A Fullness of the Earth

Left: Crabbers harvest a bountiful catch of blue crabs.

That same bond tugged at Horace Pinkney while he spent most of his life in New York City, after leaving his homeplace here. "I wanted to see home, home, home," says this soft-spoken man of his yearn to return.

Blood and toil tie him to this land, where, as a child, he helped his mother and grandmother in the ricefields. "Every morning, the kids had to go mind the birds off the rice," he recalls. "We'd sit in the field and see them come in droves, and we'd whoop and holler and throw things at them."

Now, Horace maintains the plots of his family and friends at Pine Cemetery and serves as an elder at St. Mary AME Church. He also patiently counsels younger neighbors. Perhaps he advises them to build futures here, where there is a fullness of the earth and a life lived close to it.

"There's no way you can go hungry in this country," he says, referring to the seasons for deer, duck, and quail. "Food is all around. I'm going to do my best to live here until God calls me."

So will Charles Lane, who hopes the ACE Basin remains a place apart--neither an empty environmental Eden, where all species are welcome except man, nor a new land of leisure that redefines "plantation" as a seaside golf community.

"If we don't keep our land, it won't be 'Southern living.' It will be 'temperate climate living,' " he comments with a smile. " 'Southern' is about something. If we lose this, we have lost who we are."

Hopefully in an autumn dusk of the next century, an ACE Basin resident named Sanford, Pinkney, or Lane will cross the Combahee after a long journey, watch a moving script of wings above a golden spartina sea, and feel in the heart the soar of home.

SEEING THE ACE BASIN 

• ACE Basin National Wildlife Refuge: (843) 889-3084 or www.fws.gov/acebasin.
• For information on the Edisto River Canoe & Kayak Trail, Donnelley and Bear Island Wildlife Management Areas, and the National Estuarine Research Reserve, call (843) 549-9595, or visit www.walterboro.org.
• Edisto Chamber of Commerce: (843) 869-3867 or www.edistochamber.com.

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