Walking Myrtle Beach

Consumption, pancakes, and an off ramp to the American Dream

(Next up. Istanbul. Until then, a small essay on walking Myrtle Beach South Carolina.)

In a Leicester Wetherspoons I’d convinced myself it’d be fun to walk Myrtle Beach, despite hating beaches, crowds, putt-putt golf, and Hooters.

Four pints in, surrounded by Brits splotched red from drink, the rain drizzling outside, I sat scrolling through Google Maps, happy in thoughts of marching up and down a sunlit Kings Highway¹, gaining all sorts of new insights into the human condition from places like Crabby George’s, Gilligan's Island Funland, and Ripley’s I can’t believe it’s not Butter!

That was buzzed me. Sober me wanted a challenge. Physically I wanted the workout from marching fifteen miles in the shade-less South Carolina sun and humidity. My own low-rent Bikram yoga.

Intellectually I wanted to understand why, after all the places I’d been, after writing over and over about being open minded about places with a bad rap, the idea of spending Labor Day weekend in Myrtle Beach still made my eyes roll like an American snob. Foreign is good! American is bad! Especially the stuff the American masses like.

So I spent the fifteen hour drive from my house, while not happy, at least content knowing I was going to learn something, and maybe even have a little fun.

But I was wrong. I didn’t have much fun, and I’m not sure I learned much. It was a dreary trip which I spent about as unhappy as I’ve ever been on a walk.

The throngs of joyful crowds I expected weren’t there. My fault. Summer season was over, and the city was empty. Without a foreground of happy mobs, Myrtle Beach became a drab ugly backdrop. A fifteen mile strip of asphalt, concrete, brick, and stucco. Boxy single-story buildings painted bright in an attempt to hide their prefab cheapness, or rectangular high rises painted with stripes of color to hide their hurricane code bulkiness.

There is a worn overgrown shabiness to it all. Myrtle Beach has reached middle age and it isn’t aging gracefully. Like a former beauty queen who can no longer hide their decline with makeup, botox, and the right light.

The only time its beauty reappears is at night, when it becomes a pretty diaroma of consumption. Beach stores with brightly lit windows of towels, candy, toys, and t-shirts.

And there is a lot of consumption to display, because everything in Myrtle Beach is about material and transactional fun. It is chock full of franchises serving all you can eat pancakes, crabs, sushi, wings. There is a whole hierarchy of discount stores, from “Nothing over $7.99,” to $5.99 Outlets (everything $5.99 or less!”), to “Nothing over $3.99.”

It is an escape for people without a lot of money, who don’t have the time or the money to fly off to the Caribbean, or the high end resorts to the south. It is a chance for the plebes to be royality for a weekend. Assuming their credit line allows it.

That faux low-brow royalty reaches its most intense at the Medieval Times, where families can cosplay the middle ages, from eating without silverware, to watching knights be chivalric. Excluded is almost anything to do with the faith or the church.

A notable absence given the time period, but one fitting Myrtle Beach. There is little transcendent here, except for the beach, and few use it for that, beyond older couples collecting shells when the sun is at its weakest. Most use it for the high from White Claw and jet skiing, or the lows from lying stoned in the harsh sun.

While there is little soul in Myrtle Beach, there are plenty of places for kids to be kids, places for the harmless joy of childhood. Giant elaborate life-size dioramas where you can putt-putt yourself into a childlike bliss. Arcades smelling of deep fried food where, if you’re really good, you can squirrel away enough tickets to buy a stuffed dinosaur for yourself, or a waffle maker for your parents they’ll have to use out of guilt.

But there were few families in Myrtle Beach the two days I walked, and just like a casino without loud winners is revealed as a place sucking people dry quarter by quarter, Myrtle Beach without the yelps of kids felt like a place sucking people dry margarita by margarita.

It is also a very transient town with lots of the older residents from places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Utah. People who grew up wanting a little slice of what Jimmy Buffet sells. The laid-back beach vibe, but on a limited budget.

As much as I don’t like Myrtle Beach, they do, because what it provides is an inexpensive low aspirational version of the American dream. One where you can just exist in relative peace. Where you can raise a family, be safe, happy, relaxed, well fed, and always entertained. It is a low-stress rest stop in our high-stress high-anxiety overly-driven culture.

It is an off-ramp for those who can’t, or don’t want to, play the American Dream. Who don’t want to continually scurry around trying to acquire as many credentials, experiences, and things as possible. Who don’t want to always be materially bettering themselves. Who find peace sitting in Jimmagans, with their friends, plucking buds from the ice bucket, gossiping about work, or rooting for the Tennessee Vols, and spending their off days at the beach with their kids and kids’ kids under an umbrella.

