Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (68 page)

The
Bog Trotter
entered the Goose Creek Cut through Gum Swamp on the way to the shrimp-boat docks at Hobucken Bridge where there’s an annual blessing of the fleet. Since leaving the Dismal Swamp, we’d been traveling the country of the first English settlements in America, attempts that began with Sir Walter Raleigh’s failed Roanoke Island colony. The Waterway, in fact, threads among much initial and superlative American history: in addition to the inchoate efforts by Raleigh, there’s the first successful English colony at Jamestown; oldest preserved “American” vessel (Georgetown, South Carolina); last occupation by foreign troops of the American mainland (St. Marys, Georgia); oldest surviving artificial waterway (portions of the AICW); first shot of the Civil War (Fort Sumter); first battle of iron ships (Hampton Roads); first sinking of an enemy ship by a submarine (Charleston outer harbor); home port of first steam-powered ship to cross the Atlantic and the first nuclear cargo ship (both named after that port,
Savannah
); first powered flight (Kitty Hawk); first successful wireless transmission of speech (Cobb Island, Maryland); and first swig of Pepsi-Cola (New Bern, North Carolina). And, I suspect, current archaeology along the Waterway will reveal eventually a few firsts from Spanish exploration and colonization.

We had come into a locale good for the presence of the real bog trotter — the American bittern — so I sat watchful on deck, beneath a mild Southern sun working to put me into a doze. As I played the binoculars over the edge of the marsh, I realized a transference had happened: my rechristening the boat had brought with the different name a different perception of the vessel, and my attitude toward it partook of the curious bird itself. Nicknames exist for several reasons, perhaps the highest being the intimate approach they allow to the secret nooks within all of us.

[
READER ALERT:
The passage below, like earlier excurses I’ve set out for you, I intend not to delay the journey; rather this ornithological one is to speak of a bird and to give you a notion how the voyage went in quiet moments attendant with water travel. Freeway-speed readers may whip on down three paragraphs.]

Because it can appear in all the contiguous states, the American bittern is truly a national bird, although nowhere abundant or readily encountered. It’s of some height, even if not notably tall for a heron, and possessed of an amusing and meticulously deliberate gait through a marsh. Modestly plumaged in cryptic vertical browns and duns, a bog trotter striking its classic pose — erect stance, uplifted head, long and narrow bill pointed skyward like a reed — can scarcely be distinguished from its sanctuary among the bulrushes and cattails; and when wind moves the flags, the bittern sways in rhythm as if a tule itself.

Remarkable as that behavior is, something else sets it off from the some seven-hundred other avian species in North America. For its so-called song, an accurate word only if you can hear a couple of bass notes from a cello or from a mellifluous gargle as “song,” the bittern seems to take a swallow of swamp water in order to sing of it, gulping, charging it within, pumping it up, burbling it, and releasing it as haunting notes that in the dark can shiver your timbers. Of other marshland critters giving voice to a swamp — wrens, woodcocks, rails, snipes, soras, toads and frogs, bobcats and gators — none seems so perfectly distilled from the bog itself. If flat water could sing, the notes of the bittern would be its song.

These are facts, it seems to me, making it natural to humanize the bog trotter. In 1874, the great naturalist and Western historian Elliot Coues wrote of it:

No doubt he enjoys life after his own fashion, but his notions of happiness are peculiar. He prefers solitude, and leads the eccentric life of a recluse, “forgetting the world, and by the world forgot.” To see him at his ordinary occupation, one might fancy him shouldering some heavy responsibility, oppressed with a secret, or laboring in the solution of a problem of vital consequence. He stands motionless, with his head drawn in upon his shoulders, and half-closed eyes, in profound meditation, or steps about in a devious way, with an absent-minded air; for greater seclusion, he will even hide in a thick brush clump for hours together. Startled in his retreat whilst his thinking cap is on, he seems dazed, like one suddenly aroused from a deep sleep; but as soon as he collects his wits, remembering unpleasantly that the outside world exists, he shows common sense enough to beat a hasty retreat from a scene of altogether too much action for him.

That afternoon the marshy shore kept hidden all its bog trotters, deepening the mysterious: a phantom unseen has more power than one revealed.

