Blue Highways: Manteo, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWe've gone from Columbia, Missouri to an East Coast barrier island at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.  That's a long way, and yet we're still not even close to finishing our round the country trip.  Click on the map to get your bearings, and read my musings on places being unique.

Book Quote

"'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, when 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 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.'" 

Unnamed man in Manteo, North Carolina
Quoted in Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 8

 Street in Manteo, North Carolina

Manteo, North Carolina

Reading up on the Outer Banks, where Manteo is located, I find myself intrigued by its history and its culture.  It is a place set apart from the rest of the United States geographically and culturally, though historically it may be one of the most important places.  Reading William Least Heat-Moon's account of going to Manteo, and then Wanchese and Fort Raleigh National Historical Park, just the cadence and pattern of speech that he captures suggests something a little different about the place.

One thing that intrigues me is that it evidently is a place where some say that the speech is possibly very close to that of Elizabethan England.  I am really fascinated by accents.  My wife likes to joke that I immediately fall in love with women who have some sort of accent, and I guess it is really true.  For me, the accent sets a person apart, suggests different experiences and places other than the ones I know, and I suppose also that women with accents call to my mind the exotic and maybe even the erotic.  I don't understand it, but it's probably best I don't try too hard.

If you love Shakespeare and his plays, it cannot help but be of interest that the people who live on the Outer Banks may speak a language that is the closest we will ever hear to Shakespeare's time.  Is it possible that if one were to secretly listen to two young lovers on the Outer Banks today, one would see shades of two star-crossed lovers on a balcony in the Globe Theater in 15th century England?

My experience with living in a culturally unique place that gets battered by hurricanes every so often was when I lived in New Orleans.  Of course, New Orleans is a city and the Outer Banks are islands with small towns.  But in a lot of respects, they are similar.  They both have a sizable part of their economies that depend on the sea and fishing.  Both, for much of their history, were disconnected from the rest of the country by their geography.  The Outer Banks for centuries could only be reached by boat, and New Orleans sits surrounded by difficult-to-traverse wetlands, swamps and marshes.  New Orleans developed a culture and language that was distinct from the rest of the United States, and I imagine the Outer Banks have as well.  In New Orleans, it really doesn't matter what's going on in the rest of the country - what matters are the things that happen in New Orleans.  The Outer Banks are probably similar.

And of course, there are the hurricanes.  Both areas are very vulnerable.  Both sit along likely paths of storms.  Both are vulnerable to the erosive effects of both natural origin and of human activity.  Both have borne the brunt of hurricanes recently.  Of course, Katrina and Rita battered New Orleans and Louisiana a few years ago, and just within the past month of writing this post, Hurricane Earl brushed the Outer Banks, not scoring a direct hit but bringing rain, wind and flooding.  Both also depend on the Army Corps of Engineers to build both protective defenses and to help control the damage.  In the case of New Orleans, the Corps may have made some major mistakes that may have contributed to the flooding.  In the case of the Outer Banks, they have been called in to fill channels created by direct hits by hurricanes.

I told my wife we should try to visit the Outer Banks.  She informed me that she will attend a conference in Asheville, North Carolina next year, and suggested I meet her and we make the trip.  Her conference will be in October, right in the middle of hurricane season.  Maybe I'll get to see all aspects of the Outer Banks that make them so intriguing.

If you want to know more about Manteo

Elizabethan Gardens
North Carolina Aquarium at Manteo
Outer Banks of North Carolina
Outer Banks Sentinel (newspaper)
Town of Manteo
Wikipedia: Manteo
Wikipedia: Outer Banks

Next up: Wanchese, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Plymouth, North Carolina

Unfolding Click on Thumbnail for Mapthe Map

Oysters.  This post is all about oysters.  While William Least Heat-Moon has some other things that take place in Plymouth, the mention of oysters got my mouth watering and so I had to write about it.  If you want to see where Plymouth is located, click on the map.  And enjoy an oyster and a cold one while you do it!

Book Quote

"In Plymouth I saw a sign at a gas station: DIESEL FUEL AND OYSTERS IN SEASON."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 7

Roanoke River lighthouse replica at Plymouth, North Carolina

Plymouth, North Carolina

I've been dealing with some pretty heavy issues, death and all that, in some of the previous posts.  I don't feel like being so heavy today.  Sure, in this chapter, LHM talks with a guy about timber being cut down for tobacco fields, and how the tobacco that is produced nowadays (at least in the late 70s and early 80s when this was written) is not the tobacco of old.  It has overtones of mechanization and progress and how those factors supplant the old ways of life and being.  All with LHM's approximation of the man's North Carolina speech patterns.

