Then, precipitately, the vegetable walls stopped, and the wide Alligator River estuary opened to sky and wind. Whitecaps broke out of the strange burgundy water. As I drove the long bridge over the inlet, a herring gull, a glare of feathers, put a wingtip a few feet to the left of Ghost Dancing, and, wings steady, accompanied me across.
Dare County, named after the first white child (says tradition) born in America, is a curious county with four times as much water as land and only two highways and four towns—a pair on the mainland and a pair on Roanoke Island. Most of mainland Dare is a spongy place, a bog that until recently discouraged developers. But now, about the county, men with caliper hands and parallelogram brains were taking the measure of the salt marsh and trying to “reclaim” it—a misleading word since this tidewater has always belonged to the sea.
A second long bridge crossed Croatan Sound to Roanoke Island, a low rise a little larger than Manhattan and lying just inside one of the most unusual geographic features in the country: the Outer Banks. A skinny chain of sand, the Banks stretch for nearly two hundred miles along the North Carolina coast. On Roanoke Island, there is no enduring symbol for the first “permanent” English settlement in America like the rock at Plymouth, Massachusetts. In place of a symbol, Roanoke has mystery. Here Virginia Dare was born only to vanish from history without a trace nine days later. The woods, a thick mat of shrubs and trees, looked in places as it must have when the Dares, members of Raleigh’s third Roanoke expedition, came ashore. It may be that the absence of such a ready symbol as Plymouth Rock has helped keep Roanoke from the destruction of this time.
The highway wound into the dark trees again as it traversed the very place where the English colonies disappeared, the last group leaving behind America’s most famous mystery word—Croatoan—carved in a stockade timber. Roanoke Island gave a shadowy sense of an older time that Plymouth Rock, surrounded, dwarfed, and protected in stone and steel, has lost. A man told me, “Out on Roanoke, you can feel the beginning.”
8
AT the bottom of Queen Elizabeth Avenue, the main street of Manteo, North Carolina, where it comes down to the sound, stood a Brobdingnagian statue, ten feet of a single cypress trunk cut into a sixteenth-century English courtier. A woodpecker, with uncanny accuracy, had drilled a hole in Sir Walter Raleigh’s pantalooned posterior, and now there were predictable jokes in Manteo about the hole and Sir Walter’s woodpecker.
Manteo is the seat of Dare County and one of the few courthouse towns, as the Carolinians call them, on an island in the Atlantic Ocean. Not so remote as Key West, or so big as Newport, Rhode Island, or so famous as Nantucket, or so elitist as Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard, Manteo was a pleasant place: smaller, humbler, quieter. The docks once lining the harbor had dwindled to three, and the seashell-paved streets were now macadam like everywhere else. The red-brick, turn-of-the-century courthouse opened to the waterfront where formerly a fleet of mail, freight, passenger, and fishing boats tied up. Now the sport-fishing craft in red, blue, and yellow, each sprouting long whip antennas that gave them the look of water bugs, rocked in the little marina. Even still, Manteo looked as if it belonged with its face in the Atlantic winds.
At Raleigh’s immense wooden boots, a man worked quickly in the bright, cold wind as he brushed preservative over the base of the statue. He was one of the town commissioners working to refurbish the old wharfside of Manteo. Between two big oil tanks abandoned by the owners, the town had built a park reaching into the basin off Roanoke Sound.
He spoke with the old London accent of the Banks that some people believe to be the speech of the Elizabethans. “We may be able to use one of the tanks in our new sewage system,” he said. “If not, down they’ll come. This statue is the focal point for rehabilitating Queen Elizabeth Street. New bridges did in most of the work boats, but it’s the bridges that bring out tourists now. We’ve got six million dollars of federal funds coming here over the next two years. When we finish, you won’t recognize Manteo.”
Across the sound at Nags Head, a new highrise broke the flat horizon of the Banks where once only small, low buildings stood. “I hope you’re not going to put highrises here too,” I said.
“That’s a Ramada Inn.”
“Overwhelms everything out there—no harmony at all between it and the land. Architecture without regard for place or history. They’ve been Jersey Shored, if you ask me.”
