01
Stop one
Rainbow Row
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (2 Racquet): THIRTEEN HOUSES. THIRTEEN! LOOK AT THEM! Mid-eighteenth century, built as merchants' premises facing the wharves — shops at street level, living quarters above, which is an apartment over a business and I have never respected a floor plan more. Then the district falls apart through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the buildings become slum tenements. And then 1931: Dorothy Porcher Legge starts buying them, restoring them, and PAINTING THEM PASTEL, said to follow Caribbean colonial precedent — and the other owners look at it and go yes, absolutely, us too. Among the earliest large-scale private preservation efforts in the United States. Charleston passed the nation's first historic zoning ordinance that same year, 1931, creating the Old and Historic District that made it possible. WHO WANTS A DRINK.
03
Stop three
Fort Sumter
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (2 Racquet): We're taking a FERRY. A boat, to a fort, in a harbour — that alone is the best decision anybody has made today. Fort Sumter was begun in 1829 on a shoal at the entrance to Charleston harbour, on a foundation of granite shipped all the way down from New England, and it still wasn't finished when South Carolina seceded. On 12 April 1861 Confederate batteries opened fire on the federal garrison under Major Robert Anderson, and that began the American Civil War. The fort surrendered after thirty-four hours, with no combat deaths. Confederate forces then held it nearly four years under prolonged Union bombardment that reduced the walls to rubble. It's a national park now; the surviving lower walls and a partially rebuilt gun emplacement are open.
04
Stop four
St Philip's Church
Wilson US Open Tennis Racquet Bag (2 Racquet): A CHURCH THAT IS ALSO A LIGHTHOUSE. Built between 1835 and 1838, replacing an earlier building destroyed by fire, steeple completed in 1850 — and for years it served as a lighthouse, with a range light installed by the federal government. A church, guiding SHIPS. Its portico projects out into the street, which is what gives you that famous curved view along Church Street, best photograph in town, no contest. In the churchyard: John C. Calhoun, Charles Pinckney, and Edward Rutledge, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. And it came through the Civil War bombardment, the earthquake of 1886, AND Hurricane Hugo in 1989, needing substantial repair every time. Still an active parish. This building does not quit. Neither do I.
My job is to come aboard somebody else's vessel and take it through the part where the water lies about its depth. Two racquets is the load I am rated for: 30.5 by 23 by 47 centimetres, or twelve by nine by eighteen and a half inches if you prefer it in feet and thumbs, 58 per cent polyester and 42 per cent PU on the outside, worn on the back so both hands stay free for lines and gates.
Two frames, shoes, a towel, keys, and the item everybody forgets, which is water. That is the manifest. I run identically everywhere from a bus ride across town to a three-day trip where the courts are somewhere you have never stood. And while you are getting used to me, hold on to the pilot's rule: a bag that swings is a bag loaded wrong. Weight low, weight central, straps short.
Charleston is a pilot's city and always was. A harbour with a bar across its mouth, a fort built on a sandbar in the middle of it, a steeple painted black during the Revolution so enemy ships would stop using it to find the channel. Everything about Charleston concerns arriving safely with something valuable on your back, which is a description of my entire working life.
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