“Sense of place” is our many sensual abilities to attune to the attributes of our landscapes and feel at home on them. You find and expand your sense of place by studying your region.
Sapelo Island is Part of My Place
To get on Sapelo, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—beautiful Georgia, my songland—you have to be invited by someone who lives there
1. One good way to get invited is to arrange a private tour with a local guide.
I like staying home. When I leave, I worry about the farm animals—What if the automatic waterers quit working? Shouldn’t I have put fly masks on the horses?—but when I make myself leave, I fall in love with the beautiful world outside my farm again and again and again. I return thrilled and inspired.
Why We Wanted to Visit Sapelo & What I Learned about Sense of Place
This is my husband’s birthday weekend, and one of Raven’s plans for his birthday year is to immerse himself in a study of Georgia’s 100-mile chain of barrier islands. He wanted to start with Sapelo.
Something like 90 percent of Sapelo is owned by the state, protected from development and mostly managed as a refuge and wildlife management area. Originally a plantation, it was owned by Thomas Spalding until 1851, when he died, then Howard Coffin (Hudson motor car), and finally R.J. Reynolds (tobacco) in 1934. The state purchased part of the island in 1969 and part in 1976.
What is left in private hands are some inholdings that wealthy folks have bought and a community called Hog Hammock, where descendants of Sapelo’s enslaved citizens were forced to live.
I didn’t make arrangements to visit the island until yesterday. Lucky for me, I got Mr. JR Grovner with Sapelo Island Tours on the phone, and he invited us over.
We live 73 miles from the coast, so we were up this morning at 5:30 am to make sandwiches and coffee then leave by 6:30 to arrive at the Meridian dock by 8.
What I Take With Me to Investigate Sense of Place
I had my journal with me, of course. And binoculars. I almost never go into the wild without those.
Stories are a lot like life-partners. Sometimes one just finds you. Same with story—a good one may find you. A place can pull you in to tell its stories, for example. Or a place can birth you and hand you eons and generations and neighborhoods of stories. Here are some stories for you, it will say. Go tell these.
Again like a life-partner, sometimes you have to go out and find stories. You can’t sit at home waiting.
Mr. Grovner took us to Hog Hammock and showed us the post office, community center, a defunct medical clinic, a tiny public library, an unused school. (Now the children get up at 6, take a bus to the dock, ride the ferry to the mainland, and there catch another bus to school.) Mr. Grovner stopped so we could take photos at a pretty little brackish creek. He pointed out painted buntings, including a pair learning to fly, and alligator tracks along the sand roads.
We got to see the sugar mill that David Shields writes about here in his Substack
Foodlore & More . We peeked at the Reynolds mansion and the UGA Marine Institute lab. We hung out on Nannygoat Beach, where now there aren’t enough seashells to make even a dollhouse of tabby.
We saw a museum with skulls lined up in a row—dolphin, loggerhead, alligator, Kemp’s Ridley. We saw salt marsh, sand dune, tidal creek, and mudflat.
What is a Sense of Place?
A sense of place refers to the attachment bonds we develop with the geography in which we live. This sense can be nurtured by studying the history, culture, and ecology of our place. Knowing our place can add meaning to our lives; help us feel more rooted, with a greater sense of belonging; and build our stores of memories. We can get more connected to our communities, and we can feel less homeless. We can be spurred to local action. When we explore our place, our particular concept of home (and here I’m thinking of home as refuge, as security, and as center) can extend beyond our own doorways.
So that was our morning on Sapelo. Soon the time arrived for the ferry ride back to the mainland and the drive home, where even in 93-feels-like-100 heat everything had gone fine without me.
The world calls us out into it. Home calls us back.
Sometimes the world calls us out into it so we can broaden what we think of as home.
Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
—T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”
This is the land. We have our inheritance.
—T.S. Eliot, “Ash Wednesday”
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