Choose Charleston

In the rainy seasons, flooding is never far from the minds of ladies and gentlemen of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

Because, of course, Lowcountry means low country, and coastal low country to boot.

Every a heavy day of rain, you can watch cars and trucks bravely attempting to slip through hood-high waters in especially low-lying areas of the peninsula. Quite often, they fail in the attempt and sit, steaming and in need of towing, in the slow rolling wake of other vehicles.

Sandbags in the storeroom. Stocking up on gallon jugs of fresh water, flashlights, batteries, and emergency food items.

All part of living in the potential path of tropical storms.

You know you’re in Charleston in August when skipping the weekly lawnmowing chores leaves the backyard a wilderness gone wild, grasses grown long enough to hide a herd of antelope.

That ’s what happens when the deadlines line up back to back.

But once I saw a sliver of opportunity to fire up the lawnmower, it was back to the salt mines, a return to manual labor for the writer, time to push through the shag.

We acknowledge, of course, that push through the shag would have another meaning altogether on Folly Beach, to say nothing of the U.K.

The lawnmower, self-propelled, takes a good bit of the manual out of the labor. It complained a few times as I walked it through the thickest stands of grass but it did the job.

Autumn, can’t you come on home a little quicker? I’m ready for pumpkins, color tours of the leaves in the foothills, cooler days, chilly evenings, and starry skies at night.

The South Carolina Aquarium does a fine job of portraying the natural diversity of the Palmetto State, all the way from the Blue Ridge escarpment upstate to the estuaries, beaches, and ocean way down here in the Lowcountry.

Through August, the aquarium might be your best bet for schlepping around to see some brownwater swamp. The building is air conditioned and harbors far fewer mosquitoes than the great outdoors, after all.

Of course, there being nothing like the real thing, the miles and miles of beaches between the Lowcountry and the Grand Strand are active as all get out as of late.

For beating the heat, beaches, barrier islands to kayak toward, and boating excursions all do the job well.

This weekend is looking to be a great time to catch up on indoor activities, fun out of the sun. What can you do in Charleston this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday without crisping up like a fried pork rind? Here’s a half-dozen possibilites:

1. Catch Merle Haggard at the North Charleston Performing Arts Center ($45.50, Friday, August 10, 8 p.m.)

2. Take the ch’urns to the Charleston Museum for an “Around the World” multicultural adventure ($10 adults, $5 ch’urns, Saturday, August 11, 10 a.m.)

3. Sit down with Southern author Josephine Humphries at the Charleston County Library to learn the whats and wherefores of being a novelist (Free, Saturday, August 11, 10:30 a.m.)

4. Go for a Sunday drive in the country with the windows up and a/c cranked. Use binoculars to catch a close-up of roadside attractions and historic markers (Don’t laugh - I have seen people in RVs doing exactly that).

5. Go see a foodie flick on the big screen - Ratatouille for the young or young at heart foodies, No Reservations for the romantic foodies, The Simpsons for the Quik-E-Mart foodies.

6. Alternate reading your favorite book with catnaps and Fudgesicles all weekend until reality returns Monday morning.

With another scorcher on our hands, we’re going to have to cowboy up and just ride this one out today.

There is the temperature (high 90s), the heavy cloak of humidity, and the “feels like” temperature (hot as Mercury’s metatarsals after a sprint in the Circus Maximus).

Dress in light, loose clothes to ward off the prickly heat, glug lots of clean, cool water (carry a bottle if you need, naysayers be darned), and lay an offering at the shrine at the base of the A/C unit.

There will be definite haze slipping in between the sunshine and the surface sometime this afternoon but we can’t expect much of a break in the heat until the thunderstorms proper return, possibly tomorrow. Even then, hot hot hot is the word.

The whole downtown medical district gets a-buzzing when the Roper-St. Francis cafeteria has smoked turkey legs on the lunch menu.

Big juicy smoked turkey leg and some sweet tea - you might as well be walking the midway at the county fair. Not that walking is the thing to do in this kind of heat. Man, that sunshine just pushes you down and makes you say, “Uncle!” And that’s just from crossing the street. Can you imagine what the construction workers are feeling right about now?

