by Jake Halpern
Later that afternoon, Ambrose invited me over to his house for a meal. As we sat in his kitchen, eating a very spicy shrimp gumbo, Ambrose pumped me for details on the other places I had visited. Jack’s house on the volcano intrigued him immediately.
“I’ve never seen lava, other than in National Geographic, but it looks pretty nasty,” said Ambrose. “So this guy Jack is surrounded on all sides? How does he do it? Does he have a woman up there with him?”
“No,” I told him.
“No woman!” boomed Ambrose. “A Cajun would never be in a place like that without a woman. He must be talking to the trees.”
Whittier didn’t appeal to Ambrose in the least. Apparently, as a young man, he had joined the army and been stationed in a remote outpost in Keflavík, Iceland. “We used to stay in Quonset huts,” recalled Ambrose. “There were about twenty guys to a hut, and the snow came up so high we used to crawl out through the ceiling. When the snowstorms came, we stayed in those huts for days. We used to play cards all the time—really, it was pitiful—but we had to psych ourselves into doing it. I’ll tell you, it was a hellhole, and I could never see going back to anything like that.”
In the end, the person who Ambrose related to most closely was Thad Knight. “My hunting camp in Alabama is situated in a flood plain also,” explained Ambrose. “There is a house fifty feet from my camp that FEMA recently bought out. They bulldozed it, burned it, and buried it. I imagine FEMA was just tired of bailing those folks out.”
“Has your hunting camp ever flooded?” I asked.
“Three times,” replied Ambrose. “But I just rent it. I am building a place of my own down there, and it’ll be on higher ground.”
Late in the day, we hopped into Ambrose’s pickup truck and paid a visit to the Grand Isle cemetery. By the time we arrived, the sun was low in the sky and the tombstones cast long shadows across the grass. The surrounding oak trees were all hung with Spanish moss, which draped downward and swayed slightly in the breeze. It was a haunting time to visit the cemetery, and I was glad we had come. The explicit purpose of our visit was to see the new grave of Ambrose’s older brother, Roscoe “the Rock” Besson. Apparently, the Rock had recently been exhumed from the Besson family tomb so that he could be reburied with his wife. “They just moved his coffin a few weeks ago,” explained Ambrose as we strolled through the cemetery. “It makes me feel a little funny that I won’t be buried with my brother,” he admitted. “I guess I always imagined myself down there with him, you know, so we could play cards in the afterlife.”
“Do you believe in the afterlife?” I asked.
“Not really,” replied Ambrose. “To me this is heaven right here, and so I’m just going to enjoy it while I can.”
If only I could bring them together in one room. After returning from my revisits, this was the fantasy that captured my imagination again and again. I tried to picture all five of them in my small apartment, sipping coffee and swapping life stories. I imagined Jack and Babs as kindred spirits, sitting on my sofa, talking fondly of lava and snow, and lamenting what a hellhole Boston was. I imagined Millie and Ambrose on my back porch, amid my withered tomato plants, reminiscing about the old days when young people knew how to live off the land. And I imagined Thad Knight showing off photographs of his newly completed house, receiving congratulations from everybody for successfully standing his ground. But what if it didn’t go this smoothly? Perhaps they would have nothing to say to one another. Perhaps it would just be polite smiles and long, awkward silences. After all, what did the five of them really have in common, besides a fierce devotion to home? Were they really linked in any other ways?
With my journey and revisits completed, I had an opportunity to consider these questions more carefully. As I sifted through my notes, I discovered a number of interesting similarities. To begin with, despite the various dangers that the fivesome faced, all of them had a way out. Jack had a spare house on the outskirts of Hilo; Ambrose had one in Alabama; Millie could sell her place at the drop of a hat; Thad had already rejected a federal buyout; and Babs had some savings, a set of wheels, and even a road to leave on. These were people who chose to stay.
For the most part, they came from humble origins, lived hard lives, and worked tirelessly to build and rebuild their homes. None had graduated from college (except for Babs, who had completed a two-year program at South Seattle Community College), and most worked with their hands for a living. They were a hardy lot. All of them knew how to hunt or shoot a gun; Ambrose and Babs also fished, while Jack and Thad gardened. They were people who could live off the land if they had to, and sometimes that’s what they did. Perhaps needless to say, none of them was a city person. Both Thad and Ambrose had been to New York City once, and they seemed to agree that once was enough. All of them regarded cities as dangerous places, far more dangerous than the homes in which they lived. This was a point several of them reiterated to me in the wake of September 11. “I’m safer up here on the volcano,” Jack told me with a laugh. Humor was another common trait. All of them seemed to enjoy laughing, yet this was balanced by a definite stoicism. I never heard a minute’s worth of complaining or self-pitying from any of them. They were strong, self-reliant individuals—loners, I would say. All of them were single and lived alone, except for Ambrose, who still resided with his wife.2 None had plans to remarry. Both Thad and Millie claimed to be too old. Age was another commonality. The whole group was over fifty, and all of them were retired except for Babs, who vowed to flip hamburgers until the end.
