Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (66 page)

Here’s one I might have included: inland boaters or blue-water sailors. My days with the Navy gave me a lifetime fill of an unbroken ocean-horizon forever beyond, so that in 1964 when I left my ship as a seaman, I became a mere boatman who prefers voyages with visible bounds, trips that carry a traveler
into
a landscape; the narrower the water and smaller the boat, the better for my passage. That, as you can see, means my environmental ethics sometimes bump into my love of canals, since the two don’t always harmoniously cohabit. The unnaturally uncurving banks of the Albemarle and Chesapeake, however, didn’t destroy the pleasure of gliding quietly along the swamp margin. To sit on the deck in the warm autumn sun and watch America slowly slip past, no semitrucks on your bumper, no weary motel clerk to deal with, no gas tanks to fill, was just plain damn sweet. And then, to be able to study a chart or a text
while moving
through a territory allows one to link symbol with its actuality, a significant boon to remembering a place.

The prospect of seeing the Great Dismal Swamp led me to carry William Byrd’s
The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina,
his narrative of surveying the border in 1728 through the swamp and on westward to the shadow of the Great Smokies. My belief that human voices of the past are also characters in a landscape allowed me to keep traveling the Dismal even after sundown and made me eager for sunrise to see the reality of what I’d been reading about the night before. (You especially understand this last part, envisioning reader, because it’s what you’re doing at this very moment.)

William Byrd, born in 1674 in Virginia and educated as a barrister in England, returned to America to become a legislator, a naturalist, and a closeted man of letters. He was a cosmopolite in the brambles, he could turn a phrase, and he wasn’t overly decorous about describing earthy aspects of life in the colonies a half-century before the Revolution. His narrative is history one rarely encounters in school, as he answers questions anyone but the priggish can delight in. On that second evening I read about a place just seven miles east of where we were at that moment:

On the south shore not far from the inlet dwelt a marooner that modestly called himself a hermit, though he forfeited that name by suffering a wanton female to cohabit with him. His habitation was a bower covered with bark after the Indian fashion, which in that mild situation protected him pretty well from the weather. Like the ravens, he neither plowed nor sowed but subsisted chiefly upon oysters, which his handmaid made a shift to gather from the adjacent rocks. Sometimes, too, for change of diet, he sent her to drive up the neighbor’s cows, to moisten their mouths with a little milk. But as for raiment, he depended mostly upon his length of beard and she upon her length of hair, part of which she brought decently forward and the rest dangled behind quite down to her rump, like one of Herodotus’ East Indian Pygmies. Thus did these wretches live in a dirty state of nature and were mere Adamites, innocence only excepted.

It was Byrd who firmly affixed the adjective
dismal
to a swamp so challenging penetration by his surveying crew that he, a gentleman, circumvented most of it and concluded it was lifeless to the degree “not even a turkey buzzard will venture to fly over it.” Yet, thirty-five years later, George Washington, ever the land speculator, spoke of the Dismal as “a glorious paradise” that could be improved by draining. Whether such drainage might kill paradise didn’t cross his mind. Indeed, over the next few generations the greater part of the swamp was drained and logged until 1973 when a portion of what survived became a national wildlife refuge. Even still, continued ditching at its margins allowed agriculture and the sprawlation of Norfolk/Virginia Beach to continue consuming the Great Dismal until more than two-thirds of the swamp Byrd knew have vanished.

I will risk your patience with a further comment from Byrd suggesting one aspect of such terrestrial loss. About the extinct passenger pigeon, he writes:

The men’s mouths watered at the sight of a prodigious flight of wild pigeons, which flew high over our heads to the southward. The flocks of these birds of passage are so amazingly great sometimes that they darken the sky, nor is it uncommon for them to light in such numbers in the larger limbs of mulberry trees and oaks as to break them down. . . . In these long flights they are very lean and their flesh is far from being white or tender, though good enough upon a march, when hunger is the sauce and makes it go down better than truffles and morels would do.

