MyEdistoIsland

My Edisto Island

By Kerry DiGiacomo

If I could encapsulate everything Edisto Island is to me, and share its beauty with the world, it would probably read something like this:

Imagine, for a moment, swimming in a cool saltwater creek on a cloudless summer day. You kick against the rushing tide as it slows and lessens and finally stops, and for twenty minutes or so the world stands still. You can float on your back in the water and look up into the bright deep blueness of the summer sky, or roll over and dive into the cool, shadowed, salty water.

Your perspective changes; with your horizons bounded by the spartina grass that rises out of the water on either side, you can focus on the small, often-missed sights and sounds of the tidal creek. You hear the whisper of the wind, the hum of insects, the occasional call of a bird, muffled by the heat and the stillness. You see the way the breeze makes little ripples across the surface of the calm water, small disturbances that fade away as quickly as they appear. Between the tides, time stands still.

But it doesn’t last. The water begins to move again, sliding past your skin – languidly at first, but with ever-increasing urgency, until it is all you can do to keep it from carrying you away. So you paddle to the edge of the floating dock and lift yourself out of the rushing water. You lie on the sun-bleached, timeworn boards, looking up at the cloudless sky and feeling the blazing sunlight pour down upon you, letting time and the tide flow inevitably away for as long as you dare before getting up and going home.

When I swim in the creek, I can’t help but wish that the magical time between the tides, when the world seems to stand still, could last just a little longer. In a way, though, we denizens of Edisto Island are fortunate enough to find ourselves in a place where our wish is reality - where it is possible to live balanced between the opposing “tides” of modernity and times gone by, combining the best aspects of both while succumbing to neither. You might say that we live in the state of peaceful timelessness that I have found between the tides – and what a beautiful lifestyle it is.

From the Charleston Mercury, April 24, 2008

Read the Charleston Mercury article