Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (67 page)

These voyages of yore reveal how far we’ve come from it all and thereby raise the question of where the urge for luxury housing is taking us. Perhaps those shuttered châteaux would have struck me differently had they not looked like ghosts in fresh paint; doesn’t a house require actual human habitation to be a home instead of a billboard for one’s portfolio? And when did it become necessary for a vacation dwelling to be bigger than one’s real house? The pattern often showed clearly: a bungalow or cabin designed by a carpenter as it went up — dwellings now called teardowns — stood partially dismantled on a waterside lot between two châteaux nouveaux. Off and on for some North Carolina miles, I kept hearing in my memory Kurt Vonnegut’s character Eliot Rosewater: “Grab much too much, or you’ll get nothing at all.”

The role played in that unchecked development by the Outer Banks, just beyond a narrow peninsula to the east, has to be significant. After a quarter of a century, I’d recently returned to the Banks. I had myself prepared, so I thought, for emotional surgery without anesthetic, but then, perhaps I’d be pleasingly surprised and my dark view about the American capacity for restraint prove to be fallacious.

I went out to Nags Head, then northward beyond Kitty Hawk. Nathaniel Bishop, who spent the night in 1874 in a new hotel on the Banks, wrote, “Nag’s Head Beach is a most desolate locality, with its high sand hills, composed of fine sand, the forms of which are constantly changing with the action of the dry, hard, varying winds. . . . A few fishermen have their homes on this dreary beach, but the village, with its one store, is a forlorn place.”

What I recalled from years earlier as two-lane road through open expanses with some wooden houses (easily rebuilt after a storm) had become five congested-lanes of stoplights leading to hastee-tastee tacos, outlet malls, go-cart speedways, realty offices (will sell mother’s burial plot), miniature-golf courses with plastic mountains hunted by vinyl T. rexes, high-tension lines, martini bars, all-you-can-eat obeseterias, massage emporia (
CALL FOR YOUR RELAXATION NEEDS
), and condos so jammed up a guy could toss a wet sock from his window and stick it to the neighbor’s. A Floridated shore atop leveled dunes. My antediluvian notions could not comprehend how it was that the very things people ostensibly came here for — the ocean, the beach — were hardly to be seen, obliterated as they were from view and ready access. Prepared? Pass the anesthetic!

Slowly it came to me: no longer were people truly coming for the sea. They were there for what the sea had, in effect, washed up. Not sand dollars and whelks but greenbacks and car wheels. One of Q’s favorite quotations is Dorothy Parker’s “What fresh hell is this?”

I climbed the now “stabilized” dune the Wright brothers called Big Hill and from which they launched some of their flights, the knoll today across the highway from an SUV dealership. Other than the few acres of the national monument, the openness that helped bring the Ohioans here was gone. Spread out below lay a distension of people for whom moderation seemed meaningless. Gluttony was all. How long would it be until that storm-aligned place would cost taxpayers a whole lot of money? To a man standing near, I said I couldn’t see much beach or sand, and he answered with pride, “Isn’t it something!” I realized I was beating a dead horse — or maybe it was just the nag’s head.

The
Bog Trotter
crossed Albemarle Sound in easy breezes, the rip currents that can bedevil boats just then in abeyance, and we entered the estuary of the Alligator River, a surprising name, given that we were at the latitude of, say, Oklahoma City. But it was true: we had reached the northern limit of gator country, one of many definitions of the Southern border. The Waterway narrowed to the shallow river itself, with banks of cypress swamps closing in until we entered the Pungo Canal where a heron seemed to denote the channel. For a pilot, herons are useful two-legged markers requiring no maintenance other than fit habitat. “The prudent mariner,” said my chart book, “will observe both sides of the canal are foul with debris, snags, submerged stumps, and continuous bank erosion caused by passing boats and tows.” The “debris” was entirely from nature — mostly branches or pieces of tree trunks — and the other natural “foulness” happened to be the vegetation that fish and many aquatic critters require. The Waterway there — and generally elsewhere — ran remarkably free of human litter. Some credit for the cleanliness surely belongs to that little denizen of waters farther south, Pogo of Okefenokee Swamp, and his mordant quip “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Along the Pungo lay a reach with reintroduced red wolves, but without a boat on the order of a paper canoe, I wasn’t likely to see one, and I didn’t, yet it was pleasant to imagine a hidden wolf watching our passage into its domain. Against probability, however, I was hoping to see a clapper rail, a secretive bird built like a skinny leghorn and often called a marsh hen. I understand that listening to a clapper is one of the delights — an ever more rare one — in wild America. Their decline is the result of the usual culprits — habitat loss and human intrusion. We have met the enemy.

