Land, Water, and the Shape of This State

South Carolina is three states wearing one name. The first is the low country: the tidal marshes, the sea islands, the barrier beaches, the ACE Basin where the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto rivers braid through one of the largest undeveloped estuaries on the Atlantic coast. This is a landscape shaped by water, by the twice-daily pulse of the tides, by the hurricane seasons that periodically reset it.

The soil here is sandy and dark, the air in summer thick enough to wear. Plantations grew in this country, and the culture of rice and isolation that produced the Gullah Geechee people took root precisely because the low country was so difficult for those unaccustomed to its fevers. The second South Carolina is the Midlands: the coastal plain and the sandhills, the long slope from the coast to the fall line where the rivers drop off the Piedmont edge.

The sandhills are often described as marking a prehistoric shoreline, where the ocean once stood. Long-leaf pine forests once covered much of this terrain, and fragments of that original ecosystem persist in places like the Carolina Sandhills National Wildlife Refuge. The third South Carolina is the Upstate: the Piedmont and the Blue Ridge, the granite domes and waterfalls of the upstate county parks, the Chattooga River along the Georgia border that served as the location for the film Deliverance.

Table Rock, Caesars Head, Sassafras Mountain, which at about three thousand five hundred fifty feet is the highest point in the state, mark a landscape that looks nothing like the palmetto coast ninety miles south. The same political boundaries contain red clay hills, tidal marsh, and mountain granite. It is three countries at once, all of them shaped by water moving toward the sea.