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The moon laid down a prayer cloth of light that stretched out for a thousand miles of seawater.

He and I watched a full moon rise out of the Atlantic. The man standing beside me was from the Upcountry. Ten years ago, I stood on a balcony of an endangered house that sat on the beachfront of Fripp Island. They bring the sure knowledge that the lord of waters watches over them in the deepest pride of creation. In my stories, my currents are shad-honored and dolphin-laced. This is the homeplace the Marine Corps brought me to as a boy. Osprey would impale the mullets from golf course lagoons, and cobia would lace their way through salt rivers in their own madness to spawn as blue herons hunted in perfect stillness, as hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs gathered to mate in the shallows along Land’s End. On the beaches, loggerhead turtles would emerge in the fire-struck linens (maybe havens?) of full moons to deposit glistening, sea-born eggs into funnels of beach-sculpted sands as herds of white-tailed deer drifted like smoke through palmetto forests. I would watch the breath of earth move the high tides of spring as shrimp boats inched out to sea at first light. When I came to Beaufort I had struck upon a land so beautiful I had to hunt for other words that ached with the joyous, carnal charms of the green marshes that seemed to be the source of all life. I can’t write an English sentence without breaking out in song praising the everlasting summons of these shining sea islands we call home. Its beauty was a shining thing and a living thing that would never leave me as long as I was true to that starry, everlasting river-fed country of my art. When I began to write my books, I thought I carried the comeliness of the Lowcountry deep inside me. It was during this enchanting, unforgettable year that I developed a Lowcountry heart. It was the year I learned to water-ski in the Broad River, that I attended my first oyster roast at a house on Port Royal Sound, and that a Marine colonel took me on a fishing trip to an uninhabited sea island called Fripp. When our child-laden car entered Beaufort County as we crossed over the pristine waters of the Combahee River, I caught my first unforgettable view of the Great Salt Marsh. In 1961, the Marine Corps sent my father orders that would send the Conroy family rocketing toward a destiny we were never supposed to have.