Tybee Island Reprieve
Journal: May 2002
On Wednesday morning we take our sixteen year old, Aaron, to the airport. He is flying to Russia with a group of teenagers with diabetes accompanied by his diabetes doctor. He made a similar journey last year. He will stay in a Moscow apartment with the family of a thirteen-year-old girl with diabetes. This trip has given Tish and I the opportunity for our own vacation. Her sister and brother-in-law own a condominium in Tybee Island, Georgia, outside of Savannah. The condo is at our disposal for ten days.
I am known as an easy-going person, calm and unflappable even during a crisis like a Code Blue situation. But without Tish and all of my friends and colleagues, I might well have decompensated under the stress. I had not required either antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs. I had found that I was able to be nurtured, sustained and kept largely whole by the love and compassion of others.
It is time for Tish and I to relax, to escape the nightmare that began in early December. On Friday Tish needs to work at her office until noon. Sundry errands delay us and we are not able to finally leave the city until 4:00 PM. We have dinner in a cold Tennessee Pizza Hut. My uncomfortably cold hands remind me of my persistent anemia. When we feel like stopping for the night, we discover that all hotels in a 200-mile radius are either booked, have raised their rates, or are not honoring AAA or AARP discounts. This due to a big Nascar race the following day. So much also for the discount coupon book we picked up at the Tennessee Welcome Center.
I decide to continue driving until we are clear of the race area. But by then it is 1:00 AM. I am curiously not too tired any longer so I continue to drive. I am able to drive until just before sunrise when Tish takes over for the last hundred miles. The car is running well. Aaron and I serviced it the Sunday before, including a wax job. When I awake we are just entering Savannah. We stop at the Publix grocery store, as suggested to us by a colleague of Tish familiar with the area, before going out to the island.
Tybee is an island only in the strict sense of the word. It is only separated from the rest of the state by a series of shallow salt-water creeks at high tide. At low tide it largely reconnects with the mainland by narrow mud flats. But the drive from Thunderbolt outside of Savannah to Tybee is across a low highway built up on the salt marshes. A sign warns that the roadway can be covered by water during extreme high tides. We pass Fort Pulaski, thought impenetrable at the beginning of the Civil War until the new rifled union guns on Tybee, over a mile distant, were able to breach the walls. Such forts would no longer be built and warfare was forever changed after that battle.
Tybee Island is a sleepy resort community and we were at the sleepy end of the island. There is only one main thoroughfare. We were well off that, near the Tybee lighthouse, on the water where the Savannah River meets the Atlantic Ocean. Over the next week we will watch huge tankers and container ships entering and leaving the shipping channels in the river, being steered by local pilots who motor out to meet the ships offshore. The land that we see to the far north of our condo, out across the broad waters, is Hilton Head.
cancer
splurge for a fattening breakfast at the breakfast club near the pier…great place that Tybee island and perfect place to take a break. one of my favorites
be well