Waterfront Park - Wade at Your Own Risk

Our first foray into Charleston proper was to set the GPS for Waterfront Park to get us across Art Jr.’s bridge. If you’re visiting one of America’s great seaports then the water is a great place to start. We skipped breakfast and were at Waterfront Park with the first joggers of the day. The sidewalks hadn’t even been rolled out on the cobblestone streets yet.

The park has to be one of the great places to greet a new day. The sun was shining ever so gently and the breeze blowing in from Fort Sumter was fresher than Grandma’s laundry after a full day on the line. We watched large cargo ships escorted by tugboats head down the Cooper River to sea.

Waterfront Park is graced by two huge fountains, which are accompanied by large wooden signs warning the foolhardy they will be wading at their own risk. This seems a little tongue in cheek until later in the day we came back to see toddlers among the little children wading and running through the fountains. So maybe the signs serve a limited liability purpose after all.

We saw a couple in the park, mid 30s and patrician attractive, followed faithfully by an entourage of camera persons and tagalongs. We thought they might be famous for no good reason and since we can’t identify five people in People Magazine, we finally broke down and asked. It turned out we hadn’t missed them anywhere on TV or film. The guy had asked his lady love to marry him that morning and he had hired the photographers and directors to record the entire experience. I’m sure the film had a significant budget as he struck me as a young attorney of good family able to afford such a production. I’m sure the results will be aired at their wedding if not before on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterist or some other social medium I’m not hip enough to be up on. Always a cynic, I wondered to myself what would have happened if she had said no? Probably wouldn’ t have posted that anywhere.

We ended our day as we had started, at Waterfront Park. The in between will be subject to another post. We sat down on a bench and watched the harbor as the curtain rang down on our first day. We enjoyed the breeze and people watching as all shapes and sizes, dressed and lack of dress, tramped past us in both directions. There was a Yoga class going on behind us with great enthusiasm and pretzel moves. The class seemed to break up and everyone departed except for one guy with long hair and beard who lay in crucifixion position on the grass. He outlasted everyone by 20 minutes, obviously deep in meditation or asleep. He finally rose and wandered off, sharing neither his enlightenment if he had been meditating nor his dreams if he had been asleep. My money was on dreams.

The thing that gave us most pleasure was watching the sailboats heading for docks, one a catamaran with about eight or 10 aboard and another only slightly smaller than Columbus’ Nina or Pinta with a full array of sails. The sailboats stirred a memory of my greatest sailing triumph and favorite memory, piloting a rented Catamaran 30 years before on Acapulco Bay. We had talked about renting a ride around Charleston Harbor, but had envisioned something like we had done in New York where the boat was large and gasoline powered and shared by about 200 other touristas. I suggested we splurge and try and find a sailboat to rent or stow away on and Jan agreed. It was one of the best agreements we’ve made in almost a quarter century of a marriage blessed with few disagreements. But we didn’t know that then.