 35 mph, and is obeyed by the huge vehicles, trucks, Hummers, SUVs, ordinary cars and motorcyclists. These last seemed quite numerous, often guided by gray-bearded middle-aged men, most of whom are, contrary to expectation, according to John Groves, pussy-cats. The highest speed limit I saw in the state was 55 mph. Local people complain of gas prices, but to a European they seem not high at all.

To my eye that part of the world is, or was, essentially beautiful. The beach and the ocean are the overriding constant, the temperature of the latter when we were there hovering around 30° centigrade. My swimming pool rarely reaches that level of warmth. The land is naturally flat, sandy, thickly covered with trees and populated, like the waters, by a teeming variety of wildlife. Dappled sunlight on parks dotted with live oaks hung with Spanish moss are a personal favourite among the characteristic sights to be enjoyed there.

However… it does seem to me that since the mid twentieth century or so just about wherever humans have touched this landscape they have blighted it. Made newly mobile in the first place by the coming of the automobile, and then made capable of taming the formerly inescapably punishing heat and humidity with the arrival of air conditioning, the mushrooming human population, despite wars and diseases and natural disasters, has descended upon the low country in quite an historically short space of time and has done so in an economic atmosphere where the commercial profit motive alone was more and more the sole determiner of people’s behaviour. The result has been colossal pollution of various kinds, a kind of mass rape, really: entire landscapes of huge advertising signs, acres and acres of lovely land paved over for parking lots, over-fishing, the spewing of enormous quantities of oil fumes into the sea and air, mindless consumption on an unsustainable scale of electricity, fuel oil and other natural resources. In my own mind, behind deep distaste for all this, lay a nagging worry for the ghastly example being shown to young visitors and natives of this kind of corruption as a proper way to live, the lesson given them that it was not just all right but positively desirable to conduct oneself in this way. It makes me genuinely fearful for the force of the shock, when it comes, of their being compelled before long to accept that it will all have to stop. Will people be able to handle it, not just in the Carolina low country but in the nation as a whole?

On the other hand, as I often say of my commune of Courniou here in France, the secret is the people, the friendliness, the openness their interest in others. That’s something you don’t find everywhere, and to my mind it’s priceless. Like the perfect stranger lady – I’d say ‘woman’ in most other contexts - in Georgetown, as we walked back to the car with a bunch flowers to take to Miss Minnie Kennedy, who impetuously crossed the sidewalk over to Barbara and me and out of the blue, exclaimed over how lovely the flowers were and wished us a ‘nice day’.