Child-Life on the Tidewater: A Memoir of Coastal Georgia

A lifelong awareness of one's place, and an accompanying sense of permanence within that place when set amid the context of the ecology, history and culture of the locale, is the theme of this memoir of the coastal Georgia low country by author and historian Buddy Sullivan. The author's reflections on his coastal roots are told here in his upbringing amid the salt marshes and tidal waterways of McIntosh County, Georgia, and most specifically within the little tidewater communities of Cedar Point and Valona. A fourth generation McIntosh Countian, Sullivan spent much of his childhood and adolescence in and around Cedar Point on family lands overlooking the marshes and creeks where he experienced life in the 1950s and 1960s. He relates an early association with shrimp boats and the local watermen, his own personal explorations of the local tidewater, and an early and developing interest in local history and ecology through family and extended relationships within the McIntosh County community. Contained herein is an overview of the author's family history, both maternally and paternally, and its direct connections with McIntosh County and the Georgia and South Carolina low country going back to the mid-1800s. Comprising a major portion of this book are selected essays by the author as gleaned from his writings and research relating to the coast over the past forty years. The underlying theme in both the memoir and the historical essays is that of the author's awareness and understanding from an early age of the ecosystems of the low country--tidal salt marshes, barrier islands, river hydrology and upland soils--and their unique connectivity to the region's history and culture. Accompanying the text are maps and archival photographs, interspersed with color images of the tidewater as it appears today.