We can only hope best-seller sparks interest in local shrimp industry

Inside the Hilton Head Island Barnes & Noble, Mary Alice Monroe read from her new novel about a sadly fading South Carolina way of life.

Struggling to be heard over whirring coffee machines, the book-tour veteran plowed ahead in her second appearance of the day, always smiling:

For three generations the pull of the tides drew Morrison men to the sea. Attuned to the moon, they rose before first light to board wooden shrimp boats and head slowly out across black water, the heavy, green nets poised like folded wings. Tales of the sea were whispered to them in their mothers' laps, they earned their sea legs as they learned to walk, and they labored on the boats soon after. Shrimping was all they knew or ever wanted to know. It was in their blood.

At the same time Wednesday afternoon, the National Weather Service was tracking a funnel cloud near Bluffton, moving east at 10 mph. It was spotted over Port Royal Sound, where it disappeared into an eerie sky.

Something else is disappearing from our sounds and beaches. We're losing the shrimp trawlers Monroe writes about in "Last Light Over Carolina."

It's No. 32 on The New York Times bestseller list, entertaining Monroe's many fans, but also helping drag the plight of a beautiful slice of her own Lowcountry to a sea of new readers worldwide.

Real lives in the fishing village of McClellanville act as a radar on the Lowcountry for Monroe as her imagination navigates the troubled marriage of shrimp boat captain Bud Morrison and his wife, Carolina.

Two local folks also helped Monroe accurately portray the enclaves of shrimp people tucked for generations along our coastline. One was Hilda Gay Upton of St. Helena Island. Her father and husband were shrimpers, and she gave the world the Shrimp Shack restaurant and its famous shrimp burger. Also helping was Sally Murphy of Sheldon, retired biologist and sea turtle expert with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources. Both were there Wednesday when Monroe spoke to a packed house of 150 at Port Royal's Dockside Restaurant in the University of South Carolina Beaufort's "Lunch With Author" series.

Monroe is better known for bestsellers centered around the trials of loggerhead turtles, which she has been monitoring for years outside her Isle of Palms home.

She urged her audiences to sign a petition to protest a new threat in Costa Rica to the last nesting beach for leatherback turtles in the eastern Pacific.

And she passionately urged: "Always demand local, wild American shrimp."

Here in the Lowcountry, that should be in our blood, come rain or shine.