Hey Hilton Head! Let your voices be heard! Save the big red buoy

Hilton Head Island didn’t deserve this.

A U.S. Coast Guard buoy that was washed up on the beach by Tropical Storm Irma on Sept. 11 has become our greatest tourist attraction since the fake lighthouse went up in Harbour Town in 1969.

Instantly, the unplanned attraction in a community famous for every blade of grass being planned, became our own little Eiffel Tower of bright red metal.

To children, awed by its barnacles, it is a 13,000-pound Mother Goose.

To their parents, it is a photo-op worth waiting in a long line to get.

Baby strollers are parked in front of it like it was a drive-in theater.

One couple, bless their hearts, got married at the buoy.

“I called it my prayer room,” the bride said of that section of beach near Coligny Beach Park.

“It was the perfect place to have our wedding,” she told our newspaper. “(The perfect place) to end the pain and to begin a new life of joy — in the place that I prayed for (love) for 15 months.”

Today, a truck rumbles this way to pick up the escaped Buoy No. 8 and take it back to its life of drudgery helping ships navigate eight miles out at sea.

My question is: Why?

Why would we move it?

It only costs $24,000, a sum the Chamber of Commerce spins out every hour on the hope and dream that somebody will see something here that they actually want to flock to, like, um, the accidental buoy.

Buy the Coast Guard a shiny new buoy, but leave our special new friend alone.

If others can read into the buoy’s appearance a sign of resilience and perseverance, surely I can quote some Scripture:

“What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.”

Clearly, the buoy is here as an act of God.

Who, therefore, are we to treat it like some peon without a gate pass?

This story was originally published October 5, 2017 at 12:15 PM with the headline "Hey Hilton Head! Let your voices be heard! Save the big red buoy."