Thanksgiving memories: Hunting duck and chasing geese in Sea Pines on Hilton Head

Hard for me to believe it’s 2019. I sure hope it’s normal for folks around my age to think, “OMG, where did all that time go?”

In all honesty, I may not look like much these days but below the surface I can’t be any older than somewhere in my late teens or early 20s. Don’t believe me? Ask any of my closest friends.

Why the thoughts about times gone by? It’s Thanksgiving week, by far my favorite holiday of all.

This year, I have my grown-up chillrens a-coming, my two grandchildren and my former wife, Allison. If you think that is odd, don’t. She and I are very close and always have been and, most importantly, she is the mother of my children.

With that out of the way, my mind is full of recollections of Thanksgivings past and in particular how things around here have changed since my very first Lowcountry Thanksgiving in 1961.

This is where I want to attempt to describe certain memorable Thanksgivings and, if described correctly, hopefully paint a picture that hopefully you can imagine. I realize a ton of you haven’t been here for more than a few years so imagining a very different Lowcountry might sound more like fantasy than fact. But with that realization, give it a shot anyway.

Having grown up in Sea Pines on Hilton Head Island and attended grade school in Bluffton, many of my early recollections start in these two places. I would love to include Beaufort, but peddling my bicycle there was out of the question.

The swing bridge coming onto the island had only been there a few years and the two-lane U.S. 278 was one of the few paved roads. Talk about majestic moss-draped oaks, that road was lined with some that were absolute specimens.

There was no Harbour Town and very few hotels or restaurants. Seeing rattlesnakes sunning themselves on the road was commonplace, and deer, wild hogs and such were a dime a dozen.

Hunting was big then, and many a Thanksgiving started at 5 a.m. trying to bag some waterfowl for that day’s feast.

Here’s the clincher: I never had to set foot off the island. Mallards, pintails, widgeon, gadwalls, wood ducks and black ducks covered most of the ponds and lagoons. Never a deer hunter, my friends who did hunt them had it way easier because the deer population easily outnumbered the human inhabitants.

Even more astounding was I didn’t even have to leave Sea Pines to get a bag limit.

One Thanksgiving in particular keeps popping into my head. Some friend of my father would send us a goose each year but one year it never arrived. I was riding my bike in Sea Pines looking for likely fishing spots and came upon a lagoon and there sat a flock of geese. I was not yet old enough to own a gun, so what did I do? I went back to the lagoon as the sun set and crawled at a snail’s pace toward the silhouetted geese. Oh, how my dad would be surprised if I walked in with a goose. Believe it or not, I was able to crawl close enough and pounced on one of the honkers. Talk about a battle between a skinny kid and a full-grown goose, it was epic. In the end, bloodied and bruised a bit, I got it! Now there is a Thanksgiving to remember.

Even as I reached my 20s and 30s, waterfowl hunting or dove shoots were a tradition during Thanksgiving week. I cut my teeth on duck hunting just off the island in ponds at the Cram family’s Footpoint Plantation, in the area later developed as Colleton River Plantation. Talk about beautiful, it was all dirt roads, a few dove fields and dead silence with the possible exception of a screaming pileated woodpecker or two. Can you imagine that? Hope so.

The Bluffton (and Beaufort) back then would be unrecognizable to anyone living in either place now. Talk about sleepy, it was more like comatose.

In Bluffton, hardly a car. Where Eggs n’ Tricities once sat on the corner of Bridge and Calhoun streets was Messex corner store. It was there that I learned just how fine the combination an RC Cola and a Moon Pie really is.

Burnt Church Road was dirt, and on and on the differences go. Maybe I’ll write a book, but in the meantime have a great Thanksgiving and create your own memories. God bless you all.