Jeff Whitten

Guest Columnist

I’m writing things down as they occur to me on a Tuesday evening in Richmond Hill.

First, I’m subbing this week for Andrea, the wise young editor of this paper.

For those who don’t know me, and I suspect that’s most of you, I’m playing “interim editor” because I worked here, and as a result know how to screw things up with the best of them. I.e., I used to put this paper together for a living, and cover things, and did so for many long and occasionally strange years. Now I do it as a hobby, I guess. And to get out of the house. And to help out in a pinch. And for beer money.

Second, it’s getting to the point I’m going to need a roundabout to get out of my wife’s driveway over in Effingham County.

Luckily for the universe, about 16 of the things are in various stages of construction/ development/wishful thinking within about a five-mile radius of my wife’s house. Which, as I think I’ve whined on these pages many thousands of times before, is in the midst of a two-decade long avalanche of growth but used to be surrounded mostly by cows and fields and pine trees.

That was 30-something years ago, when Coastal Georgia was barely more than a twinkle in your neighborhood developer’s eye.

Back then, instead of traffic and transplants, most folks fussed about dirt roads turning into a swamp and swallowing a school bus or the mail jeep every time it rained hard.

Back then you could just about cross from one end to the other of two consecutive counties without your tires coming anywhere near a paved road.

Back then you also could legally drive down those dirt roads — or through downtown Pembroke, for that matter — with a cold beer in one hand and its replacement in the other, and steer with your knees.

Don’t try that now, please. There were a lot less people and traffic in those days, and a good many of us didn’t have mobile phones, so we had less chance of running somebody over. Or getting run over, come to think of it. And we knew what we were doing.

Third, I think our roads were probably safer back then, all things considered, at least for all of us who didn’t get run over at the time.

Driving nowadays is an exercise in putting your faith in increasing amounts of other human beings, some wearing man buns, many of them from somewhere else and most of them from somewhere up north, where the rules are different. It’s apparently a place so messed up and awful northerners have spent the past two/three decades flocking down here in great hordes to escape. And then, you know what happens. They get here, decide it needs to be more like the place they left, and so either heckle the people in charge or run for the job themselves.

Some actually win, which sometimes gives me the willies for reasons I can’t explain, not even to myself. I’m working on getting better.

Fourth, I am starting to worry there might not be enough oysters to go around for future generations, what with all the oyster roasts for good causes going on hereabouts anymore. I am not against good causes, within reason, but I do not think oysters are procreating any quicker to keep up with the ever increasing population of oyster-eating folks hereabouts.

That sentiment expressed out loud led someone to tell me southerners love their oyster roasts. I agree, though being myself from a long stretch of Upstate South Carolinians dating back to before the American Revolution, until I wound up in this neck of the woods, I, as a card carrying southerner, had never been to an oyster roast. Boy, that’s a weird sentence. Too late to fix it.

Well, what did you eat, you might ask, if you didn’t have oyster roasts upon which to rely? Good question, I’d say.

Mostly, we ate a lot of pinto beans with cornbread, green onions, hot banana peppers in vinegar and homemade chow chow. And tomato sandwiches. And fatback. Like many southerners in the foothills, we were poor but ate good.

Thought: What we need now are upscale fatback fundraisers. Stay tuned.

Still, for several years after winding up here in coastal Georgia after getting out of the Army, Jonathan Swift would’ve thought me either a bold, bold man or a maniac, because I set about reducing the oyster population like there was no tomorrow. I ate them raw, steamed, roasted, and in stews or fried and turned into sandwhiches. I’ve roasted them in my wife’s backyard, ordered hundreds of dozens on the half shell at restaurants on the salt water and washed them down with ice cold beers. I’ve gone to plummy events where I’d get lined up at tables to be dwarfed and out-eat by assortments of beefy, well-heeled, red-faced sweaty fellows in fishing shirts and pompadours. Each would elbow their pot-bellied way through eating about 30 pounds of oysters, scattering saltine cracker crumbs in the air like there might not be a tomorrow and putting a drastic hurt on the oyster population.

Those, I think, are the professional oyster eaters of this world, and their numbers are multiplying along with everything else in what used to be a pretty good place to live before the developers got hold of it and turned it into one vast Pooler.

Ah well, it’s largely spilt milk now, and I’ve done my share of damage to the nation of oysters, so maybe I should hush. Let’s just hope the creatures survive and thrive and don’t get polluted by PFAs or a sewage spill dso future generations of Georgia’s ever-increasing population of hockey fans will be able to share in the bounty.

Here, I suspect someone might interject that there are plenty of oysters to go around for generations to come, just like there’s plenty of aquifer water to go around, and coal is good for you, and its perfectly okay to eat fish out of the rivers, and infrastructure is miles ahead of where it needs to be, and prices are down, and there are plenty of well qualified folks already here to do all the manufacturing jobs being manufactured as we speak.

Georgia is, after all, the No. 1 state to do business in. It might be a bit farther back in the rankings in many other categories, but when you elect business people to run things they’re probably going to get rich first and let everything else sort itself out afterwards.

Fifth, back to driving. Old habits are hard to break, and I tend to go cross country to skip the mess in Pooler and at I-95 and I-16. Sure, the back ways are getting more crowded, but sometimes you hit it just right and can actually go a couple of miles without someone trying to run over you or you coming up behind someone playing with their phone at 40 mph and making you want to run over them.

Tuesday was one such morning where just about everything worked out the way I’d draw it up if I could. Until I got to about where the mustard-colored cinderblock church on Highway 204 is, and some guy in a pickup with an Effingham tag pulled out right in front of me. I looked in my rear view mirror and there wasn’t a soul behind me.

I uttered a few choice words, remembering not to give him or her the salute in case he or she was packing heat, as the kids say. But then, not half a mile later, someone did the same to him. And maybe 100 yards later, someone did the same thing to the driver who’d done the same thing to the driver who’d done the same thing to me. It was like all of a sudden it was raining a chain reaction of obnoxious drivers. My first thought was, “There’s some Karma for you, you #(#)#&#&.” But truth is, it’s just how folks drive anymore.

Be safe out there. Whitten is a semi-retired newspaper hack.