Blue Highways: Engelhard, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapA disjointed post today, as I try to think up things that Engelhard, North Carolina brings to mind.  I actually just got back from a play about Moby Dick, Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod, so the sea and seafood is on my mind.  To learn about Engelhard and its connection to seafood, click on the thumbnail at right.

Book Quote

"Along highway 264, skirting the sound, grew stands of loblolly and slash pine, as well as water oaks, bayberry, and laurel.  Away from the open waters, the day was warm, and in pocosins drained by small canals and natural sloughs, mud turtles, their black shells the color of the water, crawled up to the warmth on half-submerged logs.

"The road passed through the fishing town of Engelhard..."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 13

Boats in Engelhard, North Carolina

Engelhard, North Carolina

Reading this passage, I had to look up a few words.  Not having grown up on the East Coast, I didn't know what loblolly or slash pine was, nor did I know what water oaks or bayberry looked like.  Finally, I wasn't sure what a pocosin is.  So this was an education in itself.

Loblolly pines and slash pines are relatively long-needled pines.  They sort of look like the bull pines I grew up with in my area of California.  Water oaks are a type of oak tree, of course, but with leaves that I wouldn't have recognized as oak leaves.  Bayberry has pretty purple berries that it appears can be eaten.

A pocosin is something I've never experienced.  It's a type of marshy wetland, and in some areas is referred to rather colorfully as a "dismal."  The marshy area is caused by seepage from creeks or sloughs that drain the area, and the soils are nutrient poor.  However, they are a good habitat for the loblolly pine.

I didn't grow up around many marshes or swamps, so I'm not really all that familiar with that type of wetland.  The closest thing to a swamp that I knew of was man-made.  Pudding Creek was dammed by the lumber company in my town so that they could float logs there.  By the time I was around, it wasn't a log retaining pond anymore, but the dam caused marsh grasses to grow up around the edges of the creek and give it that swamp-like attributes.  And the best part?  Unlike Louisiana swamps, there were no snakes nor alligators.

Of course when I lived in New Orleans, we were surrounded by swamps.  My two main experiences with them was driving over the Atchafalaya Swamp on the elevated Interstate 10, and taking an airboat tour.  Which is to say, not much at all.  But New Orleans' precarious position meant that we were all aware of the swamps that surrounded us.  After Katrina, the importance of and the plight of the wetlands of coastal Louisiana were driven home to most Louisianans, if not a good portion of the country.

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) doesn't stop or give any description of Engelhard, but doing a little web research reveals that it may be an unincorporated community, but it seems to have some life to it.  I am curious about the Engelhard Seafood Festival, which may not have existed when LHM drove through.  It appears to be a pretty large event, and I think that I would really like it because, growing up in a coastal town, I love seafood.  My mother's father and her two brothers were fishermen, and so we often had fresh fish on the plate.  To this day, if I am in a coastal area, I never fail to get fish.  But since I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and far from any coast, I don't get it as often as I would like.  Sure, I order mussels or clams here.  But, please don't tell my mom, but I've picked up a little of her snobbishness about fish.  She always had to have it practically wiggling out of the boat, and will turn up her nose at fish unless she knows that it is really fresh.  Unlike her, I will eat flash-frozen fish, but usually the farther I am from the coast the less likely I am to eat seafood.  So all of this is a long way of saying that Engelhard's Fish Festival sounds mighty fine to me.

As you can guess, I am finding it hard to come up with a consistent topic for this particular stop, so you are getting a bit of disconnected and disjointed thoughts.  But, sometimes reading does that to us.  Do you ever read a passage and find yourself reading it again and again because something else is on your mind and you aren't really paying attention?  Or do you find that a certain passage just isn't taking you to a very deep place?  Reading is supposed to take us out of our reality, and put us someplace else, even if the someplace else does not correspond to the linearity most of us like.  There's nothing wrong with that, and sometimes we even learn something.  I now know what loblolly and slash pines are, I know what a water oak is, and am tempted to try bayberries if I ever get a chance.  And I can now throw the word "pocosin" into a sentence and sound really smart.  I'm also really hungry for some seafood.