In general, they now seemed determined to enjoy the simple pleasures in life. Thad would never chop wood or use an outhouse again. Ambrose no longer fished for mullet or even ate bread crust. Babs could now sleep soundly without worrying about her maniacal ex-husband. Millie tended to her horses and let her children worry about brush control. And Jack never heard a peep from his neighbors. Despite all the reasons that it seemed impossible to do so, these people were enjoying their homes.
As for the differences, I noticed at least one major division within the fivesome. The way I saw it, there were two distinct subgroups. On the one hand, there was Millie, Thad, and Ambrose—all historically connected to the land on which they lived. They belonged to families, either by birth or by marriage, that had lived in a given area for several generations. Their roots ran deep. What’s more, each of these families belonged to a unique historical group that had overcome considerable hardship before settling down. The Deckers were homesteaders; the Knights were freed slaves; and the Bessons were Cajuns. All had struggled bitterly to find a home for themselves, and once they had found it, they held fast. On the other hand, there was Jack and Babs. Both were transplants. They had picked up and moved to the outer fringes of the map: Hawaii and Alaska, the two most far-flung American states. From there, they had taken it a step further, secluding themselves on an active volcano and in a gated mountain hideaway. In these strange cul-de-sacs, they had found security and peace of mind.
Perhaps the greatest single difference between these subgroups was continuity. Jack and Babs had very little of it. Their homes started and ended with them—a point underscored by the fact that neither had any children. “I don’t know who is going to take over this place when I’m gone,” Jack told me on my revisit. Babs voiced a similar uncertainty: “I’m not sure what will happen with my apartment.” This may have been depressing at times, but neither of them ever admitted this to me. Instead they focused on the prospect that some small part of their legacy would continue. Babs hoped that her burger stand would stay open, and Jack suggested that his house might make a good park ranger’s outpost.
Meanwhile, Millie, Thad, and Ambrose all had children and grandchildren living nearby, whom they hoped would someday take over their homes. In this way, their homes were almost hereditary, passing from one generation to the next like a surname or a coat of arms. “I just want one Knight by my side,” Thad’s father had told him. On some level, Thad was obliged to stay. The same cou
ld be said of Millie and Ambrose. The onus was placed on them to maintain their family traditions. Yet in return, each of them became a part of something greater than themselves—something that would continue to exist even after they were gone. And perhaps this was the ultimate kind of permanence. Staying for a wildfire or a hurricane was one thing; but staying after death, now that was truly impressive.
Despite these subgroups—and all the innumerable differences among the fivesome—there was always that one overriding commonality: These people were devoted to their homes. Their devotion required considerable courage. Without a doubt, all five home-keepers were both tough and brave, but there was also something decidedly not brave about them. They each expressed considerable fears about the world beyond, and sometimes it seemed to me as if their desire to stay was as much rooted in fear as it was in contentedness.
I also wondered to what extent each of their lives had been limited by their devotion to home. Both Jack and Babs claimed to be at peace with the absence of romance in their lives, but what choice did they really have? Millie and Thad sang the praises of staying at home, but didn’t they ever envy their siblings who’d moved away? (Incidentally, Thad’s brother in Washington, D.C., became one of the first black FBI agents in the country.) Aside from all the hardships endemic to each of these places, was there not something suffocating about how all-important they’d become? Even Henry David Thoreau eventually left Walden Pond and wrote, “Thank Heaven, here is not all the world.”
All of this begged the question: Under what circumstances would these people ever leave their homes? The odd thing was, despite the fact that all of them could leave, none of them even acknowledged this as a valid option. Their homes were not just dear, they were indispensable—a fundamental part of who they were. Primo Levi once wrote, “I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.”3 It’s worth adding that Levi’s quote sounds a little bit like Professor Proshansky’s theory of “place identity,” which I mentioned briefly in the introduction. Both men suggest that our identities sometimes become irrevocably linked to places where we live. I agree. Thad Knight’s story, for example, was inextricably linked with that of Princeville. He personified the town. Such was the case with all of them. They played important if not fundamental roles within the context of where they lived. Babs Reynolds mattered in Whittier, Alaska. Her two decades of living there had earned her acceptance and respect. If she left, all of this stood to be lost. Babs claimed the “lower forty-eight” didn’t appeal to her because she didn’t “know any of those people down there”—but perhaps the real drawback was that none of those people knew her. In Utah she would not be the institution that she is in Whittier. She’d just be another drifter, one of many, coming in across the salt flats for a bit of winter sunshine.