On the subject of Roper-St. Francis Healthcare, kudos are due. Health Imaging and IT Magazine recently named RSFH as one of the top 25 connected healthcare facilities.

Accurate information and the ability to access that information in a timely manner are vital to patient care, as we all know, and RSFH is just as pleased as a peach at the way their people consistently keep them on the leading edge, technologically speaking.

Now, everyone go hug someone from hospital IT. They’re the behind-the-scenes heroes keeping the information flowing, after all.

Early afternoon thunderstorms drenched the South Carolina Lowcountry on Saturday. It was pouring down so hard at points that visibility dropped on the highways and slowed traffic to a crawl.

It put a bit of a dent in the heat. But with August gearing up right around the corner, these runs of hot, hot, hot are not going away anytime soon. More, once all that rain soaks way down deep in the soil, grass and kudzu are going to spin up toward the sky like magic beans had been planted. Better get the lawnmowers and weed-whackers ready!

And more is on the way. Today and through most of the coming week, cloud cover and a chance of thunderstorms are the watch words.

We ventured out into the heart of the sightseeing crowds Wednesday afternoon, mostly because there are some top-notch restaurants in the area and also because, hey, it never hurts to renew your sense of what is changing, what is staying the same.

We avoided the worst of it by staying off of Market Street. But Meeting Street - in the vicinity of Charleston Place, Hyman’s, and Sticky Fingers - gathers its own crush of pedestrians ’round about suppertime.

Our reservations were actually at another restaurant - FIG, one of my favorites. But we had a bit of spare time, so we ambled along the storefronts, playing tourist in our own town, as it were, and even strolled through some of Charleston Place. We passed a young gentleman fussing with the staff of Waldenbooks over their return / exchange policy and then we ambled into Brookstone to sample the massage chairs.

On our way back down Meeting Street, we got called over by one of those folks who sell tour packages. Mind, I said that he called us over, not that we accepted his offer to stand there while he launched into a sales pitch - we made no response other than to laugh when he asked what we were doing while we were Charleston. Hmm, let’s see, while I’m “in Charleston,” I tend to eat, sleep, work, watch TV, read, commute, put gas in the truck, get oil changes, shop for groceries, mow the lawn, take the garbage to the curb on Monday and the recycle bin to the curb on Wednesday, and basically do all of the things one does when living in a town.

For Pete’s sake.

I really dislike that particular street vendor tactic - shouting out to passersby to try to sell tour packages - and, if I’m not mistaken, the city has asked the tour companies to stop doing this on numerous occasions. It’s tacky. It makes you feel like you are at a carnival.

I don’t blame the kids who are doing it - they are just following their instructions so that they can earn extra cash to help offset skyrocketing tuition costs. I just feel that it is a flawed sales theory. Any additional sales that are made are bound to be offset by sales lost from those who are offended by the tactic.

Rain, clouds, and scattered thunderstorms: when severe weather warnings scroll across the bottom edge of regularly scheduled programming on the television, Charlestonians know that some parts of the peninsula should be avoided if at all possible.

The western edge of the peninsula was once a far wilder and wetter place of ponds and marsh before the land was filled in to build on. The long-ago landfill is why driving down Lockwood Boulevard can have a mild “roller-coaster” feel of up and down, up and down, bump, bump, bump. Over time, the stuff the land was filled with has settled.

It is also why there are notorious patches of Bee Street and Courtenay Drive, for example, where attempting to drive during a downpour can quite easily leave you with a towing bill and heavy repair costs.

Drainage has long been a major headache for the city in the rainy seasons. This is, after all, the South Carolina LOWcountry and Charleston proper, being a peninsula, is surrounded by mighty waters. Sandbags are a staple item for many a downtown business owner or resident, just a little something-something to have on hand in case of emergency.

The reward of the heavy rain is the lush greenery that soon follows, vines growing so fast everywhere you look that you can practically measure their progress hour by hour.