Quo Vadis, Where are we going?: Sourdough and Submarines

The highlight of our day was our visit with old friends, Laverne and Jean Buckwalter, at their home in Timmonsville, SC. Unfortunately the pictures I took did not come out well. So here they are last January, 2014, when we stopped on our way north with our new home, the soon to be named FROG. The only difference in pics was that it was 40 degrees last January and today it was 80.

They say pictures are worth a thousand words. Let me try to reverse that for you and give you some words that just might be worth a thousand pictures, aromas, tastes, and that may just drive you to the refrigerator from wherever you are reading this right now.

Jean is a marvelous cook, baker, chef. Her dishes are honed by a talent learned from her Lancaster County mother and her life of cooking for her country family in the south. She invited us to lunch today but had not had time to prepare anything. So here was our menu:

-Home made sour dough bread. Its what she serves everyday.

-Home made vegetable stew, and I believe whatever vegetables were in it were home grown.

-Home made egg salad. Sweet and fresh.

-Swiss Cheese and crackers. OK. She said these were bought at a store.

-Home made mint tea with mint from the garden.

-Home made apple cobbler and real cool whip, not the light stuff we used to buy.

-Several kinds of Hershey’s dark chocolates with nuts and fruits. She didn’t personally make those either.

-And she sent a bag of home made cinnamon and sourdough rolls along with us in case we got hungry before supper.

Anyone hungry? I am! Mona, where are those rolls???

We ate lunch about an hour later than planned because we had come upon a potential tragedy on the highway as we were driving north to Timmonsville. A man and his dog were in the cab of their pickup stopped in the middle of our busy two lane road. The dog was wagging his tail inside the closed cab, the man looked asleep and had been unresponsive. The pickup engine was running and the radio was playing softly.

A truck driver had parked his rig in the road with flashers on to protect the pickup from being hit but his cell phone was dead and he had just stopped so Mona and I called the police and he began directing traffic around the scene.

I tapped on the windshield of the cab again and the driver slowly began to wake up, or come around. He just as slowly opened his window and the small dog came over the back of his neck to see who I was. He could speak, but very carefully, so I just kept the conversation going slowly, and lightly, until the EMT’s, police and fire dept. arrived. I think the Air Force Blue Angels and a Navy SEAL Team came after we left.

The pickup driver was responding better by the time we left and I left a card with the officer in charge. We assume he had a spell of some sort, maybe diabetic, but whatever it was, God decided to keep him with us today. He appreciated knowing he was prayed for.

I don’t know his name, but he had a sense of humor. When I asked his dog’s name he told me when I first arrived that his dog’s name was spelled D.O.G. When I asked him if the dog was a male he said, “Not anymore”.

This was only the second highway incident we have seen since leaving PA on June 8. Yes, we have stayed off Interstates as much as possible, though statistics show super highways are actually safer than smaller roads. The other was an accident at a red light in front of us in Joplin, MO. Maybe staying away from cities most of the time helps too.

Our day began this morning with a couple of library visits. At the Monck’s Corner, SC, library I asked the greeter what we should not miss if we have an hour in her town. She said the Civil War submarine at the Santee Canal Park. I was heading for the car before Mona heard the word submarine.

The Little David was one of several in a series of Confederate attack subs built to place a torpedo (subsurface fused bomb) against the hull of a Union ship. Much like the Hunley which we saw in Charleston in its recovery laboratory near its original construction site down the Cooper River from here a couple of weeks ago, the Little David was built right here where it’s full size model now resides. The original was destroyed at the end of the war.

The difference is that the LD survived the attack on the USS New Ironsides where the Hunley sank with her full crew. The Little David crew thought the charge had not damaged the Union Ship, but it actually had, though it did not sink her.

Another major difference between the LD and the Hunley was that he Little David was steam engine driven so only had a small crew and could be driven by as few as two.

The Santee Canal, which was opened to canal boats between the Santee and Cooper Rivers was opened in 1800 and closed by 1850 when train tracks and wagon roads replaced it, along with most canals in the young USA. The canal ended at Stony Landing, where just over 10 years later the Little David would be built.

Today the canal is a natural scenic wonder of swamp critters, turtles, birds and gators. We saw only one gator though. A complete hide used to scare kids with during group tours, I think.