If You Knew Myrtle Like I Knew Myrtle"
Tell me about Myrtle Beach," I coaxed my brother Robert. I was sitting bundled up at a desk in Montreal and he was sunning by his swimming pool in Columbia, S.C., a mere two-hour drive from that boardwalk beach town that is mecca for Quebecers in March.
"I'd rather go to Charleston!”
"Ah, c'mon, Myrtle's got `culture' too," I said.
"Nancy, if you knew Myrtle like I knew Myrtle!"
"Well if you knew Coney Island and Atlantic City," I said, "you'd appreciate Myrtle Beach, 'cause it's not sleazy and tawdry and rundown and kinda sinister. It's bright and spiffy and family-oriented and kid-friendly - and yeah, I know, infested with those teenagers. But it's got an innocence that our northeastern beach towns lost 50 years ago," I said, at a loss for loftier travel writing adjectives.
"Innocent?!"
"Uh, well, didn't they build the longest sandcastle in the world there - 16.39 miles long - on the Fourth of July, 1991? And golf isbig. Golfers are peaceable types - yeah, I know, I hate golf, too."
My brother could not be humored. He went to Myrtle Beach on business trips and conventions in the fall and winter, when it was more subdued, but he definitely did not appreciate the place, even with the Guinness Book-of-Records, Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not and Wax Museums. And he hated that strip of T-shirt/beach towel warehouses. But he admitted that Myrtle Beach was great for people-watching.
Therissa, his wife, a country-music singer on her way to Nashville to record a demo, had more redeeming things to say, like how Myrtle is becoming a little Nashville with palm trees - er, palmettos - what with the new Carolina Opry and the Myrtle Beach Opry and the legendary Alabama Band come home to roost in its own new theatre. And the Dixie Stampede, Dolly Parton's rodeo show/chicken dinner theatre with live bulls and horses.
"We used to go to Myrtle Beach when I was a kid, and I loved it. I still like it, especially in autumn when the crowds die down," she said. "And I love to go deep sea fishing there. But the only thing your brother ever caught was an octopus."
I visited Myrtle Beach on my way home from Columbia, even though Rob had said "don't bother." I thoroughly enjoyed it.Especially the Wing's warehouses of four-for-$10 T-shirts and towels, fireworks, and gaudy surf gear and boards with dual remote retractable fin systems.
And the All-U-Kan-Eat Fryyyyed-food Frenzys, the boardwalk, the Ripley's Museum, and just the idea that somewhere in this town were teenagers boogeying out the "shag" on an "aquarium dance floor" (filled with octopi?), and Quebecers having trophy swordfishes stuffed and mounted to bring back home.
Myrtle Beach - "the camping capital of the world" - has RV campgrounds with saunas, chapels, "campground trams,'' cable TV and a Camping Times newspaper. And places with names like the Purple Gator, Shame-o-Barefoot Landing and Murphy's Law. The last is a "raw bar" (oysters, that is!) with 12 satellite TVs picking up hurling matches direct from Ireland. And raunchy finger-food dives like Dick's Last Resort ("sloppy ribs, messy chicken, squirty crab's legs and live late-night entertainment from 5 p.m. on'').
Myrtle Beach is the perfect antidote to a high-brow refined Southern weekend in historic ante-bellum Charleston.
This is the town that invented that bebop-beach dance, the shag, and inspired local romance-writer Leanne Banks to write her novel His Royal Pleasure, and some public-relations hack to write the purplest travel promotion stuff I've ever read.
Quoting from Strand, the ad-mag about the Grand Strand, the 60-mile stretch between Myrtle Beach and Georgetown: "The smiling sun rose high and spilled itself - warm and almost liquid - on soft, dreaming beaches ... Now, the copper colored sun is slipping from its lofty perch, and the dark fingers of evening are grasping handfuls of light."
That writer should write romance novels. After the smiling sun rises and sets, the moon climbs high "set to savor another of the Grand Strand's electric, eclectic faces, with lights all aglow on scads of thrill-a-minute rides, world-class family shows, and a smatterin' of all kinds of eatin' establishments.
Now that I've had my fun with the silly side of Myrtle Beach, named for the waxy-leaved creeper that grows there, I'll tell you about the more cultivated side of the Grand Strand. Yes, it has one, with non-fried gourmet restaurants with delectable seafood, a storytelling festival at the Horry County Public Library, a one-man show based on the works of Mark Twain, and arts and crafts fairs, educational cruises with marine biologists, scuba diving to explore historic sunken shipwrecks, great fishing off the public piers, and two state parks with nature programs.
Robert Leroy Ripley is part of it too, believe it or not. Most people associate him with the garishly weird stuff he unearthed in a lifetime of travels. But after visiting the Myrtle Beach branch of his museum empire, which stretches from Cavendish, P. E. I., to Kyonggi-do, Korea, I gained a new admiration for this "modern Marco Polo" who sold his first drawing to Life Magazine in 1907 when he was only 14, and drew all of his cartoons upside-down.
This self-educated, passionate traveller and obsessive collector visited 198 countries, travelling 2 million miles by every kind of vehicle, donkeys and camels included. With the verve of a National Geographic anthropologist, he documented his encounters with New Guinea head-hunters, Sahara Bedouins, Tibetan priests, Indian firewalkers and giraffe-necked Paduang. He even ventured to the North Pole.
His newspaper columns, books and radio and TV broadcasts, and "Odditoriums" gave millions of Westerners a first taste of the Far East and dozens of other exotic cultures, and he was the first cartoonist to become a millionaire.
I could have spent days gawking at the mind-boggling human creations housed at 901 North Ocean Blvd. - things like a model of Cleopatra's barge made from confectioner's sugar, the Lord's Prayer written on a grain of rice, a gruesome "iron maiden" used to torture religious heretics and Peter Rocha's portrait of Van Gogh done with jelly beans.
I was tempted to visit the ``haunted" Mayhem Manor next door, to tour the research facility of Dr. Morphious Mayhem, who died from one of his own experiments. But to see all the kooky attractions in Myrtle Beach would take a week.
Will Myrtle really make a match for Nashville and Branson, Missouri? It's working hard, with six country-music theatresfilling up with fans and a $250-million, 12-theatre complex with a 25,000-seat amphitheatre and a 14-acre lake on its way. As for big country-music names, it's got them. (If you want to know who's playing where, phone (800) 451-8188 for a Country Music guide to Myrtle Beach.) Visit the 2,000-seat Gatlin Brothers Theatre and the 1,000-seat Magic on Ice Theatre (with laser illusions and mobile backdrops), part of the Waccamaw Harbor entertainment complex of cabarets and theme restaurants. Now all Myrtle needs is a guitar-shaped boardwalk, and a few cowboy boot-shaped swimming pools.