Content to be alive without being worried about what others think.

That’s understandable and admirable, but it’s sad we’ve built a culture so devoid of the metaphysical, so devoted to the material, so entrepreneurial, that opting out mostly means numbing yourself in the pleasures of the here and now, and having to pay for it by selling yourself all the time.

One night I went to a Hooters, because it’s Myrtle Beach. I don’t like Hooters, because of its creepy “family friendly strip club vibe²”, its harsh lighting, and its high-fat low-taste food. Yet, there are always good people in bad places, and I enjoyed myself and left in a "stop being a judgemental snob" good mood.

Then I saw a striking motorcycle parked next to me, painted in a bespoke purple pink galaxy pattern. It had a tag for an Instagram account, Thicky_ something or other. Which I found out of curiosity. The account was mostly a collection of semi-sexual selfies of a middle aged woman and then photos of her three beaming kids doing fun things.

Her profile description was “Homie❤Mother❤Biker❤Hustle” with a link to her OnlyFans account.

So much for my good mood.

Which made me start thinking about why I was being such a judgemental snob. Why did Myrtle Beach bother me but Hull, the British beach town I liked, didn’t? It wasn’t just Hull, there were a lot of similar places across the world that I’ve liked.

The difference is Hull has a lot of history that is front and foremost and hasn’t been plowed over. It’s not just the history you can see, there is a long English tradition residents can hang their hat on. To give them a meaning beyond the material. As I wrote in my pieces on walking across England, the English working class has place, history, and class pride as a non-material foundation.

So much of America, not just Myrtle Beach, doesn’t have that. So my issue isn’t with Myrtle Beach, but with the US in general. We are a highly materialistic and transient country, without a lot of grounding traditions. That focus on the material, without the transcendent, falls heaviest on those without a lot of material stuff. Or, lower income people, because a country that sorts by the stuff you own is by definition going to have people without a lot of stuff at the bottom.

So Myrtle Beach is an extreme example of an American emptiness, since it’s mostly for lower income people wanting to have a little non-spiritual fun.

Still, America isn’t entirely without traditions and Myrtle Beach isn’t entirely new. It does have a history, but one that’s mostly been bulldozed away. There is still a two block “old town.” sitting in the middle of Kings Highway, a reminder that it began as a small southern town built on soil bad for agriculture, before it pivoted into a resort town where the sand became a strength.

It is a bit of a shock to see these old parts. There is even a church there. An anachronism in the sea of hastily built sprawl. A carcass overrun, with only the old bones, picked clean, remaining.

As you drive away from Myrtle Beach that sprawl eventually comes to an abrupt end, and pine forests spotted with small towns reign again. Places with more churches than people, rather than more pancake houses than people.

Georgetown, 40 miles to the South, is a nice example. A city that still makes things, though less of them. It has a steel mill, paper mill, and an old downtown that hasn’t been picked clean by the sprawl yet.

It will be. Every time I drive along the coast of South Carolina, Myrtle Beach has expanded, in both directions. Georgetown, with its inlets, proximity to the water, is a tasty morsel for people looking for another off ramp from the American Dream.

And more and more people are looking for that off ramp, because while it might not be my cup of tea, the Myrtle Beach lifestle is an understandable way to cope and deal with the disillusionment of the aspirational American dream, that while delivering lots of stuff, especially to the winners, also delivers lots of anxiety, loneliness, and metaphysical emptiness, especially to the losers.

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Sorry to interrupt with me having to sell myself. But I’d really appreciate you thinking about subscribing, especially the paid up type. I would love to keep as much as this free as possible, but even though I travel really cheaply, there are expenses! Thanks and sorry again.

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Walking logistical things

• Myrtle Beach might have one of the worst bus systems I’ve dealt with. There is a bus that runs up and down 17, but it comes rarely, the stops are signs without shade, and you can’t really get very far on it. The only other people using them were those without any other choice. Usually that meant people unable to buy a car, or legally not allowed to drive.

• There were sidewalks everywhere, although they did sometimes simply end. Again, perhaps its for aesthetic reasons, or because of hurricanes, but there are few trees beyond palms, which don’t cast much shade. Walking means being in the sun, which after three or four hours, no matter your shape, will start making you fill a tad ill.

  

1. U.S. 17 Business, which runs the length of Myrtle Beach, as well as the coast of South Carolina.

2. The father proudly taking pictures of his two beaming young sons (9, 12) posing with dolled up waitresses in itsy bitsy outfits, was a particularly gross moment.