Even in the mid-nineteenth century, John James Audubon, who himself brought down a tidy number of wildfowl, wrote in 1840 of people hunting rail eggs in coastal New Jersey:

It is not an uncommon occurrence for an egger to carry home 100 dozen in a day; and when this havoc is continued upwards of a month, you may imagine its extent. The abundance of the birds themselves is almost beyond belief; but if you suppose a series of salt marshes 20 miles in length and a mile in breadth, while at every 8 or 10 steps one or two birds may be met with, you may calculate their probable number.

Of hunters in South Carolina, Audubon — with his amanuensis — wrote (in prose not admissible today among some of our spindle-shanked, dare-nothing stylists, those insistent practitioners of the unadorned declarative sentence):

On a floating mass of tangled weeds stand a small group [of clapper rails] side by side. The gunner has marked them, and presently nearly the whole covey is prostrated. Now, onward to that great bunch of tall grass all the boats are seen to steer; shot after shot flies in rapid succession; dead and dying lie all around on the water; the terrified survivors are trying to save their lives by hurried flight; but their efforts are unavailing — one by one they fall, to rise no more. It is a sorrowful sight after all; see that poor thing gasping hard in the agonies of death, its legs quivering with convulsive twitches, its bright eyes fading into glazed obscurity. In a few hours, hundreds have ceased to breathe the breath of life; hundreds that erstwhile revelled in the joys of careless existence, but which can never behold their beloved marshes again. The cruel sportsman, covered with mud and mire, drenched to the skin by the splashing paddles, his face and hands besmeared with powder, stands amid the wreck which he has made, exultingly surveys his slaughtered heaps, and with joyous feelings returns home with a cargo of game more than enough for a family thrice as numerous as his own.

A traveler preferring plowed fields to wetlands will like the big, bulbous peninsula separating Albemarle and Pamlico sounds. Although a thin scrim of trees had been left along this section of canal, most of the flats for miles beyond them on both sides had been ditched for agriculture. Still, free of domestic obtrusions and billboards, the route through pocosin country was enhanced by a few wildlife refuges, one of them containing two bombing ranges. In its simplest form, a pocosin is a slightly raised pond or bog that overflows onto surrounding flatlands to create swamps and marshes. They are an earmark of the peninsula and a landform considerably more rare than a mountain — and consequently worth saving. A soybean can grow almost anywhere in the contiguous states, but a terrain capable of sheltering overwintering tundra swans fresh from the Arctic is less common.

The
Bog Trotter
left the cut and entered the Pungo River to follow it downstream to its juncture with the big Pamlico, four miles wide where it enters the sound. Cape Hatteras lay sixty miles due east, the distance entirely the open water of Pamlico Sound. Take a paper map of the United States and cut out Rhode Island and place it over the sound, and you’ll see a pretty fair fit. To look across that space is to understand how Giovanni da Verrazzano, exploring the eastern coast in 1524, could conclude that Pamlico Sound was the presumed great Western Sea — separated here from the Atlantic by only a narrow isthmus of the Outer Banks — stretching to the Orient. If his error seems woeful, consider that Columbus on his deathbed only eighteen years earlier still believed Mexico to be fabled Cathay, or John Cabot thinking Labrador was Asia.

