Awash in a Quandary

Once upon a time, Hatteras Island was truly remote.  Tiny fishing villages, populated by hardy, self-sufficient people, dotted the coast, and the people lived in homes built well away from both the ocean and the sound.  When they needed supplies, doctors, or mail, they traveled to Manteo by boat.  If the weather was bad, they stayed put.

 All that changed when the state of North Carolina built the celebrated Herbert C. Bonner bridge, connecting the southern end of Bodie Island with the northern end of Hatteras at Oregon Inlet.  Hatteras Island went from a fishing economy to a tourist one in a nanosecond, and that improved the quality of life for most of the islanders.  For one thing, people no longer died while waiting on the boat to Manteo.  Ambulance service, something we take for granted, is a big deal on Hatteras.  But something else happened, too.  Rodanthe-Waves-Salvo, the three-village string that one encounters right after the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, suddenly became trendy.  People built multi-million dollar homes on a strip of sand a quarter-mile wide, 17 watery miles east of the North Carolina mainland. 

 And NC 12 became a necessity, not a luxury.

 If NC 12 is not the most fragile piece of highway on the east coast, it’s in the top five.  We have seen it become impassable in mere thunderstorms.  Hurricane Isabel, in 2003, blew open an inlet between Buxton and Frisco that was almost 2,000 feetwide and35 feetdeep.  NCDOT filled that breach with sand and paved it again.  In 2009, a November nor’easter took out the “S” curves in Mirlo Beach.  NCDOT moved the road slightly and built it back. 

 Irene absolutely annihilated that same stretch of NC 12.  Just up the road at the Pea Island Ranger Station, the storm created a new inlet from Pamlico Sound.  When Irene went up the coast, it went west of the Outer Banks.  All the water got shoved up the Alligator river, and the sound was practically dry.  But when it passed, the piled-up water rushed back, sometimes so fast people couldn’t get out of the way.  The new inlet opened up because the water overwashed backward toward the ocean. The amazing force of the overwash at the North Beach Campground actually swept trailers (but no people) out to sea.  Obviously, Labor Day weekend isn’t going to be a big tourist deal in Rodanthe.

Understand this:  I love Rodanthe and Mirlo Beach.  Love them.  We have spent many weeks there over the years.  But they are built, and this cannot be stressed enough, on barrier islands.  Overwash isn’t some aberration; it is the nature of barrier islands to overwash, and it’s not a bad thing, from a strictly natural perspective.  Overwash replenishes the beaches, feeds the animals, and enriches both the ocean and the sound ecosystems. It’s only from the human perspective that it sucks.

Admittedly, that’s an important perspective.  Hundreds of people have been whisked back in time, dependent again on emergency ferry service from Swan Quarter, a one-and-a-half-hour ferry ride away.  It will be months before NC 12 reopens north of Rodanthe.

Tourists, if they come, will come through Swan Quarter or up through the Okracoke and Hatteras ferries.  The local economy is now almost completely dependent on tourism, but it depends on those tourists having quick and easy access to Nags Head and the amenities there.  People are not going to be happy with a long ferry ride to and from the middle of nowhere.

NCDOT will rebuild Highway 12, and some hurricane next year or next month will take it away again.  Should they move the road to the back side of Pea Island and disrupt the marsh?  Build a bridge from Oregon Inlet all the way down?  Elevate the roadway?  North Carolina could spend the GDP of a small nation just to provide tourist access to some former fishing villages.  Even though I’m one of those tourists, and even though I love it, I’ve got to start wondering if it’s worth all that.  Let the barrier islands be barrier islands. Maybe some places really are too remote to last, and maybe that’s how it should be.

Watching the Weather Watchers

I love a good “weather event,” and not for the reasons you’d think.  I have a certain view of much of the newsmongering profession, and the coverage of weather events thoroughly reinforces it.

 Weather journalists have no shame.  They will do anything, believe anything.  They will scour the Outer Banks for the one old codger who will not leave.  They will finally uncover one, way back in the sweet bay bushes somewhere near Buxton Woods.  As they pull up in his driveway, they will notice with some trepidation that the house seems to be three feet above sea level and balanced on a collection of rusted truck chassis.  The old codger himself will be sitting on his porch with his dog, drinking a beer.  That is, the dog will be drinking a beer.  It will also have a pleading look in its eyes.