All of that is good stuff, but I feel like talking about oysters.  LHM's account of the sign proclaiming "diesel fuel and oysters in season" has me thinking about those delicacies, and wondering if I will ever be able to taste them in my favorite city again.

I never thought I'd like oysters.  Served raw on the shell, they seemed to be slimy and somewhat disgusting.  You can imagine how I felt when I discovered that the thing that I sometimes gingerly chewed on or let slide whole down my throat was probably still alive as I bit down or swallowed into my esophagus, to meet its final end in my stomach acid.  It seemed like torture, both to me and the oyster.

But when one lives in a town where the oyster is a big part of the local economy, for me it was New Orleans, you quickly come to love oysters.  Hanging out at Cooter Brown's in the Riverbend and getting freshly shucked oysters, mixing the Louisiana hot sauce with some horseradish and dabbing it on, swallowing the salty, slimy goodness and washing it down with an Abita amber...aaahhhh, that's the life!

I've never done any research on oysters, but I will bet they are easily the most popular seafood ever.  Just the other day, my wife and I visited Silver City, New Mexico.  It's far inland - no ocean is near.  I'm sure with modern transportation, fresh oysters on ice could be shipped easily to a restaurant in Silver City.  But I was in the local museum, looking at pictures from the early 1900s, and in one picture showing flood damage on a Silver City street, a sign on a local establishment said "Fresh Oysters Today."  Considering that it was probably at least a two-day trip to the coast by railroad, and that would be without stopping and going overnight, how could Silver City get fresh oysters at that particular time?  And, there was a demand for fresh oysters in Silver City in the early 1900s!  I know that many of the silver prospectors probably came from either coast, but it just seems amazing to me, and indicative of the power of the oyster.

Of course, they are supposed to be aphrodisiacs, but I think that's just because of the suggestive way you have to slurp them off the shell as the juices drip down your mouth.  I personally have never felt any aphrodisiac effect from them - though perhaps I haven't eaten them in the right company at the right moment.  And that brings me back to New Orleans, because it was there that I learned that you don't have to enjoy them just on the shell.  You can have them on a garlic oyster po' boy.  Or as a bacon-wrapped appetizer, or even as a kind of gumbo or stew at Commanders Palace (where I bit down on one and discovered a pearl - the first time that's ever happened to me!).

I wonder if, after the BP oil spill, I will be able to go to my favorite New Orleans eating establishments and get oysters.  Their ecosystem is fragile, and I'm afraid that oysters and shrimp might go away for a while.  Will I have to travel to the coasts to find my oysters or will Louisiana import oysters from places like Plymouth, North Carolina until its fishing industry gets its footing back?  Two things I know.  The BP spill taught me that petroleum products and oysters don't mix, unless the petroleum is fueling the refrigerator truck that is bringing them to where I can eat them.  And secondly, I look with a kind eye upon any place where I have the option to get an oyster, whichever way it is served.  Plymouth, I'm looking at you.

If you want to know more about Plymouth

Battle of Plymouth Living History Weekend
Plymouth and Washington County
Visit Plymouth
Wikipedia: Battle of Plymouth (Civil War)
Wikipedia: Plymouth

Next up: Manteo, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Greenville, North Carolina

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) drops in on Greenville, North Carolina and reflects on weather and what he must listen to in order to get a shower.  I won't say that we will shower with him, but we will reflect on weather and on religion.  To see where we are, click on the map.  Comments always welcome and encouraged.

Book Quote

"At Greenville, I stopped for the night on the campus of East Carolina University.  Out of the west, with suddenness, a nimbo-stratus cloudbank like a precipice obscured the sun, and a ferocious wind pulled the fine sandy soil into a corrosive blast.  Then the wind ceased, raindrops pelted the sand back into place, the temperature dropped from eighty degrees to sixty-five, the clouds blew on toward the sea, and the low sun shone again.  The whole demonstration lasted twenty minutes.

