Chapter One: The Morning Bus Tour

It was late February, cold and wet at home in Oregon, but a pleasatly warm spring in Georgia. Unable to pull ourselves away from Savannah in time, we didn't come close to catching the evening passenger ferry to Sapelo. As my wife drove south on I-95, I called Cornelia, and she said, sure, tomorrow was fine, too. I also changed our ferry reservation. After dark, we pulled off at the Crescent/Townsend exit and booked into one of the two $35 a night motels there. We had dinner at a pleasant restaurant on the Sapelo River. The next morning we caught the 8:30 ferry.

When you get to the island, the first thing you notice is that most of the cars parked at the dock don't have license plates.


Dolores, who led the morning bus tour, explained why. "Nobody wants to bother with us. When there's an accident, the insurance company won't pay even if somebody broad-sided you. That happened to the bus, which the State of Georgia had insured. There's no stop-signs, and no proper street signs, they say. So nobody bothers to get insurance. Or even register their cars. You need all that once you're off the island, but here, hey, there's not even any gas stations or car repair shops. We make do ourselves."

I wondered how the cars got on the island in the first place, since they obviously wouldn't fit on the passenger ferry. "There's a barge for our use," Dolores explained. "And if there's a medical emergency, a helicopter flies in," she said, anticipating our next question.

Dolores drove as well as entertaining us with stories. The first road was called the "North-South Autobahn." Well, isn't that a road sign? It was paved in parts. The old bus took us to our first stop, Behavior Cemetery.

I wondered: Is this where you ended up if your owner thought you had a behavior problem? In a manner of speaking, yes. It was named for an old settlement here. Slaves who escaped from the fields hid in the woods. They were the "behavior" slaves.

Our next stop was the field station of the University of Georgia, which studied the ecology of the marshland here. A sign explained the different types of land.



At the visitor center, where we stopped after returning to the mainland, there was a map with the different types in different colors. This shows you where the different types were. The red means high ground. The green denotes tide flats. The yellow is what interested me, beaches.


The field station is what is left of the old sugar plantation.


A few walls remain from the beginning.


They're made of "tabby," which is a mixture of sand, water, oyster shells, and lime. It was pretty durable stuff.


Later owners built wooden living quarters for the slaves and, later, field workers. These became the living quarters and laboratories of the field station.




On the field station's dock, Dolores demonstrated for us how they catch fish in these marshes, using a met. You have to arrange it first, so it won't tangle up when you throw it out.



Then if all goes well, the net casts over a pretty wide swath of water. It helps to have grown up doing this, like Delores.


We board the bus again for our next stop.