 The Weather Channel, for it is none other than those intrepid storm-visitors themselves, will interview the codger for the cameras.  He will squint into the middle distance  and proclaim that he “ain’t skeert of no hurricane.”  He will tell them that he’s been through all of them, and that he and his dog survived Isabel by clinging to the top branches of pin oaks, eating feral chickens raw, and licking the gum off of stamps. 

 The Weather Channel will eat this up.  They will interview the crap out of this guy, and then high five each other when they turn off the lights.  Just as they do this, a Ford F-150 will screech into the driveway, throwing gravel and scattering a camera crew.  It will  contain the codger’s daughter and her husband.  They will whack him over the head with an oar and throw him in the back of the truck.  They also open the truck’s door for the dog, who will jump in with a leap of gratitude and high-five them on the way by, the rest of the six-pack clenched in his jaws. 

 The couple will tell the Weather Channel mavens, who are watching this with their own jaws dropped, that the codger will spend this storm the way he has spent every storm – in their basement in Plymouth, drinking longneck Buds and believing he’s weathering the weather on Hatteras.  Then they will give the Weather Channel folks pitying looks and peel out into the northbound traffic on NC 12.

 Hours later, terrified and battered by winds and waves, the Weather Channel reporters will be frantically searching for stamps and feral chickens.  The storm will wipe out NC 12 just above Buxton, again, and the camera crew will be forced to eat its socks before it can be rescued by helicopter.

 When the next big storm comes, the crew will stay in Atlanta and interview itself, squinting into the middle distance and saying “I ain’t skeert of no hurricane.”

Touch Me Not

Observe the common touch-me-not, impatiens capensis.  When I say common, I mean it grows on every roadside and creek bank in Pulaski County, and the New River Trail is lined with it.  August is its bloom time, and yesterday, driving about with a heavy heart, I went looking for it.

This is like saying “I went looking for air.”  It’s everywhere.  Really.  We even have the more rare yellow variety.  The touch-me-not, also known as jewelweed, has a number of wonderful qualities.  It’s very pretty to look at, first of all, with speckled, orchid-like blooms.  It’s related to domestic impatiens, which explains why it grows in moist shade. 

It’s also useful.  Touch-me-not sap has antibacterial and anti-fungal properties.  You can use it to treat poison ivy, too, and I know from personal experience that it will relieve the pain of stinging nettles. 

But the really cool, really amazing thing about these plants is how they got their name.   The seed pods of the touch-me-not, when they mature, are sensitive to heat and pressure.  If you touch one, it doesn’t just open; it explodes.  The seeds go shooting out, leaving behind a star-shaped pod that has curled back on itself.  The unwary have been known to scream when a touch-me-not goes off in their hands.

Playing with touch-me-not pods is almost as much fun as scaring frogs.  (If you’ve never done that, go do it, right now.  The frogs make a “Yike!” noise that never fails to crack me up.)  Suzanne,  the queen of touch-me-nots, still can be found, in August, popping the pods and laughing like a maniac. 

The world is full of joy-sucking things, things that make us old and sad before our time.  But it’s got touch-me-nots in it, too, and they are everywhere.  It’s Saturday; go find some to play with and laugh for a while.

Brand New Things

A couple of times this week, I’ve considered whether or not to continue the blog.  After all, the summer’s over, for me, anyway, and if I had any doubt, a week’s worth of mind (and butt) numbing meetings has confirmed it.  I realized, though, that I haven’t stopped looking at the world, nor have I stopped wanting to share what I’m looking at.  True, mostly I’ve been looking at talking heads, but that’s beside the point.

So I’m not walking away.  Too much is going on, and too much still needs to be looked at.

Day One — Wrapping Up

If summer vacation has to end, and it does, I suppose I could do worse than end it at Page’s Camp Meeting, which isn’t really a camp meeting, but IS a wonderful experience, all the same.  Page’s is a late-summer tradition among the local Methodists, where many churches come together for evening worship services, outside in the warm air.

Two hundred and fourteen years ago, a man named Alexander Page died and left the Methodist church 250 acres of land between Morgan’s Cut and Radford, to be used for camp meetings.  Page’s Meeting House was built on the site soon thereafter, and every fall, droves of Methodists would arrive by wagon, to camp for a week and attend services.