"That evening, I bought a hot shower in a dormitory.  It cost a dollar contribution and a thirty-minute I FOUND IT bumper-sticker talk intended to drive the infidel from my red heart and bring me safely unto the Great White Bosom.  Take the land, take the old ways, Christian soldiers, but please, goddamnit, leave me my soul."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Greenville, North Carolina in sunny times

Greenville, North Carolina

Weather and religion subtly and forcefully influence how we look at life, and their effects on us sometimes aren't too far apart, in my experience.  For example, I wake up in the morning and look outside.  If the sky is blue and the day is temperate, it immediately affects my mood and I make choices based on what I might be able to do.  I can ride my bike to work instead of taking the car.  I might schedule more outdoor activities for myself.  If it's a work day, I can eat my lunch outside.  If not, my activities on my day off can be focused more on the outdoors.  A sunny day can certainly affect my mood as well.  Usually I will feel more buoyant and alive. 

But if the day is dark and stormy, or even overcast, my mood will be much different.  I might be put in a more reflective mood, or perhaps even if I am in some kind of emotional distress or despair, the weather can amplify my feelings.  Activities might be confined indoors.

Religion can leave me with similar feelings and reflections.  I am nominally a Catholic, though I am pretty open to all religious views (except maybe for the ones that try to make me out to be somehow misguided or even evil because I don't accept their particular narrow focus).  There are days when I feel that my individual spirituality is a great boon and support in my life.  The effects on me can be pretty noticeable, especially on my mood and on my outlook for myself and how I feel about those arouund me.

There are times, however, when I can feel that my religion and spirituality isn't helping me at all.  This is usually when I'm hurting for some reason.  I might wish that there was something or someone out there that would hear and see my pain and ease my troubles, but nothing happens and I continue to hurt.  I might question whether it is any use to even be religious.

I find that weather and religion can be very similar in that when times are good, and days are sunny, we take it for granted.  We don't think about the possibility that we might eventually hurt or that the clouds, wind and rain will roll in because we want to live in the moment and enjoy our blue skies and the peacefulness we feel in our hearts.

I'm focusing on these two things because LHM touches on both of these phenomenon in his back-to-back paragraphs set in Greenville.  He highlights how a storm roars through, blocking the sun and dropping rain along with the temperature.  Eventually the storm passes, and the sun shines again.  He then must endure a 30 minute talk on faith in order to get a shower.  I have to think that he intentionally placed these two passages about a storm and his experience together, but maybe not.

Once, when I lived in Milwaukee, I watched a sunny day with 80 degree weather turn into a cloudy, windy 40 degree day with snowflakes dotting the air, all in the space of 30 minutes.  The violence of the atmospheric turmoil that turned such a nice day into something so different made a huge impression on me.  Similarly, while driving up to Colorado from New Mexico, my wife and I passed beneath a storm front.  A huge wall of clouds loomed ahead of us, and it almost seemed like the "mother ship" from a different planet, sort of like those huge ships that hovered over major cities in Independence Day, had appeared to wreak devastation and destruction in the form of highly torrential rains.  We moved from New Orleans a year before Katrina hit, but hurricanes are the most bizarre form of violent weather I have ever seen.  One knows that the hurricane is out there, ready to slam ashore and wreak violence, yet while skies are blue and the wind is calm the radio and television are urging people to get out.  It's almost hard to be serious about it when the weather is so nice, even if the hurricane is only a day away.

Religion can also be violent and stormy.  In the U.S., we are currently in a great debate about religion, particularly Christianity, and its proper place in American society.  Is it pre-eminent, or one religion among many in a diverse country?  The debate has been particularly stormy, as thundering commentators send barbs at each other like lightning through the media.  While some, myself included, think that religion is a private matter that we can indulge in public with our particular religious communities, what you worship and how you worship has become a huge public debate.  Lately, the storm is over the proposed site of an Islamic community center in Manhattan. 

Of course, a great number of people have died fighting for, or defending, their religion and their beliefs.  Like the weather, religious and anti-religious sentiment can get whipped up and move through the landscape, and people can die just as in the aftermath of a particularly violent hurricane or a powerful tornado.  In my experience, I saw such stormy religious sentiment in Northern Ireland, when the Protestant Orangemen of Portadown and Belfast marched toward police and army barriers protecting the (nominally) Catholic areas.  The clash between Protestant traditions and Catholic fears and fortitude resembled a thunderstorm, with the Lambegh drums of the Orangemen providing the thunder.

