Good Morning Lowcountry

Tall tales

Pluffmudders are prone to exaggeration.

We wouldn't be Southerners if we weren't good storytellers.

Some lies fall into the area of acceptable subjects to lie about. House ghosts, for example, and the size of the fish you caught, or didn't catch, come to mind.

Hunters are allowed some latitude about the one that got away. And we'll give sailors room to exaggerate the height of the waves or the sloppiness of the chop.

But we draw the line at live oaks, alligators and the weather.

Mic Smith
The Post and Courier/File

A Bull's Island alligator. It's probably not 20 feet long, nor is the one in your backyard.

Maybe for tourism, maybe for the real estate business, live oaks are now being described as more than 1,000 years old. The Angel Oak on Johns Island is routinely said to be 1,400 years old, but if you believe that, GMLc has some swampland to sell you.

Charleston's urban forester, Danny Burbage, estimates the Angel Oak might be 400 years old. The exact age of large oaks is notoriously difficult to determine, even when the tree is dead, because of heart rot. Also, their wide trunks often consist of the merged trunks of several trees .

According to the School of Forest Resources at the University of Georgia: "The largest (live oak) trees which remain in most of the native range, especially along the Atlantic coast, are seldom over 200 years old, with a maximum expected lifespan of 400 years. Many old large trees have myths developed around them regarding their age and historic value. Many large live oaks are not as old as people believe."

That doesn't mean that Quercus virginiana, the live oak, is not a sacred tree ... sacred to enslaved Africans (they met under them and believed the oak trees whispered to them) and sacred to pluffmudders who believe grand old trees deserve our respect and preservation.

As for the alligator in your backyard, he is not 20 feet long. The largest Alligator mississippiensis on record in the U.S. measured 19 feet 2 inches. It was trapped in Louisiana in the early 1900s. Today, male alligators can reach 13 feet.

Now for the weather ...

GMLc sat huddled in front of the television at 5 a.m. Sunday listening to reports of golf-ball-sized hail and a tornado headed toward our house. True, hail on the window panes had awakened us, but golf ball? Seems hail that big would have broken the windows, or at least dented the car.

What kept us from getting into the bathtub with a sofa cushion? We figured if a tornado really was a block away, the TV would not still be on.

When H-season begins June 1, we will brace ourselves for orange-red television warning backdrops to each little wave off the coast of Africa that marches across the Atlantic, or peters out in the Canaries.

Tall ships

Charleston has signed up to be a port for Tall Ships Atlantic Challenge 2009, a 7,000-mile race series around the North Atlantic by the international sail training fleet.

It will start April 30 next year in Vigo, Spain ... race to Tenerife in the Canary Islands ... race across the Atlantic to Bermuda to celebrate that island's 400th anniversary of permanent settlement ... race west to Charleston, arriving June 29 ... and leave July 8 for Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia ... then race across the North Atlantic to Belfast.

For details, see tallshipsraces.com/atlanticchallenge.

GMLc
Comment at charleston.net/news/gmlc. Call 937-5564.