The Neuse River, six miles across at its mouth, is the widest river in the country, say local folk, although to me it appeared more an estuary there than a river. The boat moved up it, rolling a bit, then in the dying light she reached Oriental, North Carolina.

By that time in the voyage, our several boat mates had sorted themselves out not by age or gender but by, in Q’s word, inquisitiveness. On one hand were those trying to comprehend and remember what they were seeing, and on the other was a complement for whom the
Bog Trotter
was a floating bridge-table or a large water-bed or a reading room for perusing any paperback having nothing to do with water, coasts, marshes, or boats (unless a murder was committed on one). You get the idea.

Because Q and I were loath to leave a couple of topside observation posts we liked, we were often the last to be seated at a meal, which meant we got put wherever there was an opening. We didn’t mind usually, but honesty obliges me to say on one occasion that wasn’t the case. I ended up next to an always
en grande toilette
woman who, by my count, was on her fourth romance-novel (I judge from the covers) and whose expression, when turned on me, unquestionably said, “Sir, I shall wake from your presence at any moment.” I’m indebted to her, for without her conversation with a man on the other side of me, I could not that night have entered into my log something I might want to use someday:
Without her grievances, Mrs. Y’s life seems nearly without purpose. “Wrongs” against her must be enumerated. They are her lifeblood. As inspiration is to a sculptor, so disservices are to her, and those she carves into forms for the hurtful world to acknowledge.

6

Hardtails and Crankshafts

O
RIENTAL, NORTH CAROLINA,
emerged from the dawn mist as a small harbor with a mix of anchored pleasure craft and docked shrimp boats, the latter dominating not in number but in fishing-port authenticity furthered by potent crustacean-odors from the wharf. To see a fishing boat of any sort along the eastern seaboard today can be to wonder whether you’re witnessing the end of an era: my conversations with commercial fishermen about their catch seemed to contain the same sentence — “It’s not what it used to be.” (A prediction I recently read phrased it this way: “Year by which the world’s seafood will run out, at current rates of decline — 2048.”) The few species that have risen from possible extinction give more fragile hope than real promise for improved harvests.

While Oriental yet remained a fishing port, it now had three times as many pleasure boats as people and called itself “the sailing capital of North Carolina.” The village name — I believe the only “Oriental” in the United States — came from the founder’s wife who (on the beach at Cape Hatteras) chanced upon the nameplate of a ship gone to grief in the Atlantic Graveyard. Her enlightened refusal to yield to superstition about naming a settlement after a sunken vessel had seemingly proven itself in the renewed local prosperity.

Q and I went ashore to walk onto the high bridge to get an aerial view of the harbor, then we came down to hoof about and look into a chandlery (marine hardware to me is as jewelry to a pirate). At the former edge of the village, before it began to spread, we found the Hardtail Saloon. It wasn’t the name that drew us in; it was the structure itself and what proved to be one man’s attempt to do something about the widespread American practice of abandoning the detritus of some entrepreneur’s failed dream. Although a municipality may require an owner walking a dog to pick up after it, many Americans consider the abandoning of a building (lasting somewhat longer than dog droppings) not as irresponsibility but as an ungovernable right, a mere consequence of capitalism. A few years ago in the Desert Southwest, where derelict structures not only show up over considerable distances but can last for several centuries, a visiting Englishman said to me, “Roadsides in the States are the place where old buildings go to die. Crossing this country is often like driving through an architectural graveyard.”

The owner of the Hardtail, Miles Shorey, was having none of that ethic when he bought a pair of unused, steel grain-bins, each thirty feet in diameter and twenty-five-feet high. He took them apart panel by panel, bolt by uncountable bolt, and hauled them out of a field thirty miles from Oriental, then reassembled them in the same necessarily punctilious, labor-intensive fashion. He linked the round bins with a narrow frame building, turned one bin into the tavern, and was at work converting the other into the Southern Palace Restaurant.

We sat at the bar on what was now a second floor, ordered sandwiches, and imagined the bin full of ten-thousand bushels of soybeans. The food was good, one of the reasons a dozen “Orientals” (no Asians these) were also taking lunch. Among them was Shorey and his wife and business partner, Janice. He was of moderate height, with a shaved head and chinstrap beard à la mode for his generation of thirty-year-olds. Only some months earlier, he was mowing grass for a living. Most of the interior wooden portions — floors, ceiling, stairs, bar top — came from timber he’d cut right on the small roadside plot where he’d moved the bins. His rush to use the unseasoned lumber caused a little shrinkage here and splitting there, but his workmanship — he and a friend had done all of it — was excellent, including the tricky double-angles in the conical roof.