If you want to know more about Engelhard

Engelhard Facebook Page
Engelhard Seafood Festival
Granville Grant in Engelhard
Hotel Engelhard
NC Folk blog post about Engelhard
Northeast Fisheries Sciences Center: Community Profile on Engelhard
Wikipedia: Engelhard

Next up:  Swanquarter, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Fort Raleigh National Historic Site

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapToday we confront the mystery of the Roanoke Colony.  Just what does that word Croatoan mean?  Where did the colonists go?  It is a great early America story with multiple possible endings.  Click on the map to see the site of this mysterious lost colony, and feel free to leave a comment if you have an idea what happened to them.

Book Quote

"Because of its setting in deep woods, its age, its Croatoan mystery, and because it is the lone remnant of the first English attempt at settlement in America, Fort Raleigh is fascinating.  But it is also a monument to the disease of an old world, gone tired and corrupt, trying to exploit a newer land.  The whole ugly European process is here in capsule history:  England, wanting to emulate Spain's financial success in pillaging the New World (but learning nothing from Spanish mistakes in dealing with Indians) and at the same time trying to circumscribe the expansion of colonial Spain out of Florida, sent a group of men, most nothing more than gentlemen pirates called 'privateers,' to establish a colonly and enrich England with marketable commodities."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 12

Excavation at Fort Raleigh NHS, North Carolina

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, North Carolina

Imagine an alien ship arrives in an new land.  The ship disgorges its inhabitants, whose appearance, language and demeanor are completely strange and unintelligible to the land's, but the visitors look unwell, and the inhabitants greet them and attempt to make them feel welcome.  The visitors set up a living area, and the inhabitants, who know everything about their land, are compelled to help them over and over again as these visitors are ill equipped to deal with their environment.  But over time, the visitors begin to reveal themselves as more interested in colonizing and taking resources than living as friendly neighbors.  Hostilities break out between the original inhabitants and the visitors.  The alien ship leaves in order to resupply the visitors, but does not return for a long period of time.  When a new alien ship finally arrives, it finds no trace of the visitors except for a single word left behind.

Sounds like a science fiction story set on another world, doesn't it?  This is actually the story of the first permanent English colony in America, Roanoke Colony, established at the site of Fort Raleigh in 1585.  A first wave of settlers came to Roanoke Island and established a settlement, but deserted the colony and went back to England with Sir Francis Drake after a relief expedition never arrived.  A second colony was established at the same site in 1587, but a relief expedition took three years to arrive due to the English war with Spain.  When the relief expedition finally got to the settlement site in 1590, it had been abandoned and a single word, "Croatoan," was found carved in post at the fort.  The relief expedition assumed that the settlement went to live with the nearby Croatoan Indians, but no trace of the settlers was ever found.

This is a wonderful mystery that exists at the very beginning of our country.  It contains its share of characters both good and not-so-good.  Sir Richard Grenville, for instance, who punitively punished and regularly raided the very Native Americans that had offered their hands in friendship to the colony.  Another was Virginia Dare, the first English person born on what would become U.S. soil, and who disappeared with the rest of the colony.  Yet another was Sir Walter Raleigh, who never stepped foot there but who hoped that the colony would increase his wealth and the wealth of England as well as blunt the advances of Spain in the region.  William Least Heat-Moon mentions Thomas Harriot, who was the scientist of the expedition and felt that there could be a cross-cultural exchange of ideas between the Natives and the English.

