Awakening

To a Northerner who had read Poe, the Carolina Lowcountry is a dark and fetid land of muck and mist, snapping alligators and squirming snakes, evil fetishes hung from the rotting rafters of smelling hot tarpaper shacks on the alluvial effluvial underbelly of Appalachia. Fear is standing among the gnarly roots of a live oak at midnight on a December eve on Sullivan's Island