Tybee Island, or, My Final Summer Post

“It only took me like three months to finally write it”

It’s been weeks. Months, even, since I first promised that “next week I’ll talk about that trip to Tybee Island in Georgia that I went on!” Except then I come in next week with that classic Andy move and say “Haha, just kidding, I got tired because I had a mental breakdown/went on vacation/made a soup and I didn’t do it, here’s Say Lick Birdman instead.” No more. No more, I say! The day is finally here! And, fittingly enough, it’s a day where I would normally say, “huh, I’m a little too tired, let’s do it next week.” But no. Today I am sitting down and cranking this thing out in an hour, maybe an hour and a half, like most people reasonably suggest that blogs should be. I’m finally doing it, and nothing can stop me, except for minor inconveniences which inexplicably cause me so much intense anger that I start to cry. Here we go.

Last summer I very briefly mentioned that I went on a trip to the Lake of the Ozarks with Cheyenne’s (my partner’s) family. I didn’t do a whole thing on it mostly because I had also taken a cross-country road trip with my brother that same, like, two-week stretch, though looking back, I totally could have talked more about the Ozarks. They’re fucking weird. It’s literally like 90 miles of lake in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere that’s somehow one of the most developed and densely-populated areas for the next two hundred miles or something. It’s called America’s playground or whatever, and yeah, I can kind of see it; the place exists solely for vacationers. If you ask me, people don’t actually live on Lake of the Ozarks. Everyone migrates there for the summer, and then once the leaves start to change, they poof into the distance and go eat at fancy restaurants somewhere else, leaving the lake a weird, empty, liminal space until next season. That’s not to say I didn’t have a great time; I absolutely did. It was a fun trip! And I had a lot of fun spending time with my partner’s family. The Lake of the Ozarks is a lot of fun! But I’m not gonna talk about it anymore, and that’s absolutely because it’s been a year and I don’t remember enough to write a full post about it (just kidding, I probably still could). But let me talk, instead, about the second annual family vacation that I impinged myself upon. Because that was more recent. I’m not playing favorites here, I promise.

This summer the trip was to Tybee Island, which is part of the Georgia barrier islands and about a half-hour drive outside of Savannah. It’s kind of funny, I actually went to the barrier islands and Savannah for a family trip of my own about five years ago, and we never went to Tybee, even though we were so close to it. We were doing other things and traveling up the coast, is mostly the reason, because Tybee is very much a stay-and-chill spot, not a stop-here-and-see-a-thing-before-you-drive-an-hour-to-see-the-next-thing kind of spot, as my side of the family’s vacations are wont to be. So it’s a good thing, then, that my partner’s family decided to stay and chill on Tybee, because we had a few days to actually just sit and hang out and explore the island, while moving at our own leisurely pace. It’s not something I’ve ever actually really done on a vacation before (except for Lake of the Ozarks last summer), so it was really nice to go on a trip that doesn’t have me rushing around day in and day out. Imagine that! Me, taking a chance to relax? Absurd as it may sound, for a handful of days back in August, it was true. And we relaxed the shit out of that place. (Quick side note; I guess my great-grandfather also came here in the 40’s, when he wasn’t working on fighting a world war, and he also relaxed the shit out of that place. Neat.)

Cheyenne’s parents were gracious enough to invite me along and stay in this cottage with them and the other family that was on the trip, and I’m very appreciative of that. I’ll admit, sometimes being invited to come on vacations is more fun than planning them yourself, so I’m glad I got to tag along. That being said, it wasn’t really a cottage; it was more of a three-store complex, which was a necessity, seeing as there was, like fifteen of us? That much, at least, this trip has in common with many of the trips I’ve been on previously; I tend to be a pack traveler. The last time I went to Georgia, I was also in a group of about twenty people, so I felt right at home there. Thought, I have to say, sitting and relaxing is a lot easier with a huge group than it is getting a huge group to correlate their plans together. So we really got a chance to enjoy each other’s company, is what I’m trying to say. For better or for worse, as my roommates who had to put up with my snoring can likely attest to.

I joke, but really everyone got along very well, which was nice since we really didn’t have much to do besides figure out our plans day by day and enjoy our time. That doesn’t mean we didn’t do anything, though. We did take in the sights of the island; I climbed up a big lighthouse with Cheyenne and her siblings, in order to get a better view of the island, and it is a very pretty island. Salt marshes and grasses on one side, long winding beach and infinite ocean on the other, with rows and rows of cute shops and houses in between, it kind of a is a vacationer’s paradise. We even got our own rental golf cart to drive around in. Yes, they do rent golf carts there, and yes, it was quite fun to take it over a ton of stupid speed bumps and see whose drink gets lost along the way. You can drive these golf carts pretty much right up to most of the beaches, and along all the back roads and sides and things like that. That was one of the highlights for me, just taking the golf cart around. That and the beach itself.

