The Deep Blue Sea

Charleston and the Lowcountry have been shaped for millennia by its harbor, the foundation of the area's growth, starting with the Archaic era's First People drawn by its abundance of fish and mollusks. European colonists quickly recognized the protection and security the harbor and the mild Lowcountry climate offered, making Charleston an economic and cultural powerhouse of the colonial period and on into the 19th-century, when the Confederacy quickly grasped the importance of defending such a critical asset.

Dredging the channel

The harbor is just as critical today, generating more than $60 billion in revenue for the state through container shipping fees via the South Carolina Port Authority, which operates four container shipping terminals surrounding the harbor and two inland distribution centers. And now, Charleston boasts the deepest port on the East Coast thanks to a decade-long, $600 million dollar dredging project that deepened the port's shipping lanes from 45 to 52 feet, allowing the world's largest cargo ships to reach the terminals regardless of tide levels. Begun in 2011 and carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers, the project's last phase was completed late last year. The project's successful completion brought one of the world's largest container ships to Charleston, the MSC Rayshmi. With a draft of over 48-feet, it became the largest container ship to ever visit the port, able to pass under the soaring Ravenel Bridge and reach the Wando Welch terminal in North Charleston.

The MSC Rayshmi, the world's largest container ship

The harbor's been deepened eight times over the past two centuries, starting in the late colonial period, when the port's depth was only twelve feet. The announcement of this latest project had an immediate economic effect, even before the first dredge load was brought up from the depth. Major automobile manufacturers like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo quickly realized how the deepened harbor would streamline their supply and distribution channels, setting in motion new manufacturing plants in the Lowcountry; Walmart built a 600-acre distribution center supplied by rail lines running from the port.

Today, one out of every ten jobs in South Carolina is directly related to activities in and around the port, as Charleston's long relationship with the sea brings new benefits to the Lowcountry.

The Gray Army

They're so ubiquitous that we hardly notice them, and when we do, we may love them or curse them, but our island clan of gray squirrels carry on in their thousands. Common throughout the eastern United States, gray squirrels were in fact first scientifically catalogued and described right here in South Carolina by a German naturalist, Johann Friedrich Gmelin, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition who bestowed the scientific name Sciurus carolinensis on the animal. (The darker, or even black, squirrels you sometimes see are all grays with a genetic mutation affecting coat color.)

A kit at about six weeks old

Gray squirrels share with their red and fox-eared cousins a prolific breeding capability, with females as young as six months able to bear young, although most females begin mating at a year-old and produce up to four kits, sometimes twice a year for older females. First litters are born in February or March, and a second litter in June or July. The kits who, as adults, have an average life span of two years, are nursed in nests built high up in live oaks or other leafy trees before living on their own after about twelve weeks. Active in early morning and early evening, squirrels retreat to their nests in the heat of the day during warmer months.

Squirrels are scatter-hoarders, gathering and burying a diet of acorns, walnuts, tree bark and seeds raided from bird feeders over a wide area, returning to them sometimes months later through smell and by remembering landmarks associated with each horde. They have actually been observed pretending to bury a horde when they suspect a rival is watching, going through the digging and burying motions but retaining their prize in the mouth until the competitor is safely away and another site can be chosen. This has led some naturalists to speculate that squirrels have developed the "theory of mind" (an ability to attach mental states to oneself and to others) observed in other mammals like dolphins, elephants and apes. Squirrels are also one of the few mammalian arboreal species that can descend from a tree head-down, reversing the direction of their rear claws to grab hold on the trunk.

They're certainly clever, as anyone who has done battle with them over a bird feeder has discovered; in some parts of the western United States, Canada and in Europe, they're considered an invasive species who threaten native squirrels like the red squirrel. But they do play an important role in reforestation, helping forests regenerate with new seedlings and keeping nature in balance.

A Tale Of Three Bridges

Few symbols are more identifiable with Charleston than the iconic Ravenel Bridge spanning the Cooper River and connecting downtown Charleston to Mount Pleasant. The third longest cable-stayed bridge in the western hemisphere (after Louisiana's Audubon Bridge over the Mississippi and New York's Verrazano Narrows Bridge at the mouth of New York's harbor), the Ravenel opened to great acclaim in 2005, one year ahead of schedule and under budget. It carries more than 96,000 vehicles a day along the 1400-foot span between its distinctive diamond-shaped towers, and is expected to carry 100,000 cars per day by 2030.

The "roller coaster" Grace bridge

It's only the third bridge over the Cooper River which, until 1929, could only be crossed by commercial ferry or private boating. In that year, the John P. Grace Memorial Bridge opened to traffic, named for the Charleston mayor who spearheaded the building campaign. The largest bridge of its kind in the world at the time, the Grace was a cantilevered truss bridge with a narrow two-lane roadbed so steep that it became known as the "roller coaster bridge." Privately owned and maintained, drivers had to pay an equally steep toll for the time of $1.00. The toll remained in effect until 1943, when the city of Charleston purchased the structure and, three years later, lifted the toll.

The Pearman (left) and Grace bridges

The bridge's 10-foot-wide lanes were fine for the Model A Fords of the day, but by the 1950's they'd become dangerous for wider and bulkier vehicles in greater and greater numbers. Fender-benders and worse became so common (it became known to Charlestonians as "the scariest bridge in the world") that the city decided a second bridge was called for. This was the Silas Pearman bridge, another truss bridge built parallel to its older cousin, but with modern 12-foot wide lanes. Opened in 1966, the Pearman carried northbound traffic toward Mt. Pleasant, while the older Grace took vehicles south into downtown Charleston.

But the two sister bridges only lasted until the late 1970's, when they were rendered obsolete due to structural deterioration and the coming of larger, taller container ships too big to pass under them to reach the new Wando River container port, a serious liability for Charleston's and the state's economy. A twenty-year-old effort to raise the $700-million for a new eight-lane bridge was led by Charleston-born

Congressman Arthur J. Ravenel, who relinquished his congressional seat to become a state senator and spearhead the campaign and to help create the South Carolina Infrastructure Bank as the financing conduit for the project. So relentless was his enthusiasm for the new bridge that his fellow state legislators voted to name it in his honor during week-long celebrations preceding its opening to traffic in July of 2005. Unlike its relatively short-lived predecessors, the Ravenel Bridge was designed to last at least a century, an enduring symbol of Charleston's vitality and energy.