Retirement enables game warden to tell his stories in book form

For nearly a quarter century, Ben Moise's office walls were the "alluvial ooze" of pluff mud creek banks.

His office floor was the metal of a 14-foot johnboat so leaky it had a bilge pump.

But, oh, the ceiling. It soared above waves of green and golden marsh grass as far as the eye could see. It reached into the vastness of a Lowcountry sky exploding with color at sunrise and sunset.

"I saw fullness where others saw emptiness," Moise said of a job that kept him in the sometimes lonely coastal waters from Edisto Island to Georgetown.

Moise was a state game warden. In those wide open spaces, it was his job to hem things in. He was to net the clever scofflaws who abused wildlife protected by law.

He couldn't hold back the development that swamped the coast during his tenure, but he sure could stand as the voice of the fish and fowl before a small-town magistrate.

"It was my persistent belief that the law is not worth the paper it is printed on if it is not enforced," Moise said. "The very presence of officers fosters this thing we call 'voluntary compliance.'"

He's written a memoir, "Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden," that tells with humor and eye-witness detail the clash between conservation and exploitation. He'll be signing copies of the book from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Bay Street Trading Co. in Beaufort.

It's based on his experiences in the "thin green line" of Department of Natural Resources officers from 1978 to 2002. That line has been further decimated by state budget cuts since Moise retired to his ancient Charleston home.

For years, it was Moise, his Boykin spaniel named Belle, and his ticket book vs. the weather, the tides and the Lowcountry characters who could be slick as B'rer Fox when they wanted to outwit the "mud marshal."

Moise has gone from writing tickets to writing and editing books. He joins another line of Carolinians whose pens were more powerful than their beloved firearms in establishing the value of land conservation and wildlife management. Moise cites James Henry Rice Jr., Harry Hampton, Archibald Rutledge, Henry E. Davis, William Elliott and Havilah Babcock for setting that ethos.

"Their writings reveal that for them the seeking was perhaps even more important than the taking," Moise writes.

He no longer goes to the "office" in the marsh to watch who takes what from a wind-frozen duck blind.

But each of us can take a core value from Moise's experience. Those who violate our natural resources, whether they're dressed in camo or three-piece suits, should not be tolerated.