And that word.  Croatoan.  When I first heard this story, that word seemed to sum up the entire mystery.  It was carved in a post at the fort.  The instructions to the colonists were that if they were forced out of the settlement and captured, they should carve a Maltese cross, which looks like four arrowheads converging at right angles on a single point, in a conspicuous place and the name of the place they were being taken.  But there was no cross, so the settlers were not forcibly taken.  It was assumed they went to live with the Croatoan tribe.  But no trace of them was found.  Legends abound about what happened to the colonists.  Some legends, spoken of by Native Americans themselves, say that the colony was attacked and the settlers put to death.  Others say that the colonists joined a friendly Indian tribe, such as the Croatoans, and intermingled.  The mystery yet deepens when later settlers reported an Indian tribe in North Carolina that spoke English and already knew about Christianity, even though they had never been in contact with English peoples before.  Virginia Dare, the first English child born on North American soil, became the subject of legend herself, and in those legends grew up to be a beautiful blond maiden who was a wonder to the tribes of the area and was the object of many powerful suitors, including Wanchese, the Native American who once traveled to England with Manteo.

In the end, the Roanoke colony's failure did not stem the tide of English colonization.  In a few years, the permanent settlement of Jamestown was established, and from then on the story becomes one of war and pain, with Native Americans fighting to save their lands from the new invaders.  Would history have been different had proof been found that the Native Americans did save the Roanoke settlers, and, as Thomas Harriot wished, shared their knowledge with them?  Would the U.S. look different today had Virginia Dare appeared to successive colonists, told her story, and served as an intermediary between two peoples?  Or would the story have remained the same?   Would one side have still conquered a continent, while the other side fought a losing battle against the forces of progress?

Sir Walter Raleigh, the Rennaissance man who financed the Roanoke expedition, once wrote:

What is our life? A play of passion,
Our mirth the music of division,
Our mother's wombs the tiring-houses be,
Where we are dressed for this short comedy.
Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is,
That sits and marks still who doth act amiss.
Our graves that hide us from the setting sun
Are like drawn curtains when the play is done.
Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest,
Only we die in earnest, that's no jest.

We know how Raleigh's life played out in history, culminating in his execution in England.  But we may never know the true story of the Roanoke colony he founded, which has become one of our earliest passion plays, even though the colonists' graves hide them "from the setting sun," and "are like drawn curtains when the play is done."  It is a gift in a way, because our imaginations can run free with possible narratives that can include life, death, passion, romance, treachery...in short, whatever we want...and all wrapped up in one word, Croatoan.  To me, that's the hallmark of a great mystery.

If you want to know more about Fort Raleigh

The Colony at Roanoke (Ralph Lane's firsthand account to Sir Walter Raleigh, 1586)
Croatoan and Roanoke: A General History
Fort Raleigh and the Lost Colony
Fort Raleigh NHS (official website)
A Legend of Virginia Dare
The Lost Colony: Roanoke Island
National Parks Conservation Association: Fort Raleigh
The Shadowlands.net: The Lost Colony of Roanoke
Wikipedia: Fort Raleigh NHS
Wikipedia: Roanoke Colony

Next up:  Engelhard, North Carolina

Blue Highways: Wanchese, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIf Manteo is the flash and glitz that recalls the Elizabethan era, then Wanchese is its groundling cousin, with emphasis on fishing and hard work.  At least that's how it appeared to William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) 30 years ago.  Where is Wanchese?  Click on the map to find out.

Book Quote

"In 1584, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, the leaders of Raleigh's first colonial exploratory expedition, returned to London from Roanoke with tobacco, potatoes, and a pair of 'lustie' Indians to be trained as interpreters.  Their names were Manteo and Wanchese.  The Virgin Queen and the courtiers in their lace ruffs were fascinated by the red men.  Months later when the Indians returned to the sound, Manteo, the first man baptized by the British in America, was on his way to becoming a proper English gentleman.  But Wanchese, after seeing London, came back an enemy of 'civilized' society.  Four hundred years, the towns carrying their names, sitting at almost opposite ends of the island, still show that separation."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 10

Harbor at Wanchese, North Carolina

Wanchese, North Carolina

Two men, removed from their lives and taken to a far off place.  Each spends a few months there, objects of curiousity and also of English intent in the New World.  And each comes back to their home with two very different views of their hosts/captors and the world they have seen.  Manteo wants to emulate the people he spent time with, and Wanchese wants nothing to do with them and their civilization.

