A caper on Capers

The unspoiled barrier island just north of Dewees offers some of the best coastal camping on the Eastern seaboard. Hastings Hensel explores Capers’ best feature: Solitude.

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Once upon a time, for millenniums upon millenniums, as the glaciers melted and the sea levels rose and fell; as the granite rocks of the Appalachian Mountains eroded and tumbled; as sand coursed its way through the ancient river system and accumulated atop the dead spartina grass in the marshy mouths and deltas; as the first seeds of salt-tolerant plants like yaupon holly and live oaks took root in the wrack – this island had no name.

The first humans to set foot on it, the indigenous Sewee tribe, surely called it something, but that name is lost in our recorded histories as if blown or washed away. At the dawn of European colonization, it was known as Sessions Island, and then Capore Island, and now Capers Island – a collection of names that have shape-shifted, it might be said, like the island itself.

“In the late 1600s, William Capiers and his two brothers got a king’s grant to farm Capers Island,” explains Shane Ziegler, who since 1997 has been taking people to the island with his company, Barrier Island Ecotours. “Some of the crops were asparagus, celery, and peas – and they also had livestock. After the Civil War, apparently, the island was pretty much abandoned by the Capers family, but the slaves or servants remained out there.”

Ziegler says that a hurricane in the late 1800s made the island uninhabitable, and the Capers slaves and their descendants left for nearby Gadsdenville. After that, the island had a handful of owners until the state purchased the land in 1975. 

A Castaway on Capers

Once upon another time, not even a millisecond in deep time, on a March afternoon of this year, I set foot on the island for the first time.. After hearing that Capers camping is some of the best in the state, if not the entire East Coast, I decided I wanted to camp alone out there, like a bona fide castaway. I called the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources and obtained my permit with relative ease. SCDNR manages the land, and, although you can visit the island from sunup to sundown, you can only camp there with a permit. They took down my information, then emailed me a map and the permit – a phone call of 10 minutes, tops.

My best-laid plan had been to kayak out from the Gadsdenville landing in Awendaw on the outgoing tide – about an hour's paddle in decent conditions –  then return the next day on the incoming tide. But when my old kayak cracked and sprang a leak at the put-in, I was forced to hitch a boat ride with a friend. "Just a three-hour tour," my friend joked on the way out there as we wound our way through the Intracoastal Waterway and landed on the beach at the island's south end.

An Undeveloped Gem

Like its sister, Dewees, just across an inlet to the south, Capers is a barrier island three miles from shore, but, unlike Dewees, no one lives there. “It’s one of the few remaining undeveloped barrier islands,” Ziegler says. “It’s the beginning of a 60-mile undeveloped stretch on the East Coast of the United States, starting with Capers. It’s just special to visit a barrier island not full of houses and people and to see what it’s like in its natural state.”

We anchored down – a bow anchor on the beach, a stern anchor in the inlet – and I unloaded my gearbox. I said goodbye to my friend – who would return in the morning – then a quick hello to a school group field-tripping with Barrier Island Ecotours. I found a campsite to pitch my tent behind a sand dune, at a bend in the back creek, out of the wind, which – I must admit – was howling out of the west. But I did not curse it. No bad weather, the old camping adage goes, only bad gear. Or, the more Zen approach: No bad weather, only bad attitudes. I battened my fly tarp, let the wind do its thing, and remained thankful it drove the bugs away.

It’s the beginning of a 60-mile undeveloped stretch on the East Coast of the United States, starting with Capers.”

-Shane Ziegler

After the Ecotour group disembarked, there remained a few sea-shellers who’d anchored their boats for an afternoon of beachcombing, but they soon left, and I found myself as I had hoped – truly marooned. As the tide drew down, the sand spits rose up like skeptical thoughts: Why do this? Why, that is, camp alone? I’d be lying if I said such questions don’t float through my mind whenever I solo camp.

I found myself as I had hoped – truly marooned. Above me, in a sky streaked with contrail clouds, a buzzard circled in tipsy flight ━ as if buzzed."

-Shane Ziegler

I suppose I could fall back on the old Romantic notions of nature being good for the soul or even cite the scientific research that confirms outdoor activity is the best thing for well-being. Sure. Or I could say that, yes, I like self-sufficiency. Or I could confess that I could find no one to come along.

All true enough, but it dawned on me that I need the rituals of camping and that going through these rituals gives me a contemplative purpose. The selection of the site. The pitching of the tent. The unfurling of the sleeping pad and sleeping bag. The setting up of the camp kitchen. The rigging of fishing tackle. The fetching and filtering of water. The building of the fire. The stringing of the clothesline. The hanging of the lantern.

With camp staged the way I like it – after a constant, Tetris-like arranging and rearranging of gear – it was time to explore. I walked up the shoreline and arrived at the famously photogenic “boneyard beach,” where the upturned roots of fallen trees looked like giant spiderwebs. Here the trunks of palmetto trees stood rigid, with their fronds tickled by the wind. The surf breathed. Whitecaps winkled the ocean. Above me, in a sky streaked with contrail clouds, a buzzard circled in tipsy flight as if buzzed.

Into the Heart of Darkness

Were it not for the wind, I might have walked the whole 3-mile shoreline and back all the way to the north end, where I’d heard the shelling was better. After all, I had the time, and what else was there to do? But I decided, instead, to venture into the thick green wall of jungle vegetation, the maritime forest, or what I referred to jokingly as “The Heart of Darkness.” I followed a trail through cabbage palmetto and live oaks until I found the brackish impoundment.

Ziegler had told me about this place: “The Reynolds family, of Reynolds aluminum wrap, owned it from the ’50s until the early ’70s before the state bought it. It was their own private hunting grounds, and they had the impoundment made in 1961.” They flooded it for duck hunting, he said, and when the state bought it, DNR managed it with a trunk and gate system — as you see in old rice fields — for migratory waterfowl and other wildlife. But when the recent storm surge broke through the dike, the state decided not to fix it because the next storm would, inevitably, do the same thing.

 The Reynolds family, of Reynolds aluminum wrap, owned it from the ’50s until the early ’70s, before the state bought it.”

-Shane Ziegler

The impoundment has since leveled off, and I was hoping to get a look at the legendary 16-foot alligator I’d heard mention of in an online forum – or a bobcat, a coyote, or even a raccoon or a rabbit – but I had no such luck. I was happy enough to see a great egret stalking the mud flats, which were punctuated with deer tracks and alive with fiddler crabs, and then doubly happy to find that someone had erected an ID plaque for the Darlington oak, a species I did not know and would have missed on my own.

And then triply happy when I returned to camp and found my tent had not blown away. The tide was coming back in, and it was time to cast out a line, cook dinner – grilled steak on Reynolds aluminum wrap, of course – and settle into my camp chair for the star show. 

I thought about how Ziegler had told me the island was changing and, at some point in the future, could be no more. “A lot of people think the erosion on Capers is a new event,” he says, “but it’s been naturally eroding about 15 feet a year since 1875. Just the way the hurricane changed the inlet on the north end in the 1800s and changed the direction of the sand flow. Every time a wave breaks now, it’s picking up sand and carrying it away. And there’s not the sand in the longshore current that should be getting to Capers. It’s getting pushed up and around to the next barrier island.”

But, for now, the stars were shining intensely beside a bright crescent moon hanging in the sky, and the view was as it might have been a million years ago.