Think how much fun it must have been for those families, working hard on their farms all year, to take a break in the relative wilderness.  Many of them traveled a long way, and often the camp meeting would also be the site of family reunions as the different members gathered from their farflung farms.  Friends camped together each year, and the children ran freely among the tents and wagons. 

It’s a bit different now.  The fields are full of SUV’s and Buicks instead of wagons, and by dark, they’ve almost all headed for home.  Children, who once looked forward to camp meeting as a vacation and a chance to play with lots of other children, are now something of a rarity.  They have too many distractions at home.  It’s not “fun,” any more.

Except that it is.  Maybe it’s just my age.  I adore listening to Marva Hickman’s multi-church choir.  I love seeing my friends who attend other churches, and worshipping with them in a way we don’t usually get to do.  I even like “Church in the Wildwood” sung congregationally at a breakneck pace.  I need to hear Kathie Wilson-Parker’s reminder God is not asking me to be comfortable, but to comfort. 

Those are not bad words to hear on the night before the school year starts.  It’s not my job to sit around soaking up the goodies, but to make sure that everyone has a chance to feel love, to have value, to see Jesus.  I don’t know what my semester is going to be like, but that’s not a bad directive to take into the next days and weeks.

Day Two — Practically Over

Next to last day of summer break, and I feel it rushing away like a creek flowing downhill.  Sarah, Jeff, Suz, Brent, Rachel, and Jonathan have all gone canoeing, Chip is working, Hank is working, and I am baking birthday cakes and trying to get the house into some autumnal form.  My sister called to say she has a treeful of ripe peaches, and wonders if I want to make jam.  Yes, I do.  Am I going to have time?  I doubt it.

 Two more days.  This is where, if I am not careful, panic sets in.  My house is a wreck, I have 14 people coming for lunch tomorrow, and I have to put cream cheese icing on a cake and then find room to refrigerate it.  I do not know if I have lemon curd, but if I don’t, I’m gonna have to make it, and that’s not a job for sissies.  The guest bed is on the floor because of an ill-timed jump, and the Boy has got to leave work in time to fix it.  Beans need picking again, there’s a load of laundry to fold, and my jewelry-making equipment is spread all over the table where I usually fold it.  The other table is in our little guest room, where Suzanne’s clothing covers every surface.  Chip’s room is such a disaster, I can’t even open the door without hysterical junk blindness. 

I am not going to mention the stack of magazines by my desk, the Venetian mask on my worktable that needs a bell sewn back on, the moving boxes on the living room sofa, the tent in the dining room, the volleyball net on the back porch, or the pile of shoes at the foot of the front stairs.  

Every summer, my brain tells me that we’re going to have a house that’s worthy of a Southern Living photo shoot.  And every summer, that completely fails to happen.  Apparently, I can’t be taught.  We’ve lived here too long, I have too many books, too many hobbies, and too few hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the vacation. 

I’ve decided, here on Day Two, that I don’t care.  I have been sitting in the swing reading a magazine and enjoying the breeze, while the younger set gets ready for a baseball game that may or may not get rained out.  My Beloved and I will join them when he gets home from work.  

A few minutes ago, a sparrow swooped in and landed on the swing’s chain.  He hung there, panting and terrified, looking around him with wild eyes.  If I had to guess, I’d say he just had a near miss with one of the feral cats.  I watched him for a long time, as he gradually calmed down and finally flew away.  I felt blessed – such a wild, beautiful thing, right by my hand.  If I’d been cleaning the living room, I’d have missed him.  A bird on the swing is worth . . . I don’t know, but a lot more than a tidy living room.  It’s not much of a rationale, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and I’m sticking with it.

Day Three — Soul Food

One of the better byproducts of a mid-August cool-down is that I can resume cooking.  I’m not a big fan of elaborate, or even warm, meals in our kitchen with no air conditioning, so for many midsummer weeks, we survive on Joe’s Pizzeria and homemade gazpacho.   The girls are home this week, though, for their birthday and also some quality time before things get crazy this fall.  Even if it had still been 90 degrees out, I’d probably cook.