It's a great story because I think it approximates the human condition, at least in some part.  In every civilization are found people who embrace it and its accomplishments and its progress fully; however you also find people who are uneasy about it or even fear it.  And the truth is, most of us lie somewhere in between on that spectrum.

Think of all the great accomplishments that our own civilization has wrought.  An obvious example is today's technological achievements, particularly in communication technology.  No matter where we go, it is possible today for every man, woman and child to be connected.  Cell phones, just 15 years ago still somewhat of luxury, now are in the hands of most people.  Not only are they simply phones, but they are "smart" phones, allowing us to be even further connected by offering us access to the Internet and allowing us to send text messages and photos.  My wife will often ask me, even when we are going out to the same place together, if I have my cell phone.

It's great to have such a resource at my disposal.  It comes in handy when I have an auto emergency, or quickly need to contact someone.  I remember the days when one had to search for a pay phone, and hope that the correct change was at hand.  I remember pulling out long-distance cards in airports, calling an 800 number and then plugging in a 16 digit number plus the area code and the number I was calling.  It is now incredibly convenient to have a phone on my person where I can make a normal call.

But when my wife asks me if I have my cell phone, my eyes can't help rolling a little and a sarcastic retort comes into my head.  "Whatever did we do before we had our cell phones?"  Because there is something disturbing to me still about being so connected.  There is something a little strange to me still about always being available to someone and that to completely disconnect is not an automatic option connected with leaving the home and office anymore, but involves a conscious choice to turn off my cell phone or power down my computer.

I have no doubt that Wanchese came back and made use of the new things that he had learned about the English and their ways to try to stave off the encroachment of this new people and civilization.  But, Wanchese was also the last chief of his tribe, which disappeared into the mists of history. Manteo became the first Native American nobleman in America.  In the end, Wanchese's tribe succumbed to the forces of progress, and Manteo might have been better off embracing them.  Should we all just unquestioningly embrace change?

I know younger people do not have this inner dichotomy at all.  In fact, they embrace the chance to be connected one hundred percent of the time.  But this older guy has a little bit of Manteo inside me, that wants to embrace that which is new and which, in a way, seems better.  But I also have a bit of Wanchese in me.  I sometimes look at progress and is in some ways deeply disturbed.  Corporate greed in the name of progress has led to billions of people in hardship.  America's technological prowess and might have come at great expense to world resources and world environmental health.  I ride a bike to work instead of using a car, I recycle, and I try to be as energy efficient as possible.  But it's a choice I have, not an imperative.  I do not have to try to feed a family on a dollar a day.  I do not want to minimize what progress has done to make my life healthier and easier.  But, I am aware that even my acts of deprivation in attempts to be a good world citizen are luxurious.

As William Least Heat-Moon was writing, the same forces are at work upon the two towns.  Manteo embraces what will become the new economy geared toward tourism by playing up its Elizabethan roots.  Wanchese remains the fishing town, whose gritty working class mentality is under siege by the forces of progress.  Later in the chapter, he writes of loading crabs on a truck and watching as a man who brings in a load of crabs on his boat is turned away and ends up dumping his load back into the sea.  And a chapter later, he speaks to an older man who is deeply distrustful of the forces of progress represented by banks and corporate leaders far away who make decisions.  Where I grew up, the fishing industry was decimated, along with the lumber industry - just two casualties of progress.  People cannot make a living fishing out of my town anymore, and the harbor is strangely silent where when I was a child, a hundred fishing boats left the harbor every morning.  Our neighboring town embraced arts and its attraction to well-heeled tourists, and is thriving, while ours still tries to find its identity, caught between its working class roots and the demands of a new time.

Two minds, Wanchese and Manteo, and two different interpretations of the same experience.  Two different outcomes.  They are fascinating symbols of both our curiousity and our uneasiness with the new.  Yet for now, progress marches on.

If you want to know more about Wanchese

The Coastal Explorer: Welcome to Manteo and Wanchese
Wikipedia: Wanchese

Next up: Fort Raleigh National Historic Park, North Carolina

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