With a few important national elections still pending across the fruited plain, your Mercury Team continues to evaluate the results and their overall impact on our nation going forward. Though many conservatives agree the overall election results weren’t exactly the red wave they wanted … or expected … it’s clear that right here in the Charleston Lowcountry, we have many victories to celebrate. With our unwavering focus on the local community for more than two decades, we have much to write about regarding post mid-terms elections.
It’s time to take a breath and look towards the holiday season with vim and vigor. If you thought the red wave resembled more of a ripple (so far), the red and green wave is about to bowl all of us over. Charleston’s social calendar is packed with all sorts of fun and exciting things to do with friends and family … literally something for everyone to get into the holiday spirit.
This holiday season, remember to … shop locally … enjoy an incredible meal at one (or more) of our many fine restaurants … re-engage with our local history by visiting a museums or other historic sites. Be grateful. Give generously, including of yourself. Remember, a kind word or a simply act of kindness can change a life.
In this issue the Charleston Mercury Newsletter, we’ll start with a local election recap, hoping to whet your appetite for an interview with new Charleston County Councilman Joe Boykin in our December newspaper. Also, our own Buster Raymond is back with a wintery tale. We’ll wrap with a “Crab Pot” by Prioleau Alexander, and our readers’ favorite, Lowcountry Rambler.
Be sure to check out our Facebook page. It’s a great way for you to stay in touch.
Our picks go the distance
By Charleston Mercury Staff
It didn’t take Nostradamus to help us key in on many of winners in our state and local races. We’re pleased Tim Scott has been re-elected to another six-year term as United States senator for the great state of South Carolina, and we fully expect he will be eyeing a move for 2024.
U.S. House District One will see the return of Nancy Mace, who earned a second term after wrestling the district out of the hands of a one-term democrat. Henry McMaster will remain in the governor’s mansion for his final four-year term leading the state.
Kathy Landing will take the reins of South Carolina’s District 80 for her first term in the statehouse. She will join District 94 incumbent Gil Gatch, District 110 newcomer Tom Harnett, District 112 incumbent Joe Bustos, newcomer Gary Brewer, and District 116 newcomer Matt Leber. This amazing mix of experience and the energy of four enthusiastic go-getters, the Charleston Lowcountry appears to be in good hands. We are especially pleased to see Tom Hartnett follow in his father’s footsteps and bring the influence of Lowcountry values and traditions to his new role in the General Assembly.
The most important race locally is for Charleston County Council, where our endorsed conservative candidate Larry Kobrovsky will be joined by Joe Boykin and Jenny Costa Honeycutt, changing the majority on County Council to be a force for conservation. You may have missed that connection, but we are sure that the timing could not better for a conservation coalition to turn up the heat on hyper growth in paradise.
Judge Irv Condon is set to return as the leader of the Charleston County Probate Court. He is a humble and truly hard-working public servant and absolutely honored by your support, as we heard first-hand at the Nov. 10 prayer breakfast in North Charleston.
We also proudly endorsed five of the nine members of the Charleston County School Board. They are: Keith Grybowski, Ed Kelley, Pam McKinney, Carlotte Bailey and Leah Whatley. Pray they elect Mrs. McKinney as chair; her leadership skills are well honed.
Indeed, pray for our leaders, as we did this morning at the 21st Annual Charleston Leadership Prayer Breakfast. It was also a bittersweet event because their long-serving executive director, Kathryn Krogh, has stepped down after ten years of extraordinary service to our community. We wish her well in her new job with Carolina One.
Photo by Denis Agati on Unsplash.
Shackelton reaches the divide
By James Raymond
On TV you see a lot of those gas-powered ice drills. In real life, around here, not so much. Personally, I can’t see lugging a 50-pound device a half-mile out on the ice, in theory to save the work of running the usual manual drill, on the off chance you won’t put just as much work into trying to start that bloody touchy two-cycle in 10-below zero weather. That was — more or less — my objection to snow sleds; eventually, I was stuck with a 400-pound sled that wouldn’t start too many miles down the trail one too many times. All these machines are great fun when they work, like on TV.
In real life, though, your safe bet is to bring your manual drill, total weight one pound, and save yourself schlepping 50 useless pounds of steel parts bolted into an ice-drill shape a mile to no purpose. Of course, at 10 below, the chances are you can drive your rig right out onto the ice and right up to your icehouse. If you’re brave.
The lake I grew up on has a well-known and, in mid-winter, well-used cut-across from a bar’s boat ramp on one shoreline to a public ramp on the far shore, about a mile, saving five miles by road where deputy law might be lurking. I can tell you from experience that being in a pickup in mid-lake on a clear night is downright spooky. I haven’t taken that particular shortcut since I was 25 and immortal. It’s almost spookier, real-life suspense, when you see a single set of headlights far out on the blackness of the ice at night: You almost can’t help but watch it, waiting for it to suddenly disappear.
