Palmetto Trail: Santee and Eutaw Springs Passages

I wake refreshed after a night in a climate-controlled room with a bed. The Baymont Inn offers a complimentary breakfast, and I make an enormous waffle—a guilty pleasure I usually don’t allow myself. The morning is crisp and cold, but I decide to leave my tights packed away. Laziness drives the decision. I know the day will warm up quickly and I’ll want them off; however, I also know I’ll continue hiking in misery because I won’t take the time to remove them.

As I’m walking through Santee looking for the hardware store owned by my most marvelous trail angels, Karen and Bo, I hear my name called from across the street. It’s them! I cross the road to say hello, and we chat for a few minutes. I say goodbye, but I secretly hope it’s just a goodbye for now. The trail has a way of bringing people back together, even after they part ways, and I hope that’s the case with these two kind souls.

After leaving the city limits of Santee, I have no choice but to walk across a busy bridge spanning I-95 below. It’s a bit nerve wracking with cars whizzing by, and I’m thankful for the generous shoulder. For nearly a mile, I parallel the road I’ll soon walk on, a stone’s throw away. A fence separates me from it though, so there’s no cutting corners. I’m too much of a purist to cut the corner anyway.

As a truck passes me, the driver rolls down his window to say hello. He’s friendly and warm. He wants to know if I’m hiking the Palmetto Trail and if I need anything. I tell him I’m all set but I appreciate it. He continues on and so do I, continuing my walk on one of the longest stretches of road yet. Most of this passage is tucked away on secondary dirt roads, which makes it easier on my feet, but less comfortable sometimes when cars approach me. The encounter with this man was brief and pleasant, unlike the next one I have several miles later. 

The man in the next truck skips over pleasantries and jumps right to the crux of what he wants to know. “What’s a woman like you doin’ out here?” he asks, not with concern but accusation. I wonder what “a woman like me” translates to in his mind. I’m not quite old enough to be his mom, and I’d guess he’s only younger than me by about a decade.

“I’m on the Palmetto Trail,” I answer, trying to be friendly, despite my instant annoyance with him.

“The Palmetto Trail? But you ain’t on a trail. You sure you know where you’re at?” he questions.

“Yep, I know exactly where I am. This is a trail that spans across the entire state and ends near the coast. I’m surprised you’ve never heard of it since you seem to know a lot about this area.”

“Hate to tell ya, but you ain’t walking in the direction of the coast either. And why would you want to walk across the state anyway?” he asks me, incredulously.

“Hiking is how I recharge my batteries, and I know exactly where I’m headed,” I reply. Perhaps he’s genuinely concerned for my safety and well being, but there’s no denying the chauvinism to it. In his mind, my double X chromosome configuration automatically deemed me incompetent to hold my own.

He glances at my left hand resting on the top of my hiking pole. “So your husband allows you to do this?!” 

“Well, you know, sometimes we moms need a break from being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.” I reply, fake smiling at him. He fake laughs, and there’s an uncomfortable silence between us for a few seconds before he looks at me squarely and says, “I just don’t think you understand how dangerous what you’re doing is. How about you let me give you a ride somewhere.” 

I want to say, “I felt pretty safe until you came along.” But instead I tell him, “I appreciate your concern, but I have a lot of experience and I’m an FBI agent. I’m pretty well versed in how to protect myself out here.” The lie stems from an excellent Backpacker Radio podcast with a retired female FBI agent who section hiked the Appalachian Trail and wrote a book about it.

“Huh. Well, I gotta get goin’ now,” he says with more urgency.

“Have a good one,” I reply while watching him drive off, not wanting to turn my back to him until he’s further down the road.

Do you ever have a conversation where you think of a better response than the one you gave as soon as you walk away from it? Yeah, me too. My answer about being an FBI agent was actually the response that popped in my head five minutes after the exchange.

What I really said to him was something along the lines of, “I appreciate your concern, but I have a lot of experience and I’m capable of taking care of myself out here.” I said this while moving my hand from my hiking pole to lightly pat my Bumster fanny pack. I figured his imagination might conjure up something different bulging inside it than sunscreen, lip balm and snacks. Not a terrible answer, given it served its purpose to end the conversation, but I still wish I’d pretended to be an FBI agent. 😉 

I arrive in Eutawville by lunchtime and pop in the IGA for a cold drink. I ask the cashier where I should eat in town, and she tells me the Asian restaurant is her favorite. It’s well worth the extra round-trip mile I walk to eat there. The owner is super friendly and is intrigued by my hike. He asks me if I’m walking all the way to Mt. Katahdin. “Not on this hike,” I reply, smiling. Lo mein hits all the right spots, and my best laid plans to save half my meal for a snack later do not come to fruition. I eat every delicious bite and thank him for allowing me to charge my phone while I eat, too.