We went to the beach a lot, since that is the primary source of entertainment on an island with many miles of beach. I hadn’t been to a real beach in a bit, or at least hadn’t been to a beach where the express purpose of being there is to swim, but I always really liked swimming in the ocean, especially with big waves that would knock you around. So, yes, I did make a fool of myself by jumping headfirst into waves, punching waves in the face, clawing at a boogie board as it gets whipped out of my hands, the whole shebang of beachy things to do. I dug a sand hole and put Cheyenne’s small brother inside. I walked up and down the beach to try and find some beached monsters, and found a ton of shells, part of a horseshoe crab, and some sort of unknown white material that wasn’t whale vomit instead.

Say, that reminds me of another amusing anecdote. Cheyenne and I spent that entire trip trying to find a shark tooth, since sharks are her favorite animal, and sharks tend to lose a lot of teeth that eventually end up on the shore. We spent hours combing through these shells, sifting them out of the sand with an actual sieve, picking apart pieces of what might have been teeth, and just general sticking our eyes in the ground to try and find some teeth. And you know what? We didn’t find a single damn shark tooth. Not one freakin’ tooth. Then, later, during the family photo shoot on the beach at sunset that I somehow ended up crashing, Cheyenne’s dad bends down and immediately pulls up what was probably a shark tooth. Woof, did that piss Cheyenne off (in a funny way). We should have, apparently, focused our efforts not on finding teeth but on using her dad as a good-luck charm. Eh, hindsight is 20-20. We could have just gone to shark tooth island instead.

We did more things than just bum around on the beach, though. We climbed that lighthouse that I talked about, and went to a marine science center on the island to see some turtles. We went up towards Hilton Head in South Carolina to go parasailing, and that was pretty fun, even when it started to rain about halfway through and they had to cancel the second half of the parasailing. Sadly, Cheyenne did not get to parasail. I did get to parasail, though perhaps we should have, again, brought her dad along for good luck to cancel out my bad luck because, for whatever reason, it started to rain while I was in the air, and I got pretty soaked. Cheyenne’s sister was my sailing partner, and we were both pretty cold by the end of it, after having been coasting a hundred feet above the water in a raincloud for like five minutes. But until that cloud rolled in, damn was it a good view. I love salt marshes.

We did try to go deep-sea fishing too, actually, but that got cancelled as well because of the rain and rough seas. There’s this old joke in my family that my mom brought the rain with her, because for about five years straight, it rained on every family function, party, or vacation that my mom attended. But now that I’m older, I’m starting to wonder if maybe the problem was me, because the amount of times I’ve been rained on when we weren’t expecting rain is kind of weird. Hell, it even happened to me at the Treaty People’s Gathering this summer, and we were in a drought back then. But, then again, it still doesn’t rain all that consistently when I want it to, so who’s to say? Sorry for cancelling the fishing trip, guys.

Although speaking of fish, I ate more seafood on that trip than at any other point in my life. Full disclosure, I hate seafood. I didn’t grow up eating it, since my mom hates it, too, and I never really had almost any experience with it, save a few rarities when I would get some shrimp at a hibachi grill restaurant, or my grandfather had a lobster boil or something. So the fact that, on this trip alone, I ate shrimp, calamari, scallops, salmon, mussels, oysters, and probably some other weird sea bug makes me pretty happy. I went out of my comfort zone! And I didn’t even hate everything I ate! I thought the mussels would be bad (or maybe it was oysters?), since I had to actual scrape them out of their shell, but add a little lemon juice and hot sauce, and they’re pretty good! Thanks, Matt, for letting me steal most of your food at that dinner.

Although I did also eat boiled peanuts, which was a major mistake. If someone ever offers you boiled peanuts, say no. I learned this the hard way and somehow wound up with a bag of roughly five pounds of boiled peanuts, and I threw away most of them. It was like eating the congealed, salty water after you finish cooking a can of beans. I like beans, too, but these things were just weird. And they were still in the shell, too! That was the worst part, honestly, you had to peel them apart individually and all you got was this mushy lump that maybe tasted like a peanut. Gross. I’ll eat baked peanuts any day of the week but never again will I have boiled peanuts.

