There are lots of ways to see the Lowcountry. You can bike and hike, boat and float, walk and gawk, ride with a guide, whatever suits your fancy. And you can fly. By flying, I don’t mean hopping in a jet and zooming off to some distant destination. I’m talking about low and slow in a small aircraft with a pilot who will let you point to something and say, “Can we go look at that?” I do all the other stuff, but I am blessed to be a pilot with an airplane ideally suited for bopping around the sky looking at things…and there’s a backstory.
A lifetime ago, after spending six months in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam as an infantry platoon leader and artillery forward observer, I was reassigned to an aerial observation group. That meant sitting in the back seat of a rugged little airplane called a “Bird Dog,” technically, a Cessna L-19/O-1. Bird Dog crews flew low and slow across hostile terrain looking for trouble. Trouble usually started with a stream of tracer bullets, a river of bright green fireflies, heading our way from hidden gun emplacements. When that happened, the front seat and I would crank up a cornucopia of combined arms, including fighter bombers and artillery, to suppress the bad guys.
Fast forward to the present day, and I proudly own and fly a Bird Dog with a mission more benign than dodging bullets and blowing up things. I fly from the front seat now as a volunteer pilot for SouthWings, a public benefit organization supporting conservation and environmental causes. The way it works is, an organization can call into SouthWings, and a pilot is assigned to support the request at no charge to the requesting organization. As a SouthWings volunteer, I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting and flying with some very interesting people who have passionate commitments to their respective causes.
I recently had the opportunity to do a flight with Tony Kukulich, a journalist for the Post and Courier. Tony, an affable and congenial fellow, was writing an article about abandoned lighthouses along the South Carolina coast. We started at the south end of Hilton Head and Daufuskie, then worked our way up the coast as far as Georgetown, where the two northernmost lighthouses are located. On the three-hour flight, I learned a whole bunch about lighthouses thanks to Tony.
Until that day, I had always envisioned lighthouses as tall, round towers painted in distinctive patterns, striped or checkered, with a big glass thingy on top. Many are configured that way, but many are not. The tall round ones are easy to spot from the air, but little ones like Bloody Point and Haig Point on Daufuskie look like bungalows. In fact, Tony told me you can rent the Haig Point lighthouse. Finding them for setting up an aerial photo goes kind of like this:
Tony: “It should be right about there near that clump of trees.”
Me, pointing from the front seat: “You mean that clump near the open field?”
Tony: “Maybe.”
Me: “Okay, we’ll drop down to eight hundred feet and circle the area.”
Tony: “There it is!”
Me: “Where?”
Tony: “That little white building.”
Me: “You mean that little bungalow?”
Tony: “Yep. That’s it.”
Me: “Okay, got it. We’ll circle it clockwise. Let me know when you’ve got your pics.”
And that was that for the Bloody Point and Haig Point lighthouses, then onward to Hunting Island, easy peasy to find because it looks like my idea of a real lighthouse.
When we eventually got up to the Morris Island Light, standing alone at the mouth of Charleston harbor, I had a flashback. I remembered over two decades ago I had purchased a signed print depicting the Morris Island Light reproduced from a painting by my now deceased friend, Jim Booth, an artist renowned for his Lowcountry scenes; particularly the Charleston waterfront during Hurricane Hugo in 1989. Jim had done the Morris Island painting as a fundraiser for Save The Light Fund, a worthy organization dedicated to preserving the famously picturesque and seriously endangered historic lighthouse.
Photo by Tony Kukulich/P&C
I could go off on a tangent about my friendship with Jim Booth, but I’ll save that for a future post. It’s a Lowcountry story all by itself.
So, back to Tony and the lighthouses. We toodled along from Morris Island up the coast to Cape Romaine, then on to Georgetown. Tony has extensively studied South Carolina lighthouses and has a wealth of information in his head. He is dedicated to their preservation. Thanks to Tony, I am now enthralled by the history of these important artifacts of a bygone age. Lighthouses are one of the many captivating aspects of the Lowcountry, and my life is richer for having flown Tony in his quest for aerial photos.
To sum up, I love flying over the Lowcountry. The vistas and panoramas seen from on high take my breath away, and I’m thrilled to share that passion with my backseat companions. When I meet a passenger for a SouthWings flight, I give them a safety briefing and tell them I am just a chauffeur to help them accomplish the purpose of the flight. But occasionally, I’ll bank the airplane to give a passenger a good view of something spectacular like a particular glint of light on the water, a flock of egrets flying up a creek, or a matrix of old rice fields. In Tony’s case, I was flying with a walking encyclopedia and was getting a crash course in South Carolina coastal lighthouses…although “crash course” is probably a bad choice of words for a SouthWings pilot.