Drilling ice holes is actually easy. The main thing is to put the file to the cutter blade before you leave the house; as long as its sharp it cuts in a hurry. The hard part is always scooping all the little ice chunks from the hole, which I never knew why we bothered because it isn’t as if doing so makes it any easier to see into the pitch darkness through that six-inch hole. As a lad it was bare handed; now, of course, I bring a sieve with a handle. I’ve had frostbite enough already, thanks.
Ice-fishing is a “sport” in which “sportsmen” engage. Well, sort of; I mean, I’ve eaten fish caught on the ice. In terms of requiring cut abs and a heartbeat of 40, as a sport it ranks right up there with Olympic bowling only even less athletic. I mean, the “sport” involves sitting on a bucket in below-freezing weather in a spot sure to be windy and watching a hole in an otherwise featureless nothingscape. If there are “sport” points they’re awarded for the mental discipline/punishment-taking categories. Or maybe by association for its vague resemblance to the manner by which polar bears make a living: by watching blowholes in the ice for seals, their prey, coming up for air. Ice fishing is a solo endurance sport, like Ironman or Spartan races, lacking only any need for physical discipline whatever.
I know I have this piece of advice, which I came by the very hard way: Wear the ugliest, clunkiest, but warmest boots you can possibly find, and three layers of socks, two wool, when ice-fishing. The key to staying warm out there is warm feet; everything else you can rationalize, but when your feet feel like blocks of ice, you have to quit. You’re not really running an Ironman, so it doesn’t matter if they’re walkable.
Most ice fishermen set up little special jig rods which do the catching, so you sit, mostly waiting, for the jig to jump and the flag to pop up. It breaks the monotony a bit if you drill as many holes as you have jigs so there’s more than one to watch. Yes, of course we have a few.
For me more holes are easy; one of my sons will drill holes just for the hell of it, to watch the blade work. He is also a superb tools/materials gearhead, and he loves to icefish because he gets to tinker with a half-dozen jigs and all kinds of other special-purpose toys. He looks like Shackleton heading over the ice, towing a sled piled with gear, which may well include glass-plate photographic negatives: He’s a curious and imaginative tinkerer. He’s certainly materialized a great variety of gear off that sled. He’s too busy to just sit ice-fishing … he’s that kind of son.
I’m sure were I literati, I’d find it all metaphoric of something. There you are, in a snow-covered, windswept icy desert, under an overcast gray dome, with naught but a fishing line, a tiny black hole in an otherwise great white/gray fabric of existence, and, basically, hope and faith. You certainly can’t see the fish you’re after and undertake considerable trouble and discomfort against blind chance. I was going to write “like voting for the Independent Party candidate,” but then I remembered I’d said I couldn’t find the metaphor.
One must wonder whether the famous Arctic explorers cared to icefish. I mean, Amundson went to both poles, and so did Sir Edmund Hillary: Their daily lives in those travels read like adventure novels. I think they died with 16 digits, total, left between them. Fish only seemed to form a part of their diets, and then mostly only when under duress. Maybe ice-fishing was just too bloody lame a sport for world-class explorers — yet another reason to be glad I’m not a world-class explorer.
Ghostprints
Like all hunters I see and interpret sign everywhere. Once, headed onto ice in a local reservoir, which had gotten a thin, even coating of snow the night before, I happened to catch the light and shadow just right and saw the tiny tracks of a vole emerging from the snow-covered rocky shoreline headed straight out onto the lake. Intrigued at this behavior — there’s nowhere on the ice to hide, ever, and nothing to eat, especially if you’re a vole — I tracked this tiniest of critters through vole-deep tracking snow that held sign like a fingerprint card about ten yards onto the ice where the tracks abruptly ceased, ended, as if the vole had been spirited away.
Which indeed he had. I studied the scene at the end of his tracks, like you do with signs you don’t at first understand, trying to patch your imagination to the facts you can actually see, trying out combinations until it clicks if it’s going to. It’s best to stand still; if you stumble about, you’ll probably ruin and obliterate something, an amateur’s mistake, and never take a step until you’re sure you’re not stepping on something vital. So, I squatted and squinted and looked, moving my head to change the angles of light and shadow on the monochromatic surface.
About 20 inches to each side of the last few vole tracks, whose profiles and shadows differed subtly from all that had come before, I discovered very light patches of brushed snow surface, slightly angled, a couple-few square inches in size, just covered by my hand, mirrors each of the other. The instrumentality that made those marks had swept off and scattered the very, very top surface of the very, very thin snow. The tumblers clicked. The vole had, indeed, been spirited away by a raptor, probably an owl, judging by the indicated wingspan — a big one.