Reading Byrd made me curious enough to leave my bunk and go out on deck and try to see by moonlight whether anything from his world was yet visible. At Troublesome Point we’d left the swamp behind, and I had to imagine rather than see, so I returned to the cabin and Byrd’s account of a place once not far from where we were at that moment. In describing his visit with his weary and deprived crew to a Nottoway settlement, he speaks frankly about practices usually ignored or hidden by other writers and implicitly reveals the important role of women in Indian-Caucasian relations not just there but across America:

Though their complexions be a little sad-colored, yet their shapes are very straight and well proportioned. Their faces are seldom handsome, yet they have an air of innocence and bashfulness that with a little less dirt would not fail to make them desirable. Such charms might have had their full effect upon men who had been so long deprived of female conversation but that the whole winter’s soil was so crusted on the skins of those dark angels that it required a very strong appetite to approach them. The bear’s oil with which they anoint their persons all over makes their skins soft and at the same time protects them from every species of vermin that use[d] to be troublesome to other uncleanly people. We were unluckily so many that they could not well make us the compliment of bedfellows according to the Indian rules of hospitality.

After fourteen miles of dark Currituck Sound, the
Bog Trotter
entered a cut across a low ridge in Maple Swamp to reach Coinjock, North Carolina, where she tied up at a small wharf. I got off for a walk. The place-name is likely an altered Algonquian word for
blueberry swamp,
but the locals have been good at creating more lively (if predictable) and less believable variations. A truculent and weary dockside storekeeper said to a well-meaning woman, “Someday somebody’s going to come in here and not ask that question,” then answered with a solution involving how much specie he would have in his underdrawers if given a dime for every question about the meaning of Coinjock.

At the wharf stood an old Rhode Island mariner, a slender, angular salt whose sharp-cornered shoulders were wearing holes in his shirt and who spoke in a rusty, mechanical voice in need of oiling. He was taking a rest from moving his motor sailer south for the winter (yacht transit is a common use of the ICW). The most frequent question among those traveling the Waterway, frequent because it’s of such significance in making headway, is “What’s the draft of your vessel?” He asked, and I said about six feet.

“This is my eighth trip,” he squeaked, “and I’ve learned that for two weeks of transit I’m going to touch bottom about every other damn day and twice on Monday. My goal isn’t not to touch, it’s not to touch hard. I had to get towed off a shoal my first trip down, but I learned since how to use a rising tide to get free. Those boys who call it a ‘damned ditch’ don’t know how to sail inland waters. If they don’t have five fathoms under their keel, they mess their britches. They don’t read the day boards and range markers, and they got no clue about the floaters.”

Floaters
are temporary channel markers, a necessity in waters continually washing up new shoals. Range markers are paired signs separated north and south, so to speak, that a pilot brings into a bow-with-stern alignment to keep his boat in the channel. Cleverly simple but requiring perpetual vigilance. He said, “If challenge isn’t a pleasure, then you need to hire some guy to bring your boat down. And that’s what a lot of them do.”

The Army Corps of Engineers has a mandate to maintain a twelve-foot-deep channel from Norfolk to Miami, but seldom is it that depth, and novices on the ICW are surprised to discover even vast expanses like Albemarle or Pamlico Sound are, at the deepest, rarely more than twenty feet, and in many places of a depth a tall wader wouldn’t wet the brim of his hat. Were those big sounds in Holland, I have no doubt they would have been diked and farmed years ago.

The old mariner, whose solar-radiated nose proved his seven decades on glaring water, said, “I don’t think there’s anything like this protected coastline in terms of mileage — not to mention scenery — in the rest of the world. I mean, the whole route, Boston through the Cape Cod Canal, on behind Long Island, and on to south Texas. It’s got just enough use, probably, to keep it open, but not enough to congest it.” (I think he was correct: the Inside Passage from Seattle to Alaska is only about a thousand miles, and the interior of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia but a couple-hundred miles greater than that.) “There’s some open water on the Gulf in Florida, and that inside route down the New Jersey Shore is only for shallow-draft boats,” he said, “but if the government would fix the Delaware-Raritan Canal across the neck of Jersey to Trenton, those miles on the open Atlantic wouldn’t be needed.”