As I’m leaving town, I pass a gas station and an older gentleman with few remaining teeth jumps on a rickety bicycle and rides beside me on the road. “You walking far?” he asks me excitedly.

“Yep, pretty far,” I tell him, worried that his constantly weaving front tire is the cause for the missing teeth, and that he’s going to lose any remaining ones if he doesn’t pay attention to the curb instead of me. 

“I used to walk eveeeerywhere,” he continues. “But then I got a bike and now I ride everywhere. I ride 20 miles every day, back and forth to the store to get something to drink. It’s about 5 miles each trip and I do it 3 times.” 

“Is that right?” I ask, not at all annoyed by this encounter, but wishing I could wave a magic wand over him.

I say goodbye to my cycling companion as I turn left and out of town, and I ponder my camping options as I walk: stop short for the day at the designated primitive campsite on the edge of a field (around mile marker 18 on the Eutaw Springs Passage, if you’re curious); rent a room a little further at Bells Marina and Resort since they don’t allow tent camping there; detour off the trail to stay at Rocks Pond Campground, which does allow tents but charges a premium for a tent site; or simply hike until I find a place that looks safe enough to stealth camp. 

When I arrive at the campsite on the field’s edge, I sit down on a bench in it to weigh my options. I’m tempted to stop because it’s a tranquil setting, and it’s the only legal campsite I’ll pass until the following day. But it’s only 3:30 p.m., and I start hearing a booming car stereo in a nearby neighborhood. So much for the tranquil setting.

So I continue on, already knowing I won’t stop at Bells Resort. I’m annoyed they don’t allow tent camping, especially since they’re right off the Palmetto Trail, and I don’t want to shell out $100 for a room.

I walk quickly when I hit remote Fredcon Road, racing darkness as if I think I’ll win. I nearly tuck away into the woods several times. But when I continue coming across trucks on the side of the road with no one inside, I keep moving instead.

Jason Wish, a popular YouTuber, hiked this passage the previous year and mentioned great stealth camping sites that I took note of while I watched his videos. When I reach the general area he mentioned, I decide it’s as good a place as any to duck into the woods, especially since I haven’t seen a roadside truck in a couple of miles and I’ve hiked over 26 of them since I left Santee. The terrain is perfect for pitching my tent in a flat grove of small pines, and a quick bit of research tells me I’m on the property of a former plantation. 

I quietly make my dinner and shine my headlamp into the trees near me as I eat, hoping there aren’t game cameras attached to any of them. I don’t enjoy stealth camping. But in this instance, it feels like the safest option rather than continuing on in the dark on a remote road. Part of me regrets being so principled about the non-tent friendly campground.

I read a book on my Kindle app and feel my lids getting heavier by the second. But then I hear the sound of an ATV in the near distance and a man’s voice yelling, “There she is! I see her tent!” 

My eyes fly open and I bolt upright, my heart pounding out of my chest. Shit! Shit! Shit!  I’ll plead their mercy by explaining the situation, hoping they’ll either let me stay or leave without reporting me. I cannot believe I’m getting busted though! I wait to hear them call out again before giving away my identity. But the only thing I hear for several minutes is my pulse bounding in my ears. I finally realize it was just a bad dream, and over an hour has passed since I dozed off reading.

Sleep evades me while I try to calm my heightened senses. My mind is flooded with thoughts of this land, a former plantation, and how embarrassingly fearful I just was as a white woman with every privilege in the world. Slaves were possibly beaten, raped, or perhaps tried to flee from this very spot, fearing for their lives instead of their reputation. At a minimum, this land held them captive, and here I am worried about being booted off it for camping without permission.

I think of the black man I encountered on the bicycle earlier in the day. I wonder if his ancestors were the slaves who worked this land, and I ponder what number of things in my life prevented it from amounting to bicycle liquor runs like his. I think of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose birthday was celebrated on this very day….and whose life was robbed of him celebrating more of them on a different one. But what brings the most angst is thinking of my black son, and how different the consequences might be if he was caught camping here instead of me, even in 2023.

I’m grateful when my alarm finally sounds at 5 a.m. since it means it’s time to pack up and get moving again.