The marks to each side were left by the wingtips of another hunter reading sign and swooping that vole straight up off the ice in-flight. You could even see, a couple feet ahead, the barest marks, identifiably feather tips, centered over two itty bitty bloodspots, where the very extremities of her wingtips had kissed the snow gently in her first power stroke out of the diving glide, lifting back off the ice, vole clutched in her talons. You’ll pardon the pun: It was a rather chilling tableaux, red in tooth and claw.
My children were fascinated by the mortal drama those few, tiny marks indicated had passed this way — once you toted up the sign it was as plain to see as if we’d witnessed the actual snatch. The drama was not hard to picture: The little nocturnal vole poking around for food, his ever-watchful eyes catching the silhouette of a great bird flitting across the diamond-hard points of starlight against a coal-black Montana winter’s sky — you could see where he paused and turned slightly and realized he was a marked man — the panic, the wrong-way bolt — the marks stretched out, rear prints deep, full speed — not back into the safety of the rocks but instead right out onto the ice. His fate was sealed.
Above, in that ocean of frozen air, the solitary hunter squares that moving tiny speck in the wide-open as if it were a bullseye target, lines up from behind, sets her wingspan in a solid vee, and dives to the ice, talons-first. I can see it precisely; my kids are acting it out by now. My daughter, even in her pink Arctic wear, makes a reasonably credible great snowy owl, especially the well-practiced baleful eyeball on her older brother parodying the vole’s panic in elaborate theatrical satire. They both know … panic almost never helps.
This moment is the central fact of her very existence. She judges her skills and her environment and her target better than any Navy pilot on a carrier glide path on his best day, flaring her span — her great silent wingtips brushing forward the top millimeter of snow — and snatching that mid-stride snack up off the ice like your kid going past a plate of cookies, pivoting forward over the kill and bolstering right back up into that freezing air current with one, powerful, well-practiced stroke, firewalling the afterburners, in which but the tips of her outermost wing feathers brush now a half-millimeter backwards off the surface.
She may have keened, rising with her prey; they often do. I wonder if it is the same savage joy I know.
She could have plucked that vole right out of the palm of your hand or top of your head and you’d have felt naught but the wind of her passing. I have seen bald eagles steal caught fish out of drift boats in exactly the same way. That vole was a dead man the second he panicked. She’s a perfect hunter in the prime of her skills fully at home in her habitat.
So, it’s not really a featureless desert, despite initial appearances. Mother Nature is still doing her thing out on the ice. Even in midwinter the ecosystem is working well; the vole/raptor drama is a sign the food chain is in good health. In terms of volume, for most times of the year, in most places, raptors are the apex predators, and if they are thriving it is only because the substructure is, too, soils, water, everything.
One might say the same of the fools out on the ice catching meat. Ice-fishing is not all just freezing limbs to blue in a great gray void: A guy could even grow to like it. Even that huge monochrome nothingness has a certain beauty. Particularly if your all-purpose sons are catching the fish and the beer drone ever became reality and all you really have to do is admire the non-view, ponder which metaphor exactly you’re sitting in, be thankful you’re too big for owls and meanwhile not freeze solid yourself.
A lover from afar of the Holy City, which is right where we want them, James “Buster” Raymond is a proud third-generation Montanan, Boat and Basic School graduate, and bigshot attorney, back among civilized people on the Reservation after four year’s exile in Tidewater, “like a desert survivor finding an oasis.” We expect to read of his continuing adventures in the Big Sky Country.
Photo by sgrunden on pixabay.com
Crab Pot
By Prioleau Alexander
In our most recent “Pluff Mud Chronicles,” we wrote of our shared experiences of wearing kilts, reveling in our Scottish heritage, and participating in the Scottish games. This got me thinking of other heritage festivals in which I’ve participated, the most famous being San Fermin … aka The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain.
While there, John Walters, Al Phillips and I attended a bullfight. Although none of us are pro-bullfighting, it is a part of Spanish heritage … and here’s how it works:
The whole circus starts when some governmental heavy drops a handkerchief into the ring from his well-appointed skybox. It’s usually the mayor, or the governor, or the Presidenté, but if those guys are out of town, it might be someone like the under secretary of bull safety. They play trumpets and stuff, and after a few minutes they release this really strapping, pissed-off bull into the ring, which promptly storms around and snorts at everyone.