He looked at me to weigh my attitude, then said, “Hell, the Corps of Engineers can’t — or won’t — keep this lower section properly dredged, so I don’t think they’ll take on more. But of course they could if they weren’t trying to dam up every stream out west.”

Now weighing not me but his cocktail, he said, “Or you can see there’d be money for maintenance if that Bush wasn’t trying to undo ten-thousand years of Middle East history to give cover for his taxpayer rape. People along here are Bush supporters, but they have no clue what his war is costing them personally. The commercial fishermen yelp about insufficient maintenance of the canal, all the while they’re putting a
SUPPORT THE COMMANDER
magnet on the back of their pickups.”

(At the moment I report this conversation, George Bush’s Babylonian war was costing Americans three billion dollars a week — about four-hundred million dollars a day. That meant enough money to bring the ICW back to standard got spent on the desert sands in about the time it takes to brush your teeth and gargle. I leave it to you, sagacious reader, to consider other pieces of broken or endangered America you could restore with seventeen-million dollars an hour. Further, your project, whatever it is, would not likely include four-thousand — and counting — fallen Americans and a hundred-thousand or more Iraqis.

4

He Is Us

T
HE ATLANTIC SHORE OF NORTH CAROLINA
has something of the shape of a drawn bow, the arrow tip at Cape Hatteras aimed at the Strait of Gibraltar. Because of dangerous shoals, currents, and winds, the sea beyond the inshore route there is the Graveyard of the Atlantic, a name explaining one of the reasons for the ICW.

Unlike regions above and below it, the upper-half of the North Carolina coast is shaped, predominantly, by Pamlico Sound, a shallow sea allowing winds to gain a good fetch that, in combination with currents and rough water created by the shallow bottom, can make a hell for boats. Still, for a small craft, it’s safer than the Graveyard.

The
Bog Trotter
was moving again at dawn, most of the three-hundred miles of Intracoastal in North Carolina before us. The country of Pamlico Sound and its characteristic wetlands called pocosins have produced a different sort of development from that of the beaches just to the east or from places with deepwater harbors supporting a city, so that the Waterway through the state is a traverse past villages, a few towns, and many miles of what, not long ago, were semiwilds. But, as was evident in the morning light, superfluous structures half the age of a grammar-school child were beginning to fester along the magenta line. Those houses were peacock places serving more for display than function, since many got used for only a few weeks. Most of them had two-hundred-foot docks running over a marsh to reach the Waterway, thrusting into it like pikes, devices to impale a careless navigator. For some miles the route felt more like a suburban avenue where docks replaced driveways, and plastic boats, autos. Q: “Everyone wants a Tara.”

Of the several books written about traveling the Waterway, the classic, at least in terms of seniority, is Nathaniel Bishop’s
Voyage of the Paper Canoe,
describing his 1874 paddle from Quebec to the Gulf, mostly on waters that were then an early version of or were to become the Waterway. His vessel was truly made of treated paper over a wooden frame. To read Bishop is to see what we’ve lost and maybe to consider whether the gains of unbridled commerce are sensible and equitable compensation for the resulting natural diminishments.

Another voyage book, a cult favorite of sailors, is Henry Plummer’s
The Boy, Me and the Cat.
In 1912 he sailed (often actually using sails) from Massachusetts to Florida in a twenty-four-foot catboat (the titular cat is a feline), returning in it the next year. The book has some charm, although it’s a self-conscious boat log written in elided sentences, many of which only the dedicatedly nautical will follow: “Kept the two reefs on her only settling peak for several sporting jibes.” Plummer admits, “I have used all the nautical terms I could think of and some I couldn’t think of.” He’s always more interested in sailing than what he’s sailing through because, as he says, “There could be nothing more dreary than just a-setting still and being taken through these twisting rivers that lead for miles and miles through the never ending rice marshes.” Not a man in quest of quoz in unverified areas. Still, of the several father-son American journeys presented in books, his is a capable one, even with forced attempts at cleverness in almost every sentence; but then, to be fair, the book has probably grown beyond the author’s original intent: Plummer ran off a few hundred copies of the 1913 “first edition” on a stencil machine and hand-stitched them together with fishing line.