There’s just something about mom-made food that signals caring, compassion, and a need to clean out the fridge, or at least the freezer.  Last night, we had ham, green beans and tomatoes from our garden, new potatoes, and cucumbers.  Tonight was grilled corn on the cob, barbecued pork, sweet potatoes, more tomatoes from the garden, and Suz’s fruit sangria. 

It’s late, only two days left before I have to think seriously about freshman comp., my Beloved and I just finished cleaning the kitchen, but it’s so worth it.  We have family dinner around the table on the back deck, and we sit and laugh until the last of the sun drains away and the bats start their hunting.  It’s what I think of, when I think of summer – the table, the kids, their significant others and friends.  It doesn’t matter what the actual meal is – to me, it’s soul food.

 And here is a little bit of soul wonderfulness for leftover corn.

Cut the leftover corn off the ears and chill it.  Next day, mix in half of a medium onion, chopped fine, a can (or two, if you have a lot of corn) of black beans, rinsed, a jalapeño pepper, chopped, and a tablespoon or so of chopped fresh cilantro.  In a small bowl, mix equal parts canola oil and lime juice (this is not the time for olive oil).  I usually use three tablespoons of each.  Whisk in a teaspoon of cumin and a half-teaspoon of chili powder, or to taste.  Don’t overdo it.  Dump that over the veggies and serve at room temperature.  Fabulous!

Day Four — You Have To Be 25 . . .

           

            . . .  to wear these. 

Day Four was spent delivering sample bracelets to Sew Biz and shopping for wedding shoes.  These are NOT the shoes I’ll be wearing, because I am 52 and I do not have any desire to break my neck and possibly the necks of innocent bystanders.

No, these are the shoes Suz is wearing, and they look fabulous with her dress; it’s just that, well, they have four inch heels.   Me, I’m wearing a more modest one-inch heel, but happily, if I have those, and Suz is wearing these, then I will no longer be everybody’s Zombie Apocalypse plan.  For the first time since she was seven, I’ll be able to outrun her.

Day Five — Full of Beans

Right now, downstairs in our fridge, we have what is technically known as a mess of beans.  No one knows why the “mess” is the unit of measurement for beans, but it is, and that’s what we have, because Day Five has been garden-intensive.  

Cicero said, and I paraphrase because I very carefully forgot all the Latin I once knew, if you have a garden and a library, you’ve got everything you need, and he should know.  He spent a fair amount of his life exiled from Rome for one reason or another, and he stayed sane by reading, writing, and gardening, right up to the time he fatally annoyed Marc Antony.  I’m pretty sure that’s not the point of my day.

My day has been spent among the bean vines, which have surged up their trellis and crested, a green wave, over the railing of the back deck.  There’s something so welcoming about bean vines, in a Little Shop of Horrors kind of way.  The tendrils latch onto clothes and skin.  “Stay with us,” they say.  “We’ll protect you with our leaves. You’ll be able to pick beans from your hair; our blooms will be your jewelry.”

It’s tempting.  Today has been temperate, even cool, compared to the past month.  The garden smells wonderful, rippled by breezes and gently warmed.  The first thing I do is eat three or four of the little yellow pear tomatoes, right off the vine.  (Just ONE of the benefits of a completely organic garden.)  They taste like sunlight would taste, I think, sweet and slightly spicy, warm and mild.  I pick all the ripe ones, because Suzanne is home, and no one likes a pear tomato better than Suz. 

I move on to the regular tomatoes.  The slugs have been here, so the lower tomatoes have great big bites out of them.  Grrrr.  Somebody actually drank the slug beer, so I vow to get some more and pick the tomatoes higher up, even the ones that aren’t quite ready.  They’ll ripen better not being eaten by molluscs, so into the basket they go.

The jalapeños come next, and they’re ready for picking, too.  Nothing much bothers a pepper, at least not these, so I have fat green and red pods lying on top of the yellow tomatoes.  The little Scotch bonnet, a gift from Susette, has about ten peppers on it, in various stages of not-quite-ripe.  I’m a little terrified of Scotch bonnets anyway, so I leave it alone, concentrating on the beans.

