A Wedding

January 16, 2022

We hurtled down I-385 in the 4:00 AM darkness and fog, finding I-26 for 30 miles of construction cones and flashing beacons. In 90 minutes we passed through Columbia’s early rush hour. The eighteen-wheelers roared by. In another hour we curled south past Orangeburg onto I-95.

Our target was 500 miles south, Lake Mary in north-central Florida, for a young cousin’s wedding. A hint of daylight calmed our nerves. We got breakfast at St. George, then slogged into the Low Country wilderness-wetlands north of Savannah. Creeks and tidal rivers flow from the marshes under the interstate: Cowtail Creek, Edisto River, Allen Creek, Ashepoo River, others. The lights of Savannah flared up then disappeared. The stunted forest retreated to the horizon, the highway bounded by miles of marsh and scrub grass.

We had made this trip, or part of it, a couple of times in reverse. Decades ago I drove from Nashville to meetings at the chic hotel on Sea Island in the so-called Golden Isles, where miles of empty marshland became the setting for a pricey imitation-Old World resort. We took our honeymoon trip there, a splurge we’ve never repeated. So it was I-95 to Savannah, I-16 through the empty center of Georgia, I-75 to Chattanooga, I-24 the rest of the way to Nashville.

The Florida welcome center seemed overrun with oldsters like us. Then Florida goes on and on. The sun was high and bright for January, I-95 traffic was heavy but moving through Jacksonville and on toward Daytona. Along this stretch the rest-area signs include a screen showing how many parking spots are available. In two hours we turned onto I-4, which runs northeast-southwest, a stretch where farms started becoming industrial parks and subdivisions decades ago.

Sometimes you have to go. My cousin Eugene is the son of Peggy, one of my mother’s two sisters, now gone. Eugene’s parents, Peggy and Gene, raised their nine kids out on Long Island, New York—“out” because when I was a kid in New Jersey, Long Island was a long way “out.”

When we drove to the Island my dad fought the traffic across the George Washington Bridge into New York, across the Bronx, then through a maze of highways to Queens and the Island. The urban crowding of Queens peters out in Nassau County, then farther east to Suffolk. In the late 1950s it was transforming into Levittown-type subdivisions, which still left lots of farmland. When we visited, the two families, a bunch of brothers and sisters, were loud, adventurous, sometimes a little crazy.

Years went by in a blur. It was Sandy and me in Nashville, then Virginia, Eugene and Jean on the Island, all of us preoccupied with work and children. We missed a few milestones, the graduations and so forth. Eugene and Jean came to my dad’s funeral a few weeks after their wedding. Years later they, with their younger son, Patrick, drove out to a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania for our son Michael’s wedding. Garret, the older boy, was in school.  We dealt with three more parents’ funerals, one in Jersey, two on the Island. Then suddenly all our kids were adults.

Florida, once a Shangri-la for Yankees, was a kind of spiritual destination for Eugene’s siblings. The Island, where Eugene and Jean built their own home practically brick by brick, is more than half of their lives. That house and the attached farm property still is the family anchor. But their boys moved to Florida and built successful careers as engineers. Eugene and Jean got a place on the Atlantic side.

Three years ago in June in the blazing Florida sun Garret drove the four hours down I-95 from his place near Daytona to Fort Lauderdale for his aunt’s memorial service. He was busy with work and didn’t have to come. But he came to be with his dad, who flew down from the Island to spread his sister’s ashes in the bay.

We got the invitation to Garret’s and Shannon’s wedding a month ago. On the road I recalled those years-ago trips, from south Georgia to Tennessee, Virginia to Florida, Florida to South Carolina, over those same interstates and backcountry state roads. Away from Savannah and a few small settlements, nothing had changed in those 40 years. It occurred to me that only the people grow old.

The wedding crowd, at any wedding, tells stories of family life. If you haven’t been around much the faces are not the faces you remember. The kids are teenagers, the teenagers are young adults, now serious about careers and children. The young ones create the life of the party. Then there’s the rest of us, the over-the-hill gang.  

We admired the grace and class of the bride and groom, who thanked their parents and families for their immortal moment. Shannon and Garret moved around the tables, thanking folks for coming, for sitting through the unseasonable wind during the outdoor ceremony, wishing us well on what is their time. We mostly sat back, enjoying the company, the music, the little kids trying out their dance moves.

The next day we tramped around Black Hammock Campsite, an eerie spot next to huge Lake Jesup, said to be infested with thousands of alligators. Signs along the shore warned walkers, but the chilly weather must have spooked the gators. In Lake Mary we saw typical urban Florida: miles of low-rise apartments and condos, golf courses, traffic. Then too, lush floral displays, giant oaks, and waving Spanish moss, all a kind of dress rehearsal, I guessed, for the Disney World complex a few miles south in Orlando.

Some journeys are magical in the travel and in the destination, the miles may summon the richness of the past. We slogged for half a day from the South Carolina Upstate to the Low Country, then along the endless stretch of empty tidal swampland, to that place of dreams.

As I held the wheel I noted the mix of Northern license plates, Yankees buying into, or at least sampling the dream. I felt the heaviness of the long hours. As everyone scattered the next day we hugged Garret and Shannon and all the cousins and said so long.  We’ll do it again sometime, we hope.