Shem Creek, SC

Sitting out on the wooden chair of the dock at the mouth of Shem Creek, captain Magwood could look out on his old 68-foot trawler the Winds of Fortune, and forget about thinking so much that shrimping had been dying gradually along this stretch of coastal lowlands.  He thought of the simpler parts of the scene instead – that this was the very source of history of South Carolina itself, the very beginning of the colony, and that just now, at sunset, the colors stood much like a painting, orange out onto the horizon, and a rippled slate gray and yellow set of dashes along the immediate surface.  The boat was not so much a place of work from this viewpoint, but a fine work of art, which it was in itself, handmade by craftsman in Mt. Pleasant.  Still holding its color it was, and its trawler lines standing as steady red rods up against the moving seascape.  "No, this is not the time for

thoughts of things gone by," he said to himself, bracing his Cutty Sark in the same weathered fist that held so many shrimping lines that you could not tell a difference between a wrinkle and a scar.

As he sat down on his wooden chair to pick at the ends of his pile of net, it was easy for him to

remember the days before the machinery of pulleys and winches helped shrimpers haul in the day's catch.  The nets then, when he was 14 and still an apprentice, were pulled in by hand, and so heavy with water and jelly fish that he could only muster 2-3 net pulls a day, even then straining muscles to the point that he would have to take days off at a time, and his mother asking questions about lost wages.  Looking down at the palms of his hands now, he could just about feel the shrimp acid of those days pass down into the quicks of his fingers which had festered up raw and red as strawberries nightly.  Those were the difficult days, he thought, as he snapped an end to a piece of netting, but also the very days of romance, the very days that taught me these waters, the flows of the lowlands, and the fortunes, or lack thereof, of the almighty shrimp catch.  Much like mining for gold he thought.  The sea fragrance of the cold damp nets reminded him that he would head home soon – maybe one more Cutty – to whip up his grandmother's secret batch of shrimp and grits, and could taste the sharp inflection of vine ripened tomatoes and the thick cut bacon chips over the white warm grits.