More and more, I hope for calm skies and sunny weather, and peace in my heart and soul.  I want to try to live a life that keeps drama to a minimum, and satisfaction and happiness to a maximum.  If a sunny day will do that for me, I'm all for it.  If I can gather together with friends and acquaintances and enjoy their company and know they enjoy mine, then I don't care what they believe or don't believe.  In my particular religious tradition, acceptance and forgiveness are the tenets that should be followed.  I don't want to create storms, but I do want people, no matter what their religious convictions, to help me weather any that come my way.

If you want to know more about Greenville

Blog Greenville
City of Greenville
The Daily Reflector (newspaper)
Dine Greenville
East Carolina University
The East Carolinian (campus newspaper)
Greenville Convention and Visitors Bureau
Greenville Times (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Greenville

Next up: Plymouth, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Dunn, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

We take a littlClick on Thumbnail for Mape bit of a dark turn in this post, with reflections on death and life.  It's the landscape the William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is traveling through, and his thoughts are influencing our thoughts and reflections.  To see where we are physically on that landscape, click on the map thumbnail.  If you want to leave a comment or reflection of your own, be sure to click on the "Post a Comment" link at the bottom of this post.

Book Quote

"Highway 421 dropped out of the Piedmont hills onto the broad coastal plain where the pines were taller, the soil tan rather than orange, and black men rode tractors around and around square fields of tobacco and cotton as they plowed wavelets into the earth.  At the center of many fields were small, fenced cemeteries under a big pine.  All day farmers circled the acres, the white tombstones an axis for their planters, while tree roots reached into eye sockets and ribcages in the old boxes below.

"Near Dunn, North Carolina, I pulled up at a cemetery to eat lunch in the warm air.  Last names on the markers were Smith and Barefoot and Bumpass.  All around, the buds, no more than tiny fists, were beginning to break the tight bindings and unclench.  A woman of age and size, her white legs blue-veined like Italian marble columns, stooped to trowel a circle of sprouts growing in the hollow center of a large oak dead from heart rot."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Dunn, North Carolina

Dunn, North Carolina

Cemeteries and death seem to be a focus of LHM's thoughts as he drives Ghost Dancing through North Carolina.  He looked for the grave of his ancestor and found the memorial next to a reservoir near Franklinville.  Now he's left with reflective thoughts as he travels through rural farming areas.  When one travels through the countryside, as LHM is doing, it is easy to contemplate death and life and its endless circle.  "Do not go gently into that good night," wrote Dylan Thomas, but the somnabulance of death quietly biding its time among the tobacco fields (themselves eventual purveyors of death) and cotton fields in the midst of winter quiet or summer malaise lies enshrouded in the gentle peacefulness of the rural landscape.  The dead sleep, and we erect memorials to remind us of their endless slumber.  I love the image of the farmers, coaxing new life out of the soil, even amidst the buried remains of men and women who have gone before.

As a young budding poet, I contemplated life and death in one of my first stabs at a sonnet.  I don't promise a work of Shakespearean elegance here, but I am proud that it won me a poetry prize at my university (and $250, a kingly sum in 1986).  I share it with you now not because I think that it will establish me among the great poets (it certainly won't!) and not because I am looking for your accolades, but because LHM's musings remind me of my own.

Gravestones and Grass
by Michael L. Hess 

Some grass grows through the cracks in marble stones,
And reaches toward the setting winter sun,
Against the shafts of tombstones, pale and dun,
That guard the finest men, reduced to bones.
These lonely blades that missed the reaper's eye,
Blaze forth, in midst of death, with marvelous life,
And over the remains of man and wife,
Defy the gloom, and reach out for the sky.
How did such wondrous seed invade this plot
That men established as their monument
To coldness, darkness and mortality?
Perhaps these plants will remain in permanance,
To root in mankind's past, which lies in rot,
And drown all thoughts of grief in greenery.

Other poets and writers have mused more eloquently than I about death and life.  As living beings that have the capacity to reflect and to look ahead, death is omnipresent in our lives.  We die, our friends and loved ones die.  I think that perhaps every day of my life, I am given some reminder of death.  It could be as small as my accidental crushing of a snail on a walk with my dog, to a story in the newspaper, to my mom telling me about an old classmate who has passed on.

