“Where is the place you have come from, with your buried steps full of new roots?”
— James Dickey, “The Salt Marsh,” 1961
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I crest the Waccamaw River Bridge on an August evening when a storm is looming in the distance. I haven’t been back to Pawleys Island in nearly a decade, but the smell of the Georgetown paper mills and the rhythmic thunk of the bridge’s seams under my tires call up the years I spent visiting this tiny spit of South Carolina Lowcountry. My father, the poet James Dickey, loved what he called the “unbroken openness” of the island’s salt marshes and the spooky beauty of its live oaks. He bought a second home here long before I was born. When he died in 1997, we buried him at Pawleys in an 18th-century graveyard under a tree cloaked in Spanish moss…