That’s a very long way from Savannah, where she supposedly jumped from the Talmadge Bridge. More than twenty miles, I thought. The body would have had to float, undetected, through a confusing labyrinth of waterways to reach the place where it was eventually found. Maybe it had washed out to sea, and from there, back into the marsh again. Who knows, maybe only God. But I was going to do my best to find out.

The channel made a hard turn to the left, bringing us back to an easterly heading and then abruptly opened into the wide upper reaches of Lazaretto Creek. Ahead, jammed deep in the mud on the left side of the channel, I caught sight of the dead bodies of two new victims. As we came abreast of the spot, I brought Miss Rosalie to a halt and took a good long look. It was a sad sight to behold.

The hulls of two shrimp boats had been abandoned to the ministrations of the marsh. The commercial fishermen of this area had experienced another of their seemingly perpetual financial calamities. Overfishing, bad weather, and now, the low price of shrimp being imported from Southeast Asia and Latin America and dumped on the American market had combined to wreak havoc on the livelihoods of the fishermen of the coast. With nowhere to turn for help, and in the face of nothing but hardship, men, from Virginia to Florida, were abandoning their precious boats, but the Georgia coast appeared to be the epicenter of this sad spectacle.

Economies of the market, spout the business gurus. It’s good for the bottom line, they blather on. But I ask myself, Whose economy? And whose bottom line are they speaking of? Certainly not the men who have lost the work they’ve followed all their lives.

Those derelict boats may represent enhanced profits to a handful of huge corporations, but to the men who had depended on those boats to wrest a living from the sea and provide for their families, those same rotting hulks now represented hardship, desperation, and destitution.

So go ahead, America, ship those jobs overseas as fast as you can. And when the bulk of the working people of this country can no longer afford to buy the foreign-made goods we import, and when they can no longer afford to purchase the homes, and cars, and other major items that have kept our economy humming and growing for the last three-quarters of a century, well, then, don’t be surprised if we end up with an economy similar to that of Mexico: with a small handful of Haves and a great mass of Have-Nots. And then we’ll see how well the Wall Street robber barons and their political enablers in Washington like the society they’ve created.