Because Europeans discovered America piecemeal and because the role of Columbus dominates our current view, other contributors such as Verrazzano have remained shadow men. He deserves more. His voyage up the coast comes to us through a single surviving, brief chronicle, the Cellere Codex, that is considerably more enlightened — as was his behavior — than most other commentary by Europeans in the Americas. His report, a truly significant firsthand narrative of the exploration of sixteenth-century North America, remains the earliest-known description of the inhabitants of the Atlantic coast above Florida. Nearly two-thirds of Verrazzano’s account depicts the natives he encountered, and his detailed view is sympathetic — a kidnapping notwithstanding — and marked by comprehension of significant variations among tribes. Of one meeting, he writes (Kathryn Wallace translation from the Italian):

They have at the ears various whimsical pendants as the Orientals customarily do, not only the women but also the men, on whom we saw many sword-blades of wrought brass, more highly prized by them than gold, which for its color they do not esteem; indeed, of all colors, that is the one considered by them to be the ugliest, they exalting blue and red above all others. What was given them by us they prized most were little bells, little blue crystal beads, and other trinkets to wear at the ears and neck. They did not prize silk cloth or gold more than any other kinds, nor do they care to have any; the same with metals like steel and iron, because often, showing them our weapons garnered no admiration, nor did they ask to have any of them, showing regard only for the way they were made. With mirrors it was the same — quickly looking at them, pushing them away laughing. The people are very generous, giving away all they have. We made great friends with them, and one day, before we came into harbor with the ship, being a league out to sea in adverse weather, they came in a great many of their little boats, their faces painted and made up with various colors, showing us it was a sign of joy, bringing some of their food supply, making signs to us where, for the safety of the ship, we should come into the harbor, and continuing to accompany us even as we put down anchor.

Another engagement, farther north, was less amicable yet still without bloodshed. Had more explorers possessed Verrazzano’s sensibilities, one wonders how differently the European peopling of the Americas might have proceeded.

The great naturalist Rachel Carson described this latitude of the coast — where the Labrador Current collides with the Gulf Stream — as “the Mason-Dixon Line of the marine world.” Things change at sea, and those changes change what happens on land. Down East, one eats mackerel; down South, it’s mullet. For us, the thermometer was climbing, the South deepening.

5

The Gift of Variant Views

O
F THE NECESSITIES OF TRAVELING
with others
,
variant viewpoints, depending on one’s openness and tolerance, can be annoyances or gifts. The latter can be recompense for the first. The only fellow voyagers I avoid are those who find every trip they’ve taken preceding the present one to be superior and who enumerate why — at length. Those people are often AWPs (Authorities Without Portfolios), and their distracting blather is rich with opinions not likely to be amended by differing evidence or variant reasoning. In an automobile, you are trapped, but on a boat, there’s always the rail on the other side; it is, happily, other sides and different views they most wish to avoid.

One morning while I was on the sun deck and looking over treetops, I had to find refuge at the other rail when a woman wanted to recount her voyage down the Rhine with its “far superior scenery.” Said she, “This is just swamp — old mucky swamp.”

Later that morning, two other passengers stopped beside me to see what I had the field-glasses locked on. I was sorry to report it was nothing in particular at that moment. He, a Southern Californian, said, “I had no idea of the complexity of this coastline. When we came aboard, I thought we were just going down the Atlantic — outside, along the beach. We’d never heard of the Intracoastal Waterway. I guess I’m not ever going to get too old for my ignorance to amaze me.” Southern Californians, to generalize, are not uncommonly disinclined to discredit regions lying to their east, a turn of mind that seems concomitant with living in a mild climate, as if the absence of any snow not on a ski slope somehow confers topographical superiority. So his next few sentences surprised me: “There’s nothing like this on the West Coast. If you sail from San Diego to Seattle, you’re in the open ocean the whole way. I mean, the West Coast is nothing but cliffs — beautiful cliffs — for thirteen-hundred miles.” A moment later he said, “I still can’t get used to the sun rising over the ocean instead of setting over it.”

Even without measuring the multitude of embayments and inlets of the indented and sunken Atlantic coast, its three grand bights between Maine and Florida make it considerably longer and its longitudinal variation twice that of the geologically rising West Coast. I said the differences sometimes seemed as big as those between California beaches and the shores of Japan. The man’s wife said, “But all this water and no sushi.” Then, perhaps to tone down what sounded like flippancy, she added, “It’s a lovely place though. This morning, weren’t those big houses something? But where was everybody?” Her husband said, “Out looking for sushi.”