October 20 and 21, 2012 Edisto Island State Park

Perhaps my favorite place on earth.  It is so hard to describe it's essence.  I will let these quotes from Bubberson Brown and Sam Gadsden tell you.  They were life long Edisto residents in their 90's when in 1999 they left oral histories to Nick Lindsay which were published in the book, "And I'm Glad".

"This is better, home here.  Me and my wife been together all these years now, sixty years.  Long water run out me eye how thankful the Lord been to me!  I sleep so good here, the world turn over."  Bubberson Brown

"If you get the full Gullah, it's a song language.  That's the deep Gullah.  It is a song language and not a deaf language like English.  The speaker of a song language doesn't mean exactly just the words alone, but when he has once spoken them, he really couldn't have said it any better.  If you catch the song, you can tell exactly what he means."  Sam Gadsden.

"How could I know the name of heaven I come from?" Bubberson Brown.

Driving onto the island we passed the Special Tree in the marsh decorated with plastic jackolanterns, then the huge oak with the mattress hanging from it, but the mattress was on the ground.  We parked and walked in to the primitive campsite where we set up our tents under an ancient oak beside the marsh.  A hundred yards away there is a bathhouse and a quarter mile away, the beach, where there are also campsites.  Two years ago, my cousins, Ann and Sylvia and I stayed in one of the refurbished cabins on the marsh and walked up the beach to where Jeremy inlet enters the ocean.  We crossed at low tide to the beach which is covered in big shells.  We stayed so long, the tide was coming in when we returned nearly up to our waists, carrying bags full of shells.

This trip, we took the boys, Zack, Shane, James, and Sergay on the Indian Mound trail (also called the Spanish Mount trail, officially that is).  There are other trails, including a bike trail.

From "And I'm Glad":

The sea surrounds the earth of Edisto
Surrounds the salt mud and palmetto-praise
Sands of the island, the salt mud where ten thousand
Fiddler crabs pray to God each  morning,
Pray to God who made us, pray with their tiny
Arms raised in unison, raised heavenward
In the morning of mud flats and rising tide. Surrounding
Us the always salt sea with sharks
Swimming and carnivorous money men circling
In. God made the ways sharks go within the sea,
And He made money men, and He made mud,
Made man and woman and the lovely salt embrace
Of tide and earth, of bramble and crop, of man
And woman that makes children-- a tough week's work
For Him. And He pronounced them good.