Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/812511
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S • 89 T he hurricane roared through like a runaway train, like a Seaboard freight with a stuck throttle. Fifteen inches of rain in 15 hours, wind a-hundred-plus-Jesus, tornados on the back side, it tore hell out of the piney ridges and swamp-ground hardwoods in between. Three hundred of us way out here on this sore thumb against the sea; one-third of us took our chances. Every man parked his tractor in the middle of a field; every man laid up fuel, dug out his log chains, and sharpened his saw. Everybody had a job. I fired the generator to keep the beer cold, the modem hot. So long as the Internet worked, the world would know we were still alive. It was a noble endeavor but a mite hard on the nerves. That was right after Mrs. Clinton called us deplorable. We shook our heads, scratched our fannies, walked around in circles as we thunk it through. Then we named ourselves the Daufuskie Deplorable One Hundred. I slapped it up on Facebook, the papers got wind of it, and the governor was furious. How dare we defy her mandatory evacuation? She called us out on national TV, said we all would drown. She ordered up one last ferry run, a 40-passenger boat, too small. She mobilized a National Guard posse to round us all up, but by then it was too late for the choppers to fly. There commenced a mighty howling in the heavens, a great heaving of the sea, ship-mast pines laid like jackstraws upon a great snarl of power lines, an eight-foot surge right at a full moon floodtide, docks ripped up, boats adrift, sunk outright or blown way up into the trees. The eye right over the shack at 2 a.m., so we missed it all. A damn shame to waste a perfectly good hurricane on the dark. They called it a class two, but it was actually a class three, 130 in gusts. Dickie's coonhound sprained a leg, and Miss Raya broke her arm in a roller-rink after evacuating to Atlanta. One house lost to a pole-axe pine, two to the surf, but that's about it. And it's a damn shame to annoy your governor, but we did. I t's deep down in November now; the freezer ain't empty, but you can see the bottom. Time to go down to Barge Landing horizons by roger pinckney A hurricAne, A double gun, And A pilgrimAge. at the first flush of dawn; time to light one last delicious cigarette and read the smoke, then sneak upwind, easing along at about a mile an hour toting a 12-bore stuffed with double ought. The deer will bust loose almost from beneath your feet and you can shoot them on the rise like quail. But it's tough walking among all the blow-downs, and forget quiet, it's like wading through a pile of Venetian blinds. But that's where the deer are—feasting on wind-fall acorns and tender top branches. Will this be the first year in 50 I will not kill a deer? R unning? I reckon not. I didn't run from that storm, I never ran from nothing, 'cepting a warrant, a bear, and a woman or two. So maybe I ought to call it a pilgrimage. I lit out for Darlington, South Carolina, to meet Jim Kelly, the man who brought Bo Whoop back from the dead. You likely know about Bo Whoop, the Super-Fox magnum 12 specially built for Nash Buckingham by Bert Becker, Ansley Fox's best barrel man, Bert Becker's and Illustrator Bruce Marshall painted this portrait of Nash Buckingham holding Bo Whoop. At his side is Chubby, his loyal springer spaniel.