View From The Ravenel and The San-Joaquin

To view the song while reading about it in the Location of the Day, right-click the title above and select 'open in new tab'

I have grown totally tired of downtown Charleston (about eight months ago), and North Charleston too, it becoming drab again after just a week of being back. However, Sullivan's Island has always held a special place in my heart, as well as the drive through Mt. Pleasant to get there. Here is Sully's Island http://tinyurl.com/ydsbljf (right-click, open in new tab). It is a small island that is mostly residential, has no hotels, and is protected by the government (The Park Service if I remember correctly) such that development is kept sustainable and low-impact. My favorite part of the Island is a result of these government land-development regulations: one has to walk through about 500 feet of vegetation (mostly brush, but some pathways to the beach have nice fields at the beginning) to get to the often-unpeopled beach.

Another part of Chareston I am still fascinated and excited by is the Arthur Ravenel, Jr. Bridge. The longest cable-stayed bridge in the western hemisphere, it towers over Charleston, and could easily be the tallest point, not even mentioning the two towers that hold the suspension cables. It is a grand work of architecture, and always arouses the deepest admiration in me (I wanted to be an architect as a 3rd-6th grader). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Ravenel_Jr._Bridge

Biking to the beach from downtown felt like such freedom. Even with the clouds hiding the great blue from view, being able to see all of Charleston and the complete panorama, seeing many miles up the Cooper River and all of Charleston harbor where, off in the distance, overcast skies ripped open and eerie light flowed down on the water in thin beams. I could see Mt. Pleasant, the lighthouse (which holds much sentimental value) on Sullivan's Island, and the green trees that stretch far beyond all of it, and all of this made me glad I am still in Charleston (but probably not glad enough to miss it when I'm gone). The giddy-with-fear emotion I felt as I looked down at the water from at the highest point of the bridge could be shared with the man who looked down at the sea from a cliff in Edgar Allen Poe's The Maelstrom. After waving to a ship as it passed right under my feet -- it couldn't have been more than 50 feet shorter than the height of the bridge -- I zoomed downhill (top gear and speed, I maxed out sooner than a quarter of the way down), and before I knew it, I was in Sullivan's Island. The closer I got, the more the sky bled light and the more frequently the glorious blue sky revealed itself. My friend was right, its always sunnier in Mt. Pleasant, and I counted on it. I swear, everything got more and more beautiful as I got nearer that bless-ed sandbar. By time I got to the dinky draw bridge that crossed the international waterway, there were shadows and full sunlight. As I got into Sullivan's Island, I made no turns, I went straight down the road until it became grass. By this point, I don't remember there being any sound, just light and clouds and green. Biking the boardwalk over brush and bushes to where it ends in sand, I can only say it was surreal. It was the most beautiful thing in the world. It climaxed here, and the other-worldly beauty of it all held precariously as I bared my feet and walked in the water and continued my gaze at the clouds. I knew I had only a certain amount of time to get back downtown for the earlier bus home, so I was just to put my feet in the water, then bike back out. After immersing my feet in the water, I knew all of that didn't matter. Time disappeared -- its just an illusion anyway. Pick your favorite cloudset, watch it pass across the sun and out to sea. Half of the sky was unclouded by now. Pick your favorite shade of blue, whether it be near the horizon or straight up, and let your eyes soak up the light. After what could have been one minute or half an hour, I walked back to Middle Street and bicycled back downtown.

Musically-Inspired Geographical Location of the Day

Beyond this Location, I feel I have already come to a point where I cannot think of any more places besides the big town (though not as big then) of Atlanta, Georgia, the musical mecca of Nashville, Tennessee, and others that have been sung about enough times and in the same ways as to make them cliche lyrics. Today's location runs in sequence with Kerouac's On The Road, from the madness and sadness of San Francisco to the fleeting love of the San Joaquin valley.

I first heard about San Joaquin in the road-of-life song -- in all of its holy twists and turns that in the end are part of the master's plan -- Wrecking Ball, by Gillian Welch. I've talked about this song before, with its rite of passage in leaving home, perhaps "just a boy passing twenty," making it on ones own, and struggling, but oh the joy of and within that struggle, the simple pleasure of hardship, the inevitable disappointment, one after the other, and failure after failure. Gillian has a wonderful talent in assuming the identity of the song's character, who will narrate their own story (especially considering she assumes the identity of a young man in one stanza, maybe even Jack Kerouac himself) She is often directly or indirectly (in the case of becoming another character, or maybe being "under a pseudonym") speaking about her own experiences. To make clear the relevancy to On The Road, after Jack leaves Frisco, he meets a Mexican girl on a bus and falls recklessly in love with her and they experience struggling together for a few weeks in the San Joaquin valley, among the grape vines. He goes back home to New York in October; for "everyone goes back home in October". Ah, the literary and emotional power of the melancholy.