“The sea never forgets where it’s been, and it’s been over that land many times. We haven’t had a major hurricane in nearly twenty years, whereas we used to have a hard blow every few years. New people don’t know that. They come in and see open beach and figure they’ve found open land. But the Banks aren’t ordinary islands, and that’s why they’ve been left alone. People didn’t used to build much they couldn’t afford to see washed away, because sooner or later most things out there get washed away. I know—I’ve lived there. It’s always been a rough place. Land pirates, sea pirates. Blackbeard was killed down at Ocracoke where my family comes from. One of my ancestors was on the Arabian ship that wrecked and spilled the Banks ponies that used to run wild.”
“They don’t now?”
“Fenced in by the Park Service. They overpopulated and started cropping beach grass so close as to kill it. Pawed holes in the sand to get fresh water and caused erosion—the number-one problem on the Banks. People get up in arms about the fencing, but the ponies aren’t natural to the island. Of course, grass isn’t either. Or men. Indians used to hunt the Banks, but I don’t think they lived there. They’re barrier islands. Some of that land’s moving south as much as twenty feet a year. It’s a natural process, the way the sea washes sand over the islands from the coast side and drops it on the sound side. But the Corps of Engineers and Park Service have built jetties and grassed dunes so sand doesn’t get washed over now. They’ve tried to stop a natural process, and so you get erosion on the east and no build-up on the west.”
“That’s the Corps: redesigning and stabilizing nature.”
“Today we’ve got bridges over land and roads ending up in the water. Been millions of dollars spent trying to pin down the Banks. You talk about the Ramada. A motel at Wrightsville Beach is built where an inlet used to be. They have to pump sand back in to keep the building standing. An architect has to understand our natural balance of the change that keeps things—in the long run—almost unchanged. It’s not stability, it’s balance. Living on the Banks, you learn the difference real quick.”
“Sounds like somebody wants to keep something not his to keep.”
“Ninety percent of the U.S. coast is privately owned. It isn’t easy to give up your land—even to the ocean.”
9
BUCK’S (Open 24 Hours) Fish House in Manteo sat on pilings, its backside in the water. It smelled right: like fish. On mounds of ice lay crab slough oysters (fresh-shucked or in the shell), jimmy crabs, littleneck clams, chowder clams, croaker, mullet, flounder, bluefish.
I got hungry and went to the Duchess of Dare restaurant on Budleigh Street, a street trying to look like sixteenth-century London. The town commissioner had said the place served a good plate of seafood. The Duchess was a tired, motherly woman in mid-life who had been in her Olde English Swiss chalet cooking, washing, cleaning, and figuring the books since five-thirty that morning. The ocean wind rattled the windows, and beside me at the counter the Duchess sat drinking coffee from a heavy mug.
“They call me Duchess now, but thirty years ago I was Doris Walker of Walker’s thirteen-stool diner. Made out of a surplus Navy bus. Thirteen’s my lucky number. Later, I added a wing and seated forty-five. Then remodeled again to get eighty-five in. It’s successful because I worked all the time.”
Against one paneled wall, a preternaturally blue swordfish leapt over a Formica table. The Duchess had tried to get rid of the diner image in the successive remodelings and through decorator touches like the Mexican wrought-iron chandeliers. But the lunchwagon still showed in places: above the wine
rack little boxes of Special K and All-Bran, near the oil paintings of Moorish Spain the booster club gumball machine.
“The diner,” I said, “the real diner of olden times, is dying out, you know. Thirteen-seat surplus Navy bus diners are rare.”
“They’re rare because you can’t make a living wage off one today.” She nodded toward the big circular table under the front window. “See that?”
Around the ledge above the table were men’s caps: an orange hard hat, navy-blue watch cap, soiled yachting cap, a Forest Service hat. Like an all-night poker game, the composition of the table changed one at a time.
“Those are friends and customers. I need them and they need my place, but it’s hard to make a living off coffee. When I first opened, I was happy to sell a dozen cups a day. That won’t make it now. Manteo lost most of the work boats. Today, tourists and county government keeps us alive. Tourists don’t want a Navy bus—they want your ‘olden’ days with all the conveniences. Me, I need volume in season to survive. If you want the real yesterday, go to Wanchese. They haven’t seen neon light down there yet.”
