Blue Highways (9 page)

I
SLEPT
deeply until a terrible clanking against the back of the truck. I woke witless as stone. The Ghost filled with hot, yellow light that seemed to spin my head. Another clank and a violent jolting and shaking. I raised the rear curtain. A shrunken, sallow face just inches away stared at the rattling chains of a tow truck. I jumped out—again—shoeless and pantless, the Carolina sand cool between my toes. “Don’t tow it!”

Behind me, a man in corporal’s stripes said, “You sleepin’ in there?”

I felt as if I’d been caught in the women’s dorm. The simple truth seemed inadequate. “Just resting some.”

“Didn’t know you were inside. I’ll get the citation off the windshield.”

“What about my rig? Could you see your way to putting it down?”

“If you’ll get a visitor’s permit tomorrow. Unhitch him, Ronnie.”

“Hooked up,” the shrunken face said.

“I see he’s hooked up. Unhook him. You can hook the Chevalet.” Ronnie cursed Ghost Dancing back onto the sand. The corporal said, “Sorry we wokened you up. We’re about through bumper bangin’.”

“Thanks.” I hope he makes general. Again in bed, I wondered whether police would beset me across America. Give me the quiet lurk of whangdoodles any night.

O
UT
of Greenville, on route 32 just northeast of the road to Pinetown, gulls dropped in behind the Farmalls and poked over the upturned soil for bugs, and the east wind carried in the smell of the sea. People here call the dark earth “the blacklands.” Scraping, scalping, bulldozers were clearing fields for tobacco and pushing the pines into big tumuli; as the trees burned, the seawind blew smoke from the balefires down along the highway like groundfog. Trees burned so tobacco could grow so tobacco could burn. But where great conifers still stood, they cast three-hundred-foot shadows through the morning, and the cool air smelled of balsam.

In Plymouth I saw a sign at a gas station:
DIESEL FUEL AND OYSTERS IN SEASON.
A man, his eyes a camouflage of green and brown speckles, white hair to the wind, filled the tank and said, “How’s this weather for ye?”

“Fine today. But it’s been rough.”

“Hard weather makes good timber. How’s that Missouri weather?”

“Hard.”

“Yessir,” one word, “that’s why your Harry Truman was good timber. Toughern oak. No trees out your way is there?”

“Lots of trees. Especially oaks. Red, white, bur, blackjack.”

“Flat though, ain’t it?”

“Lots of hills.
This
is flat land.”

“Whistle me Dixie! This county don’t get up in the air no higher than a boy can throw a mud turtle. But it’s God’s Country. And a good town. Woulda been a better town but the Yankees shot it all to hell. Union gunboats got it, sir. Hard to believe now gunboats out in the Roanoke. Fierce river fightin’. They had to make coffins out of pews from Grace Church. Buried men in their own pew. That’s no joke to us.”

As he wrote up the credit slip, I said, “Looks like they’re taking out timberlands for tobacco fields.”

“Govnor comes out and shoots you personally if you say against tobacco in this state. I smoked thirty-odd years. Did my duty and got a right to talk. Truth is you cain’t buy a real, true cigarette anymores. That’s why they name them that way—tryin’ to convince you what ain’t there. Real. True. Nothin’ to it. They cut them long, they cut them skinny, they paint them red and green and stuff them with menthol and camphor and eucalyptus. What the hell, they’s makin’ toys. I’ll lay you one of them bright-leaf boys up in Winston-Salem is drawin’ up a cigarette you gotta plug in the wall. Nosir, your timber’s comin’ down to make toys.”

“You don’t smoke now?”

“Why smoke what’s no taste to it? Same as them light beers and whiskies: no flavor. Americans have just got afraid to taste anything. You ask me, sir, it started with oleo. Or maybe the popalation got scared by them mouse spearmints wheres they give a mouse a needle-shot of a substance ever day until he dies a cancer. Nosir, my advice is to live your life.”

“That’s solid advice.”

“And harder to do than you think. Take me. I retired and ended up settin’ and worryin’ about myself, about my health. Then I bought this station to get away from myself. My own worst enemy. Don’t need the money comes in—it’s the people comin’ in I need. But I been remarkin’ recently, people don’t listen liken they used to.”

“I’ve noticed that.” I was down the road when I realized his tumble of notions had distracted me from the oysters. There would be more.

The face of the tidewater peninsula lying between Albemarle Sound and the Pamlico River showed clear now: cypress trees cooling their giant butts in clean swamp water black from the tannin in their roots, the road running straight and level and bounded on each side by watery “borrow ditches” that furnished soil to build the roadway. Ditches, road, trees—all at right angles. The swamp growth was too thick to paddle a greased canoe through, and, although leafless, the dense limbs left the swamp without sun.

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.”

A
T
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.”

B
UCK’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.”