A Southern Gentleman

September 5, 2005

I got my first taste of the South as my husband and I were venturing down Interstate 95 from Pennsylvania en route to our new home, Bluffton, South Carolina.

Three hundred miles from Bluffton, somewhere outside Raleigh, North Carolina I heard the moving truck emit a noise that I knew could not be good. I watched as my husband pulled the truck over to the side of road, and panic set in. Hoping for the best, yet not knowing what that may be, I followed suit. So, there we sat on the side I95.

We’ve all witnessed this scene before – heading down the interstate for the big summer vacation and there is that one desperate family sitting on the side of the road. A car stuffed tight with pillows, pop tarts and travel Parcheesi, bikes bungeed to the roof, and the family sitting on their cooler, waiting for help.

You can see them, can’t you? We’ve all driven past this family at one time or another and commented, “Glad that’s not us.” Well, this time, it was us.

We were the family with the moving van towing the SUV, being followed by the sedan, filled with the dog, two cats and everything that we couldn’t fit elsewhere.

Our options were to have another truck dispatched, which would kindly wait to tow the broken down truck while we unpacked it and re-packed the new truck. Or, we could wait for a tow truck and hope they could fix the problem. We chose the later – the prospect of unpacking our household items on the side of I95 while the rental company sat on our cooler and watched was not appealing.

And then, a Southern gentleman arrived. At just after 6:00 p.m. in the evening he broke the news, the truck could not be fixed but he would tow the moving truck to Bluffton. Tow the 26 foot moving truck? Ok. At 9:30 p.m. our moving van arrived in Bluffton escorted by the kindest man we had ever met. Knowing that this gentleman now had to return to Raleigh and wouldn’t get in until well after midnight, my husband attempted to tip him. The gentleman declined and when my husband insisted – he obliged saying, “today is my wife’s birthday, I’ll stop and get her some flowers on my way.”

And this was our introduction to the South – a gentleman who reached out to strangers in a “foreign land.” Something tells me that his wife understood because she married him for just this reason. This doesn’t happen everywhere, I guarantee you.

I have since found that all that I had expected from this new chapter in my life has been realized. Bluffton is a hidden gem, with all of the charm and uniqueness that we envisioned when we began our journey. This column will serve to celebrate the people and places of Bluffton and introduce other “newbies” to their new home. I will let the waterways, pathways and people here be my compass – just point me in the right direction.