The Duchess went back to the kitchen, and the waitress set out my platter of fried fresh fish, grilled potatoes, and slaw. Basic food, tasty without expertise, prepared by the Duchess and her daughter personally.
Maybe she was right that tourists want half-timbered facades and stained-plastic windows; maybe they want an Elizabethan town even when the real Manteo had been clapboard and shingles. Progress, retrogression—the Duchess knew best. But for me, I headed toward the town that hadn’t seen neon light.
10
IN 1584, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, the leaders of Raleigh’s first colonial exploratory expedition, returned to London from Roanoke with tobacco, potatoes, and a pair of “lustie” Indians to be trained as interpreters. Their names were Manteo and Wanchese. The Virgin Queen and the courtiers in their lace ruffs were fascinated by the red men. Months later when the Indians returned to the sound, Manteo, the first man baptized by the British in America, was on his way to becoming a proper English gentleman. But Wanchese, after seeing London, came back an enemy of “civilized” society. Four hundred years later, the towns carrying their names, sitting at almost opposite ends of the island, still show that separation.
Wanchese, smelling of fish and the sea wind, was on the lower tip of Roanoke. For generations the trawlers had passed through Oregon Inlet of the Banks to tie up at the little stilt piers of Wanchese. They still did, although the fleet worked out of here only in winter. The boats, maybe a hundred and fifty strong, came from the north—Massachusetts and Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey—to work the milder waters, where they trawled for flounder and dragged the mud for hibernating hardshell crabs. In spring, they followed the fish north, and the summer party-boats and a few yachts motored in.
The town had a craft shop now, but mostly it was splintered pilings and warped gangways and fish barrels. The small houses, built by seamen used to working in limited quarters, were made even smaller by the expanse of marsh weed and scrub loblolly stretching away to the sound. Rusting boilers and winches and broken hulls bobbed up like buoys from the waving grass; on lawns, under the crimson violence of camellias, fishermen had set admiralty anchors rusted to fragility or props painted red, white, and blue. From any home the boatmen could look to the wharf and see the white wheelhouses trimmed only in black, and the booms with lines and nets dripping like kelp.
The sun was just gone, the time Carolinians call “day down.” I walked the wharf and read names of the trawlers: Country Cousin, Brother’s Pride, Blue Chip. I came to a wooden shed with two windows gleaming like cat eyes in the night. A sign above the door: JAMES GRIGGS WHOLESALE. As I passed, a low, dusky whisper slipped from the side of the building, and a shadowy arm hooked me. “Hey, sport. You be here to help load?” It was a small, compact black man without age. He fixed me with his left eye while the milky right one shone like a moonstone.
Then a rasp from the shed: “Bring him in, Balford, and let’s git the hell movin’.” Balford motioned for me to follow inside. He stood behind me in the doorway and said, “Here, Griggs.”
The room, a glowing of yellow bug lights and redolent with fish and diesel fuel, was stacked with crates of hardshell crabs. The crabs clacked their bony claws and reached through the slats at my eyes. Griggs, a white man, took a good pull on a can of beer. “Our third man ain’t comin’. Kin you work? For money.” Why not, I thought. I told him I could. “You a strong boy?”
“Lift my own weight with two men helping.”
“How much you weigh, topper?”
“About one-thirty-five.”
“Fancy that. These here crates weighs one thirty-five. Some’s a tot heavier.”
So we started. The truth was they all were a tot heavier. Balford and I slid crates to the scales, I weighed them, Balford in a slow and uncertain hand wrote down the number, and we hoisted them to Griggs on the truck.
There were more crabs than crates, and the critters kept hopping out of the overfilled boxes like popcorn in a hot skillet. The floor crawled with their oblique scuttles for the nearest dark underside. They scrabbled and clacked, and we crunched them into an agony of yellow ooze as we heaved on the crates. I started shuffling to avoid stepping on them. Balford got mad. “Pull on that drawhook, sport. They’s crabs, not custard pies.” A jimmy reached up and clamped onto my pant leg and slid back and forth across the floor with me until we finished. I had to break its claw to free my cuff.