But if most of us acknowledge death, we also try very hard to live in spite of it.  Certainly our lives have pain and loss that remind of death, but we live, laugh, love and create joy.  We come together in community around the world, we care enough to participate in politics and help those those who need our help, we gather in nice little towns and communities like Dunn, North Carolina and do our business and raise families.  We do this despite the fact that we will die, our sons and daughters will die, and that our time alive is just a brief flash, like the spark of a lighter in the darkness, in the eons of the existence of the universe.  We accept death as a natural part of the cycle of life, but we get what we can out of living.  "Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time," wrote author Susan Cheever.  But Native American flautist Robert Cody answers "Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die."

If you want to know more about Dunn

City of Dunn visitor page
Dunn Area Tourism Authority
Dunn Daily Record (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Dunn

Next up: Greenville, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Siler City, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) stops in Siler City on his way to the Carolina coast to load up on supplies.  We go with him, but we're not buying healthy food for ourselves.  Normally I don't put links in the quote, but today I did because a lot of those chewing tobaccos don't exist anymore.  Check out where Siler City is located by clicking on the map.  Or make a comment about your experience with food on the road. 

Book Quote

"...You never feel better than when you start feeling good after you've been feeling bad.  In the truck I laid out a breakfast of bread, cheese, raisins, and tomato juice.

Then to the road.  I bought supplies at Siler City, where the grocery sold twenty-two kinds of chewing tobacco:   Blood Hound, Brown's Mule, Red Coon, Red Horse, Red Fox, Red Juice, Black Maria, Big Man, Cannonball, Bull's Eye ("Hits the Spot"); also fifteen brands of snuff in three sizes, the largest big enough to give the whole county a snort."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 5

Downtown Siler City, North Carolina

Siler City, North Carolina

Once on a road trip, a group of friends and I tried an experiment.  We had been used to getting road food for our trips.  Road food usually consisted of potato chips, sodas, cookies, salty crackers, peanuts, and lots of candy - everything from chocolate bars to Twizzlers to gum to Good N' Plenty's to Skittles to Spree to SweetTarts.  While driving, we would gorge on these things.  By the time we reached our destination, we felt sluggish and tired.  The air in the car would be stale with the odor of sugar-induced gas.  We usually weren't in much shape to enjoy the place to where we were traveling for that first day or night after we got there.

So we tried an experiment.  We got healthy food for this road trip.  Apples and oranges substituted for the cookies and chips.  Unsalted trail mix substituted for the salty peanuts.  Granola bars substituted for the candy, and fruit drinks and mineral water for the sodas.  While it wasn't completely satisfying like the candy and salty snacks and sodas, we took solace in that we were trying to be healthy.  When we got to our destination, we got out of the car and felt good, even energized!  The car air was fresh because we had no gastro-intestinal problems.  We weren't sluggish from sugar hangovers.  We could actually enjoy where we had gotten to, right from the very start!

It felt so wrong that we went back to our usual road food on the way home.

The convenience stores one encounters on the road just feed this addiction to salt and sugar.  You can't really find anything in them except for candy, chips and sodas.  Nowadays the selections in drinks also include high energy caffeine drinks, various flavored teas with sugars and artificial sweeteners, and of course alcohol which you have to wait to consume when you get home unless you have a serious problem.

The passage above reminded me of our failed attempt to instill healthy practices while traveling.  LHM lays out his breakfast, and how healthy is that?  Bread, cheese, raisins and tomato juice?  Where is the beef jerky at least?  It's too damn healthy.

The convenience stores are also full of other vices - including cigarettes and chewing tobacco.  Not being a chewer or a smoker, I don't usually pay attention to whether they stock up on the chewing tobacco or the types of cigarettes they sell, though I wrote a previous post reflecting on chewing tobacco.  But you have to admire places that twenty-two kinds of anything.  The fact that they stock them must mean that every kind of tobacco has its buyers.  In Siler City, which is tiny, so much chewing tobacco must mean that every single man (and maybe woman and child) did some dipping in the late 70s.

So, the moral of this post, and what I take from LHM's Siler City stop, is that if you go on a road trip, eat the cheesiest, saltiest and most sugary stuff available.  That's one of the guilty pleasures of being on the road.  You can always go back to your angelic self when you're back home.

If you want to know more about Siler City and surroundings

Chatham News (newspaper)
Pittsboro-Siler City Convention and Visitors Bureau
Siler City on Atlantic & Yadkin Railray Historical website
Town of Siler City
Wikipedia: Siler City

Next up: Dunn, North Carolina