“Where is the place you have come from, with your buried steps full of new roots?”
— James Dickey, “The Salt Marsh,” 1961
• • •
I crest the Waccamaw River Bridge on an August evening when a storm is looming in the distance. I haven’t been back to Pawleys Island in nearly a decade, but the smell of the Georgetown paper mills and the rhythmic thunk of the bridge’s seams under my tires call up the years I spent visiting this tiny spit of South Carolina Lowcountry. My father, the poet James Dickey, loved what he called the “unbroken openness” of the island’s salt marshes and the spooky beauty of its live oaks. He bought a second home here long before I was born. When he died in 1997, we buried him at Pawleys in an 18th-century graveyard under a tree cloaked in Spanish moss.
My older brother Christopher, a journalist, loved this place, too, and he returned to it almost every summer before his own death from a heart attack in 2020. Some of my best memories of Chris involve roasted oysters and pitchers of cold beer or watching him file stories for Newsweek from a folding beach chair.
My relationship to the island is more complicated. Like the men in my family, I always marveled at the sunsets and sawgrass, and the herons cutting low arcs over the horizon. I still cherish the afternoons I spent catching turtles in brackish ponds and reading on the couch when it rained. The eerie landscape made it easy to believe in fables. Dad and I worked our way through all of Edgar Allan Poe one summer, spending extra time deciphering the code in “The Gold-Bug,” which Poe set on Sullivan’s Island, just up the coast. We then plowed through the gods and monsters in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, a book I must have read a dozen times.
Illustration by Darya Shnykina
Dad knew how to make things fun, especially for children. He crafted darts out of matchsticks and turned old spools of thread into self-propelling “cotton tractors.” He liked string tricks and paper airplanes and whipping up elaborate bedtime stories on the fly. (Was there an emerald castle, Dad? Of course there was, honey.) Narratively speaking, Pawleys gave him a lot to work with. When the sun went down, and the tree frogs came out, Dad would insist, ominously, on the existence of a creature in the woods too terrifying to name. “Don’t go outside, Bronnie,” he’d say, lowering his voice. “It walks by night!”
To which I’d roll my eyes and sigh, “No, it doesn’t,” and go outside anyway.
But Pawleys also taught me to distrust calm surfaces. I learned early to avoid the cypress swamps favored by cottonmouths and the flattened patches of marsh grass where alligators made their nests. When I was nine, I almost drowned when I was sucked into a rip tide during a brief swim at the beach. One minute, I was looking for sand dollars, and the next, I couldn’t move. Every time Dad pulled me forward, the ocean’s weight pulled me back. After what felt like hours, we both collapsed on the sand. I was embarrassed about getting in so far over my head, about needing so much help. It was the only time I ever saw Dad scared.
After that, I didn’t enjoy Pawleys. I didn’t like the beach, or the bugs, or the lack of other kids my age. Once Dad died, I hardly ever went back, and when I did, it was usually to spend time with Chris.
Decades later, I’m caught in a different kind of rip current. The end of my marriage is pulling me back toward all the people I’ve loved and lost. Maybe now, with my world thoroughly inverted, I can reconnect to the place that mattered so much to them.
• • •
I pull up to All Saints Church just as the rain has started. Soon, my feet are sliding around in my sandals. I’m barefoot by the time I reach my father’s grave, which hasn’t weathered much, if at all. Blink, and I could easily be 15, when I first came here to tell him goodbye, or 35, when I came to tell him I had published a book. This time, I’m at a loss for what to say. I lie down in the cemetery’s wide-bladed grass, taking in my father’s “view,” and let the rain hit my face. I’m in over my head again, Dad. I could really use some help.
The last time I was here, a van pulled up and a tour group hopped out. Dad had become a stop on what was otherwise a local ghost tour. But he was by no means the main event; the tourists had come to see the grave of Alice Flagg, the central figure in one of the island’s best-known ghost stories, a few plots over. The tale goes that Alice, a teenager from a wealthy family in nearby Murrells Inlet, fell in love with a laborer sometime in the 1840s. To prevent her from marrying him, Alice’s brother, Allard, sent her away to boarding school, where she died of an illness in 1849. Allard then threw her engagement ring into the marsh, dooming Alice to chase after it for eternity. As a final indignity, he put just one word—“Alice”—on her grave marker. Generations of visitors have circled it backward, hoping to summon her ghost, hoping she will chase after her ring and perform her grief for them.
Illustration by Darya Shnykina
I loved this story when I was a kid. The teen girl, the lost ring, the marriage hoped for but never realized. It seemed impossibly romantic, chasing love into the afterlife. It never occurred to me that history only remembers Alice because of what she couldn’t let go. That all hits a little different now.
