Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey

by William Least Heat-Moon

  After fourteen miles of dark Currituck Sound, the Bog Trotter entered a cut across a low ridge in Maple Swamp to reach Coinjock, North Carolina, where she tied up at a small wharf. I got off for a walk. The place-name is likely an altered Algonquian word for blueberry swamp, but the locals have been good at creating more lively (if predictable) and less believable variations. A truculent and weary dockside storekeeper said to a well-meaning woman, “Someday somebody’s going to come in here and not ask that question,” then answered with a solution involving how much specie he would have in his underdrawers if given a dime for every question about the meaning of Coinjock.

  At the wharf stood an old Rhode Island mariner, a slender, angular salt whose sharp-cornered shoulders were wearing holes in his shirt and who spoke in a rusty, mechanical voice in need of oiling. He was taking a rest from moving his motor sailer south for the winter (yacht transit is a common use of the ICW). The most frequent question among those traveling the Waterway, frequent because it’s of such significance in making headway, is “What’s the draft of your vessel?” He asked, and I said about six feet.

  “This is my eighth trip,” he squeaked, “and I’ve learned that for two weeks of transit I’m going to touch bottom about every other damn day and twice on Monday. My goal isn’t not to touch, it’s not to touch hard. I had to get towed off a shoal my first trip down, but I learned since how to use a rising tide to get free. Those boys who call it a ‘damned ditch’ don’t know how to sail inland waters. If they don’t have five fathoms under their keel, they mess their britches. They don’t read the day boards and range markers, and they got no clue about the floaters.”

  Floaters are temporary channel markers, a necessity in waters continually washing up new shoals. Range markers are paired signs separated north and south, so to speak, that a pilot brings into a bow-with-stern alignment to keep his boat in the channel. Cleverly simple but requiring perpetual vigilance. He said, “If challenge isn’t a pleasure, then you need to hire some guy to bring your boat down. And that’s what a lot of them do.”

  The Army Corps of Engineers has a mandate to maintain a twelve-foot-deep channel from Norfolk to Miami, but seldom is it that depth, and novices on the ICW are surprised to discover even vast expanses like Albemarle or Pamlico Sound are, at the deepest, rarely more than twenty feet, and in many places of a depth a tall wader wouldn’t wet the brim of his hat. Were those big sounds in Holland, I have no doubt they would have been diked and farmed years ago.

  The old mariner, whose solar-radiated nose proved his seven decades on glaring water, said, “I don’t think there’s anything like this protected coastline in terms of mileage — not to mention scenery — in the rest of the world. I mean, the whole route, Boston through the Cape Cod Canal, on behind Long Island, and on to south Texas. It’s got just enough use, probably, to keep it open, but not enough to congest it.” (I think he was correct: the Inside Passage from Seattle to Alaska is only about a thousand miles, and the interior of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia but a couple-hundred miles greater than that.) “There’s some open water on the Gulf in Florida, and that inside route down the New Jersey Shore is only for shallow-draft boats,” he said, “but if the government would fix the Delaware-Raritan Canal across the neck of Jersey to Trenton, those miles on the open Atlantic wouldn’t be needed.”

  He looked at me to weigh my attitude, then said, “Hell, the Corps of Engineers can’t — or won’t — keep this lower section properly dredged, so I don’t think they’ll take on more. But of course they could if they weren’t trying to dam up every stream out west.”

  Now weighing not me but his cocktail, he said, “Or you can see there’d be money for maintenance if that Bush wasn’t trying to undo ten-thousand years of Middle East history to give cover for his taxpayer rape. People along here are Bush supporters, but they have no clue what his war is costing them personally. The commercial fishermen yelp about insufficient maintenance of the canal, all the while they’re putting a SUPPORT THE COMMANDER magnet on the back of their pickups.”

  (At the moment I report this conversation, George Bush’s Babylonian war was costing Americans three billion dollars a week — about four-hundred million dollars a day. That meant enough money to bring the ICW back to standard got spent on the desert sands in about the time it takes to brush your teeth and gargle. I leave it to you, sagacious reader, to consider other pieces of broken or endangered America you could restore with seventeen-million dollars an hour. Further, your project, whatever it is, would not likely include four-thousand — and counting — fallen Americans and a hundred-thousand or more Iraqis.

  4

  He Is Us

  THE ATLANTIC SHORE OF NORTH CAROLINA has something of the shape of a drawn bow, the arrow tip at Cape Hatteras aimed at the Strait of Gibraltar. Because of dangerous shoals, currents, and winds, the sea beyond the inshore route there is the Graveyard of the Atlantic, a name explaining one of the reasons for the ICW.

  Unlike regions above and below it, the upper-half of the North Carolina coast is shaped, predominantly, by Pamlico Sound, a shallow sea allowing winds to gain a good fetch that, in combination with currents and rough water created by the shallow bottom, can make a hell for boats. Still, for a small craft, it’s safer than the Graveyard.

  The Bog Trotter was moving again at dawn, most of the three-hundred miles of Intracoastal in North Carolina before us. The country of Pamlico Sound and its characteristic wetlands called pocosins have produced a different sort of development from that of the beaches just to the east or from places with deepwater harbors supporting a city, so that the Waterway through the state is a traverse past villages, a few towns, and many miles of what, not long ago, were semiwilds. But, as was evident in the morning light, superfluous structures half the age of a grammar-school child were beginning to fester along the magenta line. Those houses were peacock places serving more for display than function, since many got used for only a few weeks. Most of them had two-hundred-foot docks running over a marsh to reach the Waterway, thrusting into it like pikes, devices to impale a careless navigator. For some miles the route felt more like a suburban avenue where docks replaced driveways, and plastic boats, autos. Q: “Everyone wants a Tara.”

  Of the several books written about traveling the Waterway, the classic, at least in terms of seniority, is Nathaniel Bishop’s Voyage of the Paper Canoe, describing his 1874 paddle from Quebec to the Gulf, mostly on waters that were then an early version of or were to become the Waterway. His vessel was truly made of treated paper over a wooden frame. To read Bishop is to see what we’ve lost and maybe to consider whether the gains of unbridled commerce are sensible and equitable compensation for the resulting natural diminishments.

  Another voyage book, a cult favorite of sailors, is Henry Plummer’s The Boy, Me and the Cat. In 1912 he sailed (often actually using sails) from Massachusetts to Florida in a twenty-four-foot catboat (the titular cat is a feline), returning in it the next year. The book has some charm, although it’s a self-conscious boat log written in elided sentences, many of which only the dedicatedly nautical will follow: “Kept the two reefs on her only settling peak for several sporting jibes.” Plummer admits, “I have used all the nautical terms I could think of and some I couldn’t think of.” He’s always more interested in sailing than what he’s sailing through because, as he says, “There could be nothing more dreary than just a-setting still and being taken through these twisting rivers that lead for miles and miles through the never ending rice marshes.” Not a man in quest of quoz in unverified areas. Still, of the several father-son American journeys presented in books, his is a capable one, even with forced attempts at cleverness in almost every sentence; but then, to be fair, the book has probably grown beyond the author’s original intent: Plummer ran off a few hundred copies of the 1913 “first edition” on a stencil machine and hand-stitched them together with fishing line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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