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Boston Globe November 8, 1991
``Paradise Regained for Just a Moment"
by Linda
Weltner
My husband and I have just taken a vacation in Paradise. No
kidding much of the movie ``Paradise," starring Don Johnson and
Melanie Griffith, takes place in the area of Seabrook
Island,
South Carolina, and I can see why.
In the ocean, families of dolphins swam just offshore. As my
husband and I, along with our older daughter, her husband and child, and
our younger daughter and her fiancée stood on the beach at dusk, mother
and baby dolphins rose and fell in perfect harmony, and small groups
played what seemed to be a game of tag, oblivious to our presence.
One morning, eating breakfast by the window of the house we had rented for
the week, we observed two deer feeding nearby. When we moved outside
onto the porch, they reacted by moving towards us, taking a path that
brought them almost close enough to touch. There were alligators
lurking in the water holes of the golf
course,
a stunning array of butterflies flitting from flower to flower, the sound
of songbirds in the air.
I didn't know that such a place still existed in the United
States. We stumbled upon Seabrook
Island
by accident, choosing it because it was a resort area close to my younger
daughter and her fiancée, both graduate students at the University of
South Carolina. Upon investigation, we discovered that there was a
golf
course
for the men and horseback
riding
for my older daughter and I, so I reserved, sight unseen, a three-bedroom
``villa." Then we flew to Charleston, rented a car and set off for a
place we knew almost nothing about.
We arrived after dark, but the morning we made our way to
the three-mile stretch of beach we could see from our living room.
Off-season, it was almost deserted. There wasn't a single piece of
litter that bright sunny morning, or any morning after that, a remarkable
event in the 20th century. I was collecting shells when
the first black fin broke the water no more than 20 feet out. I
shouted, convinced that this sighting was some kind of miracle. An
hour later, it dawned on us that the dolphins were our nearest
neighbors. The waters were full of life. Shrimpers passed by
on their daily comings and goings, leading a parade of noisy birds that
swooped and dived as they followed the boats whose nets stretched out like
dark wings on either side. An unfamiliar species of fish leaped out
of the water with amazing regularity, slapping their gills against the
water to facilitate breathing, we were told. Pelicans dived into the
ocean, scooping fish out of the water. The shells ran around on
hermit crab's legs.
We ate shrimp that had been pulled from the sea just hours before, and
fresh crab, too, which we caught ourselves, using chicken necks as
bait. I got so excited when we hauled up crabs in 10 minutes that I
stepped into a rowboat to improve my position. It slid away under my
feet, throwing me into the water fully clothed. I made may way
safely back to the dock in spite of my water filled sneakers, but I swear
there was disappointment on certain faces when I emerged without a single
crab attached.
Much of the island is marsh-land preserved and protected by law.
One afternoon, my husband took our granddaughter, Jess, for a walk along a
boardwalk that stretched across the salt marsh to a creek 150 feet
away. For the first time I understood what environmentalists mean
when they call marshes nature's nursery. Peering over the edge of
the wooden walkway, we saw hundreds of baby fiddler crabs running from our
shadows, innumerable tiny fish darting about in the shallow water, huge
clumps of small black clams nestling in the mud and pale gray snails
clinging to the marsh grasses turning yellow in the fall.
Our path ended at a wooden dock. We were sitting there, watching
a great blue heron feeding on the other side of the creek, when it
occurred to me that Adam and Eve could not have felt more a part of nature
in the Garden of Eden. As a child, I had always been puzzled by what
had happened to the place after Adam and Eve were expelled. Surely,
I thought then, it was still somewhere on Earth and I remember wondering
why modern man, with all his means of exploration, hadn't managed to find
it.
When I was older, I learned that the stories in the Bible were symbolic
of greater truths, and sitting beside Jess in her carriage as the earth
beneath us teemed with life, it seemed to me that perhaps the story of
Adam and Eve had been written down so that thousands of years later our
generation could hearken to its warning.
With the glow of the afternoon sky shining off the water, it seemed
entirely possible that Earth itself is the Garden of Eden, and the apple
from which we have bitten is uncontrolled ``progress," with its toxic
legacy. It won't be necessary for any higher power to evict us from
this paradise, because if we continue in the same old patterns, the beauty
and the fertility of this planet will recede further and further into the
past, leaving us stranded and bereft.
In our week on Seabrook
Island,
I was surprised I didn't feel any desire to swim out to the wild
dolphins. I felt instinctively that my presence would be an
intrusion into their world, and that my desire to reach out could be as
harmful to these creatures as Midas' touch. It seemed enough to
simply coexist in harmony with all living things. As a pair of
dolphins rounded the bend of the creek, however, I prated that someday in
the future, when Jess is old enough to feel their magic, their descendants
will still be there to see mine.
Linda Weltner is a free-lance writer. Her column
appears each week in At Home. |
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