Back in the early summer, in dire need of a trellis, I grabbed a section of our old deck railing that we kept for some unfathomable reason.  I jammed it in the ground at the front of the bed and leaned it against the deck at the back.  It looked pretty, but I worried whether it would work.  Normally, I build elaborate and unstable creations out of rebar and chicken wire, but this year, there wasn’t time.  Let this be a lesson to me.  Sometimes quick and dirty IS better than slow and premeditated.

The trellis keeps the bulk of the beans at an easy picking height, but they hide under their heart-shaped leaves.  Picking them is a treasure hunt.  Of course, the bean vines are also home to a vast array of spiders, and I’ll happily tolerate them here.  They eat the bugs that eat the beans, and so, presumably, do not need to bite me.  I give a large black-and-yellow one a wide berth, nonetheless.  I do not need a bean that badly.

And so our beans went from vines to ready for dinner in less than an hour.  I sat in the swing and snapped them, feeling all peaceful and summery, and then cooked them in my grandmother’s bean pot.  If I have a garden and a library, I’m going to be okay.

Day Six — Alternative Histories

This house and 192 acres of farmland are for sale in Carroll County, at the intersection of the Little Vine road and Route 52.  Despite the fact that I could have a goat dairy, it would be closer to my Beloved’s work, and I’ve always wanted a little farm, we’re not likely to buy it, but we did go look at it.

That’s because it belonged to my great-grandfather.  My grandmother was born there.  Finding it popped the lid off some mysteries that will probably never be solved, and maybe were never meant to be solved, but I am intrigued.

My grandmother was Lillian Gladys Early.  I don’t think she minded the “Lillian,” but the “Gladys” was a bit much.  Her father, William Early, owned1,800 acresof Carroll County, and his family had a lot more. We never heard him mentioned, and the reason is that he died in December of 1895, and my grandmother was born in May of 1896. 

This contradicts some things we’d always been told.  My grandmother maintained that she was nine months old when her father died, but she couldn’t have been.  She was born on May 17, and could possibly have been seven months old, but the old court records show her birth in 1896, not 1895.  It’s unlikely she was born in 1894, since her parents were married around then.  I think she desperately wanted to have overlapped her father in the land of the living, and made it so, at least in her personal history.

It got me to wondering about my grandmother, a person I knew so well, and yet didn’t really know.  I remember her as an elegant woman – tall and attractive – who also managed to be a fabulous cook, an artistic housekeeper, an indulgent grandmother, and a serious devotee of my grandfather.  She died in 1986, eleven years after he did.  I was 27 at the time, pregnant with twins, and unable to attend her funeral.  You’d think, in 27 years, I’d have time to find out some things about her, but she kept her real self hidden way down below layers of other selves. 

Among the things I didn’t know:  Her mother, Ida, was 15 years younger than her husband, and seventeen when she married.  She was a widow at twenty, and soon went home to her family in Allisonia, leaving her husband’s four children by a first wife with other relatives.  Two of those four children survived to adulthood, but my great-grandmother never mentioned them.  My grandmother did not know, for many years, that she even had half-siblings.  She had no memory of the white house, the huge farm, the sprawling and powerful Early family.  Perhaps she knew that she had a large inheritance from the Earlys, but she dropped, innocently and through no choice of her own, into another history, and so, inadvertently, did the rest of us.  

I felt a huge upwelling of compassion for my grandmother, looking at her house and thinking about the girl who never knew her father, who was six feet tall in a family of petite people, whose mother remarried and had other children.  She was close to her sisters all her life, (the ones she knew about; her mother’s daughters) and they clearly loved her, but I wonder if she always felt, back behind everything else, that something was different – missing – in herself, some identity they had that she couldn’t have.

My grandmother studied music, worked in a dress shop, and lost her soldier fiancé to the flu epidemic at the end of World War I.   I didn’t know any of this until now.  I feel like I’ve just looked at something familiar and realized I’d never seen it before. 

I know this: if I HAD had the intelligence, curiosity, or even compassion to ask about her family years ago, she would have changed the subject.   She took the history she was given and got on with her life.  Knowing this stuff makes sense of some other things about her – things that annoyed me as a young adult.  It’s a reminder almost everyone carries a history that shapes them and maybe sometimes makes them less than easy to deal with.  If we knew what it was they carried, we’d be compassionate.  Maybe we should just start assuming the history and let the compassion flow.