How low is it?

When Southern Living Magazine drops into my mail slot, I open it immediately to the house plans. Frequently, the home plan of the month is a "Lowcountry Cottage".  Lowcountry cottages are elevated about 10 feet, and  now I know why.  The Georgia and South Carolina coast is a swamp.  From a satellite photo, the inland waterways reaching out to the coastline resemble spider veins. Rivers and marshes form a web, and the little swatches of land between them are thickly foliaged with pines, oaks, magnolias, sweet gums and palmettos. You could be lost for years in Lowcountry.

I had a misconception that I would have oceans views from Florida to Nova Scotia, but in the Lowcountry, I have to work really hard to see the ocean.  My route so far looks like a blanket stitch pattern, with highway driving north alternated with forays east onto islands such as Tybee for a peak of ocean and a lighthouse.  Those excursions would be ecstasy if I golfed, fished or bird-watched.  Since I don't, I have contented myself with an overdose of antebellum architecture, dripping with wrought iron and laden with graceful porches.  Savannah, spared by General Sherman, is graced with more than twenty oak filled squares around which homes constructed in early 1800 hold court.  Beaufort's homes are even older. In Beaufort, the graveyard at St. Helena Episcopal church, circa 1700, contains graves of soldiers marked by the Union Jack, the Confederate flag and the Stars and Stripes.  The church was used as a hospital in the Civil War, marble grave slabs the operating tables.

With a fort on every island and markers everywhere commemorating the War between the States,  I am in a Scarlet O'Hara frame of mind.  Fiddle Dee Dee, I guess I'll see that ocean a little farther north.