Next, these lunatics called banderilleros come running in, each with a couple of really sharp pointy sticks adorned with streamers of brightly colored crepe paper. They boogie up to this perfectly healthy, angry bull, stab it just behind the head in the neck area, then run like hell. The bull gets very angry, but these guys are usually too quick to gore. It’s worth noting one of their goals is to look “elegant” during the process, which is no small task when you’re wearing steel reinforced Depends.
Next some guys called picadors trot out on horses, and the bull’s mood brightens considerably; a horse offers a target he cannot miss. The bull works up a full head of steam running across the ring, and smashes into the horse, usually causing the horse and rider to slam against the side of the ring. Fortunately for the horse — and unfortunately for the bull — the horse is clad in some sort of anti-goring chainmail called a peto, and while the bull is trying to figure out why the horse isn’t dying of two sucking-chest wounds, the picador jabs the bull in the neck with his (pica) spear.
Finally, the picadors leave, and the bull is tired, bleeding, and praying a tourist will get in the ring.
Next, the matador cha-chas in, wearing his Michael Jackson costume and montera hat — that looks a lot like Mickey Mouse ears, but is supposed to look like dueling man-buns. As a rule, these are good-looking, flashy, macho guys — I mean, how bad ass do you have to be to look sexy in Micky Mouse ears?
The bull’s mood improves considerably, and the pair squares off. The bull stomps his hoof, snorts, charges and the crowd yells “Olé!!” (The word “Olé” doesn’t mean anything in particular, although it certainly makes more sense than “Roll Tide.”) The bull charges the cape, and the matador attempts to see how close he can lure the bull’s horns to his most valued possession — with a goal of retaining possession of the aforementioned possession.
The bull, after a while, gets tired. The matador takes note of this, does a little tango up to the bull, and thrusts his sword between its shoulder blades. A skilled matador uses only one thrust, during which the sword penetrates the bull’s heart, and death is instantaneous. The crowd desires a quick and honorable death for bull, and jeer if the matador requires more than one thrust. If a matador performs in an exceptionally elegant and effective manner, the bigwig presiding over the fight may give him the nod to take one of the bull’s ears. If the matador is set on some post-fight romance, he can give it to his lady… or, really, any hottie he sees down in the first couple rows. Whether 1-800-BULLS-EAR would be a big money maker on Valentine’s Day remains to be seen.
As I said, I’m not a fan of bullfighting, but let’s consider the overall life of a fighting bull compared to the bull you ate yesterday with special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun.
A Spanish fighting bull lives semi-wild for four years—grazing on a free-range estate littered with acorns, which is a bull’s equivalent of, well, steak. That’s four years of total freedom before there’s any chance it steps into the ring. If the bull is strong and tests worthy of fighting, it’s got … what? Fifteen minutes of combat?
The cow you ate yesterday spent its last year knee-deep in manure at a feedlot, endured endless injections of hormones and steroids, then stood in line with 1,000 other bulls, terrorized by the smell of death while waiting for its chance to get a bolt gun to the skull.
Which life would you prefer?
Newsletter Rambler
Not a stroke of luck
Pennsylvania has decided to send John Fetterman to the United States Senate, despite his recent stroke and the prognosis that he “may fully recover.” This reality has given your Rambler Team a stroke, from which we are certain we won’t recover.
Flooding rioters with praise
Harvard professor and author Susan Crawford has released Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm, which she describes as “an unflinching look at the beautiful, endangered, tourist-pummeled, and history-filled port city which now finds itself at the intersection of the twin crises of climate and race.” The press release seems to make the theme clear: Global warming is racist.
The dash and the marathon race
There will be a Dec. 6 runoff between Georgia’s Democratic incumbent Senator Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker. If Senator Warnock is fast enough to beat the Heisman Trophy winner in a runoff, he will have to choose between serving America in the Senate and serving America in the Senior Olympics. It is a marathon of a U.S. Senate race.
Can they just leave us alone?
Democrats spent nearly $200 million on perennial losers Beto O'Rourke and Stacey Abrams —money that failed to make their gubernatorial races against Republican incumbents competitive. Your Rambler suggests next time the DNC simply write personal checks to the people they claim to represent.
FB jail for the boss?
Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Facebook is firing 11,000 employees. The announcement was deemed “unacceptable to our community standards” by Facebook moderators, who promptly put Mr. Zuckerberg in Facebook jail for 30 days.
Sen. Ron Johnson won but in other news …
Mary K. Brown, a Wisconsin nurse, has been accused of amputating a dying frostbite patient’s foot without permission — and allegedly telling coworkers she would display the body part in her family’s taxidermy shop. Prosecutors say she plans to fight to charge, but they don’t believe she has a leg to stand on.
That’s our latest edition! We hope you’ve enjoyed it, and convey that joy to a friend.
Warm regards,
Team Mercury