Open Season

Our island's main tourist season may be a few weeks off, but another and equally crucial season's about to begin, South Carolina's shrimping season. The Lowcountry is fortunate to have access to its favorite food for eight months of the year, from May to December, although the state DNR divides the season into three distinct phases, determined by the quality and quantity of the crustaceans each year.

Limited harvesting usually begins in the spring - this year, starting this week - and is restricted to specific offshore sites that lie along the border between state and federal waters, and then only if winter monitoring has indicated sufficient numbers of mature shrimp. The full summer season usually begins no earlier than mid-May, the date again determined by the DNR based on the health of shrimp populations (it's not yet been announced for this year), and mostly harvests smaller brown shrimp, which were spawned in the previous fall and matured during the winter. The third season begins in September and focuses on larger and more favored white shrimp, but can also bring in more rare pink shrimp until the season ends in December. This is all in addition to net casting for shrimp in tidal creeks by locals, again progressing from brown to white shrimp as the months progress.

White shrimp spawn in the spring and are ready for the table by autumn

Predictions for this season are for an abundant harvest based on a relatively mild winter, as colder winters and resulting lower water temperatures can affect spawning, drive shrimp far offshore and kill off significant numbers of the animals. Shrimping is an important economic driver for the Lowcountry, generating up to ten million dollars in revenue in some years from commercial harvests of some three or four million pounds in good years. A constant worry for commercial shrimpers is the cost of diesel fuel, which rose high enough last year to idle some of the fleet, which may return to the water this season as fuel prices trend lower. It's a hard, physically demanding way to make a living and a tradition that will be honored this weekend with Mount Pleasant's annual Blessing Of The Fleet on Sunday, April 30th at Waterfront Park. Find out more about the event here.

Nature / Nurture

Tomorrow, April 22nd, is the 53rd nationwide Earth Day to raise awareness of the delicate balance between human endeavor and Earth's ecosystem. Earth Day's first appearance in 1970 is often cited as

the birth of the modern environmental movement, but it really began eight years earlier.

The book that started it all

1962 saw the publication of Rachel Carson's "The Silent Spring", a warning about the effects twentieth-century industrialism and urban expansion was wreaking on environmental quality. Within weeks of its appearance, the book sold half-a-million copies in twenty-seven countries. Among the book's readers was Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson, a longtime promoter of environmental causes who was spurred to further action with a devastating blowout at an oil pumping rig off the California coast. More than 80,000 barrels of crude oil fouled the Santa Barbara channel and it beaches for months, killing shore birds, turtles and other aquatic life.

The New York Times noted the first Earth Day on its frontpage

Nelson had also taken note of the energy and commitment among young demonstrators against the Vietnam War and decided to harness that same energy to promote environmental causes, convincing a fellow conservation-minded colleague, Congressman Pete McCloskey, to serve as co-chair of an organizing committee. Beginning as a series of rallies and seminars on college campuses, Nelson, McCloskey and the staff they built around the effort chose April 22nd as the first Earth Day in 1970, as it was a weekday and fell between spring break and final exams. The concept soon spread well beyond college campuses, acting as a coordinating focus for hundreds of smaller groups with similar aims.

It was an effort whose time had come, for that year later saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as the passage of a raft of environmental laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. By 1990, Earth Day had gone global, with more than a billion people worldwide participating in activities ranging from tree planting to shoreline cleanups and anti-pollution efforts around lakes and streams.

There are a host of Earth Day observances this weekend in the Charleston area. Click here for a complete list of events around Johns Island and beyond.

The Wright Stuff

Hidden away deep in the Lowcountry is a rare architectural gem with the unusual name Auldbrass. The only project in the South designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Auldbrass' 326 acres lie along the Combahee River, near the town of Yemassee, and are dotted with buildings displaying the trademarks of Wright's distinctive aesthetic - steeply angled walls, pagoda-like cupolas, delicately milled exterior woodwork, on low-lying structures that seem rooted in the soil and surrounding landscape.

Window detail, staff quarters

Auldbrass was the 1938 brainchild of lumber magnate Leslie Stephens, who assembled parts of several old plantations that had fallen into disrepair (he used the name of one of them, Old Brass, for his new venture) and asked his fellow Midwesterner Wright to design what Stephens envisioned as a modern "plantation" for hunting and outdoor recreation. Wright, always sensitive to the terrain into which his structures would be inserted, was fascinated by the grounds' many live oaks and mimicked their twisting trunks and branches by designing building walls that leaned inward at an 80-degree angle. He used cypress for much of the exterior cladding of the main house, guest house, stables and kennels, further tying the structures to their surroundings, and even designed downspouts based on the Spanish Moss that festooned the property.

courtesy Anthony Perez

Ambitious in conception, Auldbrass was never fully completed. World War Two and its shortage of building materials halted construction until the late 1940's, and by Wright's death in 1959, only the main house, guest cottage and a storage barn had been built. At Stephens' death in 1962, his daughter and son-in-law struggled to maintain the property, opening it to tours and getting it placed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Sold to a lumber company in the early 1970's, the property deteriorated due to its high maintenance costs until the Beaufort County Open Land Trust managed to find a buyer willing to place a conservation easement on the property and undertake a full restoration.

The Wright-designed swimming pool

The new owner was, and still is, film producer Joel Silver ("Who Killed Roger Rabbit", among a long list of films), a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. Silver, who bought the property in 1987, has ever since been working to fully realize Wright's original conception and has generously allowed the Open Land Trust to offer tours over three days in the fall of every odd-numbered year to support the organization's mission. This year's dates haven't been announced as yet and the property is not open to the public at any other time, hidden away in Lowcountry solitude.