Shorey said, “With a bin, you build the roof first, then put the sides under it and raise the roof a tier at a time.” For some years he’d lived among the growing number of derelict grain-bins marking the flat fields of Pamlico County. “I’ve always wanted to do something with them,” he said. “Finally, a year and a half ago, this restaurant idea and the right time came, so I did it. Everything in my life has changed since then.”

I asked what a
hardtail
was. “People think it’s dirty, and that gets their attention. That’s why the sign on the women’s room says
HARDTAILS
and the men’s is
CRANKSHAFTS
.”

“Don’t evade the question,” a woman said.

“There.” He pointed across the room to a dusty and worn and engineless — call it derelict — motorcycle frame. “I bought it a long time ago with the idea of rebuilding it. But I never had the money or time. Never even put an engine back in it. Instead, I’ve ended up rebuilding grain bins.”

“Tell him,” the same voice repeated.

“That bike’s a hardtail. Look, no rear shock absorbers. Harley doesn’t make them like that anymore.”

The voice to me: “Hey, dude, tell me where there’s another bar named after shock absorbers.”

Here was a young fellow who couldn’t find the wherewithal to rebuild a motorcycle yet could dismantle, move, and reconstruct two large farm-buildings and thereby rebuild his life. A down-home definition of
imagineering.
“There’s a book,” Q said. “
101 Uses for Abandoned Grain Bins.
Item One: Rebuilding Your Life.”

7

Veritable Poverty For Sale

O
NCE AGAIN UNDER WAY,
the
Bog Trotter
left the Neuse River to enter the southernmost peninsula of North Carolina, that thrust of land tipped by Cape Lookout. She went along the estuary of Adams Creek, a zigzag leading to six miles of canal through more drained agricultural land. Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station was ten miles west and Morehead City dead ahead on the far side of the bay of the Newport River, and there the boat tied up to an industrial dock until the next morning.

Q and I took a bus across the river to the third oldest town in North Carolina, Beaufort. (It might have slipped your aural memory that this name has a long
O:
BO-furt; the town in South Carolina, perhaps to vex the French, is BEW-furt.) On Front Street, fronting Taylor Creek, were clapboard and shuttered two-storey houses of a distinct design: roofs sloping down from the peak, making a slight shift in angle toward the obtuse, then continuing until they covered second-level porches. Ship carpenters built some of the places, purportedly after seeing such architecture in the Bahamas. The west end of Front Street manifestly expressed the South, but the other end, the commercial stretch, was of the early twentieth century: small brick buildings that might have been lifted from a main drag in Nebraska. In one shop window, a sign:
BUSINESS SUCKS SALE.

Beaufort was the home of two men noteworthy in their earthly conclusions. There was privateer Otway Burns, his pursuit of English merchant-ships during the Revolution earning the respect of Andrew Jackson who appointed him in his later years to keep light on a nearby island where, says one history, old Otway “sank into anecdotage.” And in the Old Town Cemetery lay a man who died at sea, his name lost, and who was buried “in a drum of spirits” that had kept his body from putrefying on the return voyage to Beaufort (perhaps a better end than sinking into anecdotage).

Once a fish-factory town, Beaufort renewed itself with gentrification from tourists and yachters. The fish was primarily the Atlantic menhaden, a herring about a foot long harvested largely for manufacture into many products or used as crab-pot bait. Menhaden go by other names, depending on where on the Atlantic coast the fisherman is: bugfish, hardhead, fatback, greasetail, yellowtail, alewife, mossbunker, pogy, shad. In Beaufort, in years gone, a social order developed around the menhaden, a not-surprising system in which African-American men (primarily) brought the fish in to black women (primarily), who processed it; bossmen and owners were whites (entirely). But declines in the number of menhaden — mostly from overharvesting — and improved environmental regulations, and the tremendous rise of recreational boaters, served to a degree to unite the disparate orders while creating a new division between them and the latecomers. If the racial elements have changed, questions of free enterprise versus sustainability, ownership against labor, wealth confronting welfare, remained.