Only much later did I learn that none of Alice’s story is true. It was concocted in the 1940s by a man who later owned the Flagg family’s home. Like all folk tales, this one reflects the fears and fantasies of the culture that created it, and sometimes culture creates fake ghosts to avoid real ones. In a community that profited mightily from antebellum nostalgia when I was growing up, slavery was barely mentioned, if at all. The 150 enslaved people who died on Litchfield Plantation, where my father bought his house a hundred years later, received no markers of any type. The allure of a broken-hearted ghost bride was a much easier sell.
• • •
I drive around Pawleys for the next day and a half. The rain prevents me from walking much, so the beach is out, and so are the woods. Instead, I eat crab cakes and drink gimlets at Frank’s, a restaurant Chris liked. He often ate there with his late friend John-Henry Whitmire, a mustachioed bon vivant who owned local landmark Whitmire Fine Jewelry. Frank’s was where the two could get reliably good wine to drink with their shrimp and grits. It was a small, clubby enclave back then; it’s now grown into a tropical maze of open-air dining nooks and potted palms strung with cafe lights.
I always preferred the Pawleys Tavern, a dressed-down hideaway on the other side of Highway 17, with walls papered in dollar bills and grunge rock on the stereo. I’m relieved it’s still open. The beer is still cold, the lights are still dim, the floors are still sticky; in other words, it’s still as perfect a dive as you could ask for.
Other than those two spots, everything I remember has changed. What was once an empty stretch of highway is now packed with chain restaurants and multiuse shopping centers. The conveniences I used to long for have arrived in full force, and I’m not sure I like them. Which is not to say that Pawleys itself is any better or worse, only that it’s different. So am I.
• • •
The rain stops the next afternoon. I need fresh air, and Brookgreen Gardens seems a good place to get it. My parents used to take me to its small zoo, where we would watch the otters.
What I remembered as a modest web of wooded paths is actually a sprawling 500-acre complex of outdoor sculptures, art galleries, and natural history exhibits. It was the vision of early-20th-century sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington (one of the first major artists to cast statues in aluminum rather than bronze), who created it to showcase her work and that of her peers. It now contains over 2,000 pieces by more than 400 artists, the largest collection of American figurative sculpture in the country.
Illustration by Darya Shnykina
Miles of trails crosshatch the property. I start at its eastern edge with what I remember—the zoo, the otters, the aviary—and loop north along the boardwalk to a long stretch of open marsh. It’s late enough in the day that the herons and egrets are starting to lift out of the sawgrass for the night. I am again awed by their poise and their freedom. They are essential to the place, but not bound to it.
I’ve never had one recurring dream, per se, but most of my dreams follow the same track: I am returning to a house—usually one I’ve lived in—that contains rooms I never knew were there. Walking these trails feels a little like that; every corner yields something beautiful I didn’t remember: a poetry garden, a bank of ferns, a labyrinth. It’s like touring the inside of a Fabergé egg.
The gardens’ western quadrant, where most of the sculptures live, is a revelation. Each outdoor “room” is studded with fountains and set against a sweeping backdrop of live oaks. Bellerophon clings to Pegasus in one reflecting pool, a tiger curls around Dionysus in another. Diana raises her bow to the sky while Icarus plummets through it.
I soon find myself staring up at a towering sundial: Time and the Fates of Man by Paul Howard Manship. This is a smaller replica of the 80-foot original, which Manship created for the 1939 World’s Fair, but it is large enough to set me back on my heels. The dial rests on the figures of three goddesses, each holding a piece of a thread. They are Clotho, who spins the thread; Lachesis, who measures it; and Atropos, who cuts it. All stand under the Tree of Life.
Nine-year-old me, with her dog-eared copy of Edith Hamilton, would have been thrilled by this. How had I forgotten it?
I think back to the magic those stories once held for me, and of how much I admired the boldness and independence of the female deities. Unlike fairytale princesses, with their bland catatonia—unlike heartbroken teenage Alice, chasing her ring—the women of myth didn’t wait for life to happen to them. They were capable of great wisdom and great folly, but at least they called their own shots.
So much comes down to choosing which stories you believe. I’ve been walking my own backwards circles, summoning my own ghosts, as though connecting to one specific place will somehow unfreeze my grief. But grief doesn’t live on a map, and neither does love; both are with me all the time.
What I should have known all along becomes suddenly clear: I don’t have to keep doing this. I don’t have to keep coming back to a place that represents so much loss. I don’t have to keep scouring the past, hoping to change it. I can honor the fond memories without drowning in the bad ones. This time, no one can save me but me.
This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Southbound.