That same day I got those peanuts, though, Cheyenne and I did go to Fort Pulaski national monument, where we hiked around a bit and I left five pounds of wet beans behind a trash can. That was pretty neat, honestly, because you could go into the different rooms in the fort and walk around and explore all the bricks and see how the place was built, and they had the cannons and the armaments and the battlements and such, and there was tons of information and a lot to see and walk around on. But the strangest part was, every so often, there’d be these signs scattered throughout that would say things like “all 27 million bricks in this fort were built by slave labor, and you can still see their fingerprints in some of the exposed bricks.” What? I know I should have expected something like this, considering that pretty much the entirety of the southern coast was built upon the backs of enslaved peoples, and a lot of the north was, too, but the intensity of that sign really caught me off-guard. And it was just kind of there, off in its own little corner, without any markers or adornments or anything. And sure enough, some of the bricks next to it had the fingerprints of people who had been enslaved by American businessmen and forced to build bricks for an army that fought to keep people enslaved. The very quiet, almost-but-not-quite-apologetic way this was signposted was kind of a running theme not just at Fort Pulaski, but across the entire Tybee island. I didn’t notice it at first, but once I started looking at it, the signs, both literal and figurative, started to pop up more and more. It is definitely something I hope to write more about at a later day.

Now, it’s sort of a game of mental gymnastics to go from “hey what a great vacation” to “I am literally on an island built by slave labor” to “hey what a great vacation” again, but I’m gonna try and do it, because that’s sort of the mental world that Tybee island has to balance itself on. Once the curtain gets pulled away, it’s hard to put it back, but that’s something Tybee has gotten pretty good at over the years. And I don’t want to sideline a discussion of enslaved peoples and the continuing legacy of that systematic violence in favor of a discussion about what I did this summer, but, uh, I’m gonna do exactly that. It would feel weird to not include that kind of revelation in here, since it is one of the things that sticks in my memory the most (at least for Fort Pulaski), but I don’t have a very strong transition to come back from it. So I’m just gonna kind of leave it here with a note that I’ll come back to this later. Believe me, I’m not trying to practice some sort of willful ignorance about this stuff. It’s something I want to discuss at length, just not, well, right now. Especially when I told myself I’d only write this for an hour and it’s already been an hour and a half.

We did go to Savannah proper, too! We got to hang out and go to the stores, and wander around the park and see the moss everywhere. We went to the antiques store that appears in a chapter of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. And we were very, very careful not to touch the many $50,000 antiques in the store. There was also a store that sold only things made out of cork, which was weirdly specific. We saw a bunch of shipping vessels enter into the port. And we wandered down on the edge of the water, around all the fancy shops. It was neat! Savannah is really pretty. It’s kind of small, though, and we didn’t end up having time for a walking tour of either architecture or ghosts, so shopping it was. And sometimes that’s ok!

There are a ton of things I didn’t even really talk about in this post, but it was a really fun trip. The things that I remember (besides the fingerprints, that is; another day) from this trip are ones that mostly revolve around spending quality time with the other folks I was traveling with. Taking the golf cart up and down the back roads with Cheyenne and her brother and his girlfriend, or going to the stores on the strip in that same golf cart. Or just sitting on the beach and going through shells to try and find a pretty one, or watching the sun set over the ocean with family members that I didn’t even know two years ago. Jumping into a bunch of waves and frantically trying not to get knocked down, or finding a lizard on a leaf, or parasailing and getting soaked, or eating a bunch of strange fish-themed foods, or trying like three different ice cream stores, or hearing some old guy talk about horseshoe crabs, or plucking a crab out of a tide pool, or climbing an old lighthouse and realizing we can feel it moving in the wind, or sticking myself in a bunch of family photos at inconvenient moments, these are the kinds of things that are gonna stick with me.

I’m glad that I get invited on these extended family trips, now, and I’m glad that Cheyenne’s family (hopefully) like me. Because vacations are great when you see a bunch of things, but even on trips like that, what really ends up becoming the best parts are the times when you just get to spend time with people you enjoy being around. And this vacation was kind of the final part of my summer, a summer that really was chock-full of vacation and traveling and seeing sights. But it, like all the vacations I went on this summer, from the Treaty People Gathering (not much of a vacation, but hey, it kind of counts), to going to Devil’s Lake, to a 5,000 mile road trip, to exploring the pacific northwest, to bumming around Tybee island, these are vacations that are made special by people that I went with on these vacations. And I’m glad that I got to spend so much time with these people that I care about this summer, especially right before I underwent a major life shift and moved to Minnesota. What a summer it was, three months ago. And this was a great way to end it. I’m glad that I can share with you what I did this summer, because it was a good one. And if you were one of the people that helped make it special, thank you. It really was a great summer. Thank you.

And with that out of the way, wonder how the winter’s gonna be? Can’t wait to plastic-wrap my apartment! Tune in later for more updates on what I did after the summer!