Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden: A Memoir

Off and Running

Off and Running n a flurry of decision making, I resolved to retire and leave the field to the younger generation of game wardens. The department made my decision easier by offering a voluntary separation incentive, a new statewide policy designed to ease out to pasture some of us who had grown long in the tooth. It was part of the department’s efforts to preserve dwindling operating funds during a period of severe statebudget cuts. I picked the time of my retirement to coincide with the final moment of the 2001–2 duck season, which was at sunset, 5:45 p.m., on January twentieth. I launched my johnboat on a gravel ramp at the Edisto River end of the airplane runway on Pon Pon, a three-thousand-acre plantation managed for hunting. Before the curtain fell on my career, Belle and I had patrolled for fourteen hours on the Edisto River between Jehossee Island and the Prospect Hill impoundment, issuing nine warning tickets for waterfowl violations. Remembering my first days as a game warden when I earned the moniker “Mudflat Moïse,” I thought it seemed appropriate when the car bogged down to the frame at the bottom of the ramp as I was attempting to pull my boat out of the water at the end of the patrol. To get help I had to walk more than a mile in the mounting darkness to the far end of the runway, to intercept gunners leaving the “Temple of the Hunt,” George Dean Johnson ’s Pon Pon hunt camp. Tadpole Baldwin, the plantation manager, and an entourage of curious hunters, returned to the ramp in a train of pickups I 228 Ramblings of a Lowcountry Game Warden and assisted me with the task of removing my car and boat from the primordial ooze. By the time they were dragged over the crest of the ramp, the car and boat were covered with a thick layer of mud, spun out from my car wheels and the truck doing the towing. I contemplated that turn of events on the drive back to Charleston and started laughing. I hooted and cackled all the way back home at the thought that the first minutes of my retirement were spent digging myself out of the mud, an event in many ways typical of some of my more memorable days as a game warden. When I parked my muddy rig at the Fort Johnson law-enforcement office the next morning and turned in my badge, gun, and uniform, I left a job whose responsibilities had changed considerably since my initial trip to that office more than two decades before. When I became a game warden in 1978, we were under the leadership of Dr. James A. Timmerman, only the fourth director since James Henry Rice was appointed to that position in 1910. The modern Department of Natural Resources grew out of what was essentially a warden force. The ensuing years brought dramatic growth and change, as the introduction of state hunting and fishing licenses and Patrolling the area offshore of Sullivan’s Island on August 8, 2000, during the raising of the Confederate submarine Hunley Off and Running 229 federal aid programs made it possible to increase the breadth of services beyond mere law enforcement. When I first donned the uniform, college degrees were not considered an important requisite for being hired. The idea of issuing twin-engine speedboats, automatic pistols, and global-positioning systems to officers was unthinkable. State duck stamps and saltwater-fishing licenses were nonexistent . There were no size or creel limits on saltwater fish either. It was not uncommon to see fishermen returning from trips standing knee deep in fish piled on the decks of their boats. Sometimes there were so many fish that there was no more room for them inside the fishermen’s coolers . Many of the fish lying about the deck were curled up and dried out by the sun. On weekends the trash bins and waters around every marina and landing used to stink from the rotting sailfish and marlin that had been brought back to the dock and thrown away once the bragging and picture taking was done. Conscientious sports fishermen, who saw increasingly depleted stocks of the more popular inshore fish such as spottail bass, trout, and flounder, and marlin and sailfish offshore, came to understand the...