Horse Lubber Grasshoppers

ISSUE #206

I recently left the car after an eight hour drive—we’ve just returned from Myrtle Beach on my first-ever visit. Actually, we were about 14 miles south, in Murrells Inlet. A friend was showing us her hometown, giving a glimpse into how she grew up. It was a week’s stay in her childhood crucible. Oyster-studded pluff mud with a dash of hot thunderstorm, every afternoon.

The highlight of Murrells Inlet is Brookgreen Gardens, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen. It’s a 9,100 acre sculpture garden, replete with stone-carved mythic figures and lush with ancient live oaks, many older than the signing of the Constitution. The grounds are public thanks to the Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband Archer, two Northerners who made Murrells Inlet their winter home.

Anna, a sculptor, lived near the sea with a menagerie of deerhounds, horses, bears, and a macaw. A master sculptor herself, she suffered few of humanity’s crimes against nature—she preferred to keep the beauty of animals as the subject of her life’s work. Before the Huntingtons opened the sculpture garden in 1932, the Brookgreen plantation was owned by Joshua John Ward, the largest slaveholder in the United States before his death in 1853.

Such is the peril of a walk in the South—every tree witnessed evil and holds its secrets true. They are filled with silent scolding. Horse lubber grasshoppers perch on their branches, looming like Shelley’s Ozymandias. Thick-bodied and hale, with a yellow striped thorax, they were the largest bugs I’d ever seen in person.

Someday, they will conquer this world, watchers looking out over a sea of bones. A black widow crawls over a bronze Diana. Ancient creatures, their behaviors are not far from ours. They are saved only of our boring vanities, like minions before and after Gru.

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