It’s raining on Hilton Head’s parade, again: Deadly storm gives coronavirus perspective
It rained on our parade anyway.
This Monday morning is supposed to be one of the most glorious days of the year on Hilton Head Island.
It’s the day we weave a new tartan thread into the community fabric. Citadel bagpipers should be screeching in a parade with grand poobahs and common folk from the Harbour Town Yacht Basin to the 18th green of the Harbour Town Golf Links in Sea Pines.
We’re supposed to be sitting in the sunshine, watching brown pelicans sweep low over sparkling Calibogue Sound, during the opening ceremony of the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing PGA Tour event.
This tradition — peculiar to us, and probably seen as pretty peculiar, period — is more than half a century old. In Hilton Head’s modern era, that’s about as old as traditions get. We cling like Linus to its warm security.
But it wasn’t to be.
The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic took all that away. There will be no Heritage this week.
PGA Tour
Perhaps the govnuh would have been at the ceremony, right on time, and maybe U.S. Sen. Tim Scott and certainly our legislative delegation and the Hilton Head and Bluffton mayors, and a CEO or two. The secretary of agriculture would probably have sung the “Star Spangled Banner” a cappella.
Defending champion C.T. Pan — a great American success story from South Korea — would have received a print of West Fraser’s painting of him in action last year, back when we had action, and a world, and the South’s greatest outdoor party.
He would have put plugs in his ears and driven a golf ball into the Sound at the mud-jarring boom of a smoky cannon.
Speakers in red tartan jackets would have talked about the tournament’s place in South Carolina’s culture and economy, surely using the term “100 million dollars” to describe its impact. The word “charity” would have been used a lot, because that means a lot to the title sponsors and the nonprofit organization that stages the tournament, the Heritage Classic Foundation.
It might not have been talked about, but I think of the thousands of people who have lost income without the tournament: caddies, caterers to caddies, the guy in Ridgeland who trucks over tanks of fuel to keep gigantic generators humming so CBS Sports can beam the goings-on to the world.
Tornado watch
But on this day that was supposed to be so glorious came even more dark clouds.
On Monday morning, Beaufort County was under a tornado watch. Five deaths from a tornado were reported in neighboring Hampton County. The sky was many shades of gray. It was pouring rain.
At Harbour Town, it was pouring rain. Thunder grumbled in the distance and cracked overhead. Power was out in Bluffton. A tree fell across Ribaut Road in Beaufort. This storm that could swallow a skybox whole had been deadly across the South.
So it would have rained on our parade anyway.
And doesn’t that help with perspective on the hated virus? Doesn’t the tragedy in Hampton County do the same?
Normally, our brows would have been furrowed at a storm on parade day. We would have felt put-upon. We would be pleading into the fickle skies for a divine mulligan.
Now we know better. The pandemic has taught us that much of our troubles are actually a gimme in the larger canvas of life on Earth.
Maybe the dark lining of Monday’s storm can ironically show us a ray of light in this grim pandemic. Maybe it can help show us that this too shall pass, and all the fretting and finger-pointing in the world won’t stop nature.
It reminds us that, come rain or shine, they will someday once again tune up the bagpipes and put on their red coats and straw hats. And a small man from Korea will hit a tiny golf ball into deep waters with great gusto.
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 9:47 AM.
