Too much of my adult life must have been spent either in countries which were recovering from war (Austria as a Fulbright student of Greek philosophy, Japan as a student of Japanese) or in the third world (Afghanistan, Viet-Nam, Pakistan, Iraq, Surinam and the like).  In any event nothing had prepared me for the lifestyle of Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

My wife Mary and I went to Hilton Head in early January 1998 for a five-day Elderhostel adventure in adult education and it was splendidly instructive. Our three courses  reinforced one another. They also  added to our introduction (through  a Charleston, SC Elderhostel in July 1997) to  the South Carolina Low Country: from its early cash crops like indigo, rice and Sea Island cotton to colonial architecture and history. On Hilton Head in January our three courses were: 
 

• (1) Hilton Head in the Civil War, 
• (2) Gullah and Low Country Black culture and
• (3) one non-fiction work and four novels  by “the Lord of the Low Country,” Pat Conroy.

But what to make of the larger setting: Hilton Head Island as it presented itself in 1998? President and Mrs. Clinton had departed from the annual Renaissance Weekend a couple of days before we arrived. This was clearly an off season for visitors. Our first impression as we drove onto the island was how clean and visually attractive it was. The island itself felt about twice the size of Hong Kong island (without hills), where I first did Foreign Service work as a Vice Consul 1964-66. Signs and billboards were small and discreet. Here and there were peeks at Sam’s Club, condos, bookstores and restaurants. It took 25 minutes to drive the 12 miles down the island to our Holiday Inn hotel.

We were given by our elderhostel instructors only a sketch of the island in its present (since 1983) municipal form . Hilton Head has about 30,000 residents and is not to be permitted to grow beyond 40,000 or 45,000 (there were a million people on Hong Kong island when we lived there). And the parts of the island which constitute its raison d’etre are divided among seven private residential/golf complexes popularly called plantations. 

Mary’s  college roommate lives in one of these and we could not have entered it or the other gated plantations without being invited by a resident.  Our friends enjoy very pleasant living indeed at remarkably affordable prices. Their attractive home abuts on one of their  plantation’s four golf courses and golf is uncrowned king. We walked together over the grounds of a civil war fort inside the plantation. We were amused by signs at one little park saying, “Please do not feed the alligators.” None of the saurians were then in evidence. But we understand that when the weather warms and the water level drops, gators will reappear in Camelot. 

One of our fellow elder hostelers told us that he had just visited a friend in Aiken, South Carolina (one of America’s gems) and that guarded, gated communities in the spirit of Hilton Head plantations are beginning to circle Aiken like a necklace. Indeed, our new friend thought that this pattern was clearly the wave of America’s future: gated communities, not open to the public, secure, with residents united by a common love of some sport (golf) or avocation. Suddenly the mountains of Western North Carolina where I now live felt as open as Oklahoma or Texas by comparison with physically flat but socially stratified Hilton Head.

I began to speak about Hilton Head with people I met on Hilton Head and nearby Beaufort (what a visual feast!) and Ebenezer on the Savannah River in Georgia. Hilton Head was a personal first for me. More familiar to me were the mud villages north of Kabul or the ruins of Babylon in Iraq or the log and thatch huts of the Bush Negroes of interior Surinam. 

Hilton head: what is  it really like? “ZARDOZ,”  it suddenly came to me!  Do you remember the 2 1/2 star 1973 movie with Sean Connery as the angry mutant from the outside and Charlotte Rampling as the cool intellectual inside the great force field dome which protected latter day  immortal Lotus Eaters  from the ignorant survivors of post-cataclysmic Ireland? ZARDOZ, Connery discovered in a ruined library, was a corruption of “WIZARD OF OZ” and was the name given by the lotus eaters to an ugly looking “god”  which they used to cow the natives into supplying basic needs to those who lived in the bubble. 

Well, Connery snuck into the bubble, broke down its force field and destroyed the little, aloof unwarlike Camelot. He and Rampling went off to a cave and restarted mortal life as it might have been thousands of years earlier.

Hilton Head Island is much better than Zardoz.  Its residents number many hard working, self-sacrificing achievers--who happen to love golf. Is Hilton Head or Zardoz, however, a taste of America’s likely future? Let me think on that  and report back to you soon. 

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for Asheville TRIBUNE