The pickup, loaded beyond the legal maximum, listed to port. I asked Griggs how far he had to take them. “Over to Belhaven, couple hours away.” He gave Balford and me a beer, relieved himself against the shed, and fished up his wallet. His fingers fumbled among the bills and drew out a five. He said, “There you be.”
From the darkness, a man with legs like masts and arms like spars and great blue-ebony lips walked up. Griggs called him Big Man. Never had I heard speech like his. “We bean oat since yahstudy. Got mebbee leven hunred pounds o’ blues.”
He had missed his regular truck and wanted Griggs to take his crabs. Griggs pointed to the crates stacked high on the pickup. “Be money for me could I haul them, but surely I cain’t.”
Big Man said he would have to take his blues out in the sound and dump them. “It gone hurt me someten good.”
Griggs was sorry. “See if the fish house can put them on ice.” He gave Big Man a beer. The diesel engines of Big Man’s trawler mumbled at the wharf, and Griggs’ crabs clacked and chattered in the crates, and the men looked for a solution. Then Big Man went off to the fish house, Griggs and Balford to Belhaven, and I walked to my truck.
Later that night, just before I fell asleep, I heard Big Man’s boat pull out, and I knew he was heading for open water to dump a half ton of blue crabs. He had said, “Most, day nebba make it to da bottom what da big fish eatem.” For me, it had been one fine day.
11
I ENCOUNTERED Thomas Harriot, who died in 1621, the next morning because I had on the red suspenders I wear on the road. I was finishing breakfast at the edge of Wanchese harbor, my legs dangling over the pier as I watched the fishermen, rubbing sleep from their eyes and squinting into the sun, move about the docks.
A man sat down beside me, nodded, and unfolded a pair of glasses; on the temple was an embossed plastic label: NEAR. He removed the pair he wore, FAR, and put on NEAR. A person shows himself in the way he opens an orange. Some tear jaggedly with fingers, some slice with a thumbnail, some spiral latitudinally, while others go at the longitude. That man pulled out a pocketknife and precisely quartered the skin stem to navel so the fruit came out in sections. When he finished cutting, the peel, still attached at the base, lay on the pier like an open blossom.
He was not a young man. “I used to wear braces,” he said. “We all did. I’m afraid I can’t remember why I put them away. And that’s odd because old men traditionally wear them. They are of surprising comfort. Would that be your re
ason for wearing them?”
“Part of it. When I’m traveling, I wear clothes in layers to be ready for a range of temperatures. Jacket, khaki shirt, turtleneck, and T-shirt. I have to buy pants a size bigger to get everything tucked in.”
“So you peel like our friend the onion?”
“Or put on. Comfortable from about ninety degrees to thirty.”
“And every ounce is cotton?”
“One hundred percent.”
“You might guess that North Carolinians, with our heritage, are not fond of plastic fiber clothing. We believe pure cotton is the most civilized of fabrics. We and the ancient Egyptians. At least we used to before we made tobacco the crop of our hands. Now, what about the military shirt?”
“Army issue. It’s a heavy twill. Doesn’t wrinkle much.”
He opened to a smile. “Would you say this garb suits you?”
I laughed with him. He said, “I read not long ago—I mention this because of the license on your panel truck—that there’s a Missouri bank named after Jesse James. Now, is there any truth in that?”
“It’s near where James lived.”
“Well, then, may I say it might be the only honestly named bank in the country?” We laughed again. “I’m not apologetic about my lack of respect for bankers—and I’m not speaking of those out there.” He pointed toward Bodie Island Light on the Outer Banks. “You wouldn’t recall the tenant farmer system that developed after the War Between the States, but it was bankers—and I speak of men, not institutions—that worked hand in glove with landowners—sometimes they were one and the same—to keep so many Carolinians propertyless. Living in rural America without land is to be without strength.” He paused for a slice of orange. “May I suggest how it was that Jimmy Carter rose from what some have called ‘nowhere’ to the Presidency?”