I think the final question to consider is whether the hardships themselves appealed to these home-keepers. Did the actual raw, punishing elements heighten their resolve to stay? Perhaps in the tradition of the American pioneers, like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, they were drawn to the high adventure of the American wilderness. Perhaps, over the years, their intimacy with danger and their ability to survive created a deep sense of pride and belonging. This certainly seemed to be the case with Millie and Ambrose, who knew the tricks to fighting wildfires and riding storms. Indeed, all of them had struggled fiercely to maintain their homes, and this struggle had imbued their lives with a commanding sense of purpose.
The drawback to these places was undeniable, but the reward was a unique and invigorating existence. By staying in Princeville when it was still just a ghost town, Thad had embarked on a personal odyssey that redefined his family relationships, his faith in God, and his view of the world. Babs Reynolds had become a legend in Whittier by lasting more than twenty years in a place where people usually cracked in three. Jack Thompson had witnessed and lived alongside one of nature’s most spectacular occurrences. Millie Decker was a last bastion of the Wild West, and Ambrose Besson was among the hardy few who still stayed for hurricanes. In a nation dominated by highways, strip malls, and cookie-cutter houses, these people had distinguished themselves, and over the years their lives had become as extraordinary as the places in which they lived.
Perhaps, in the end, Babs said it best in a conversation we had during my revisit. We were sitting in her kitchen drinking coffee, and outside the wind was blowing wickedly. “You know,” she said, “as unpleasant as that wind is, it says something for the people who stay here.”
“What does it say?” I asked her.
Babs thought for a moment as the gusts continued to whistle through the minute crevices in her apartment. Finally she replied, “It just lends a certain dignity to the whole operation. It says you’re tough. You’re different. You’re not like everybody else.”
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1 United States Census Bureau, Report on Geographic Mobility from March 1992 to March 1993, 20–481.
2 United States Census Bureau, Report on Geographic Mobility from March 1999 to March 2000, 20–538. Compiled by Jason Schacter, demographer.
3 Ibid. The information on rural inhabitants was actually not included in this report, but was provided to me by its author, Jason Schachter, from an unpublished study that he compiled.
4 Harold M. Proshansky, “Place Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 3 (1983): 57–83. Robert Gifford, Environmental Psychology: Principles and Practice (Needham Heights, Mass.: Allyn & Bacon, 1997).
THE UNDERWATER TOWN
1 There were a number of articles describing Princeville as abandoned, including Richard Lezin Jones, “Hurricanes Leave Princeville Like a Waterlogged Pompeii,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 23, 1999, and Chris Burritt, “N.C. Town’s Future Murky,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 27, 1999.
2 Joe A. Mobley, “In the Shadow of White Society: Princeville a Black Town in North Carolina 1865–1915,” North Carolina Historical Review 63, no. 3 (July 1986). I gathered additional information by interviewing Joe Mobley several times during the summer of 2002. Joe Mobley is a retired historian and administrator at the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. He is also a lecturer on North Carolina history at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. He has distinguished himself as the leading scholar on Princeville.
3 According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Engineering and Planning Branch), Princeville flooded seventeen times between 1908 and 1965. The Corps speculates that periodic flooding occurred before this as well, but there are no records from this time.
4 Robert Kilborn and Lance Carden, “USA: News in Brief,” Christian Science Monitor, September 14, 1999.
5 Patrick J. Fitzpatrick, Natural Disasters: A Reference Handbook (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1999).
6 Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, “Weakened Floyd Leaves Legacy of Heavy Flooding, Record Evacuations,” Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1999.
7 Linda McNatt, “The Entire Town Is Gone,” Virginian-Pilot, September 20, 1999.
8 Frederick Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Travellers Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New York: Mason Brothers, 1861).
9 Horace James, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864: History and Management of the Freedmen in this Department up to June 1st, 1865 (Boston: W. P. Brown Printers, n.d.), as quoted in Joe A. Mobley, “Princeville: A Black Town in North Carolina, 1865–1981,” an unpublished research report, North Carolina Office of Archives and History, 1981, Raleigh.
10 Mobley, “In the Shadow of White Society.”
11 Bonnie Rochman, “Reburying Unearthed Caskets,” Raleigh News & Observer, November 1, 1999.
12 Peter T. Kilborn, “Landmark for Ex-Slaves Felt Brunt of Storm,” New York Times, September 21, 1999; Emily Yellin, “Town with Fabled Past Facing Uncertain Futu
re,” New York Times, November 22, 1999.
13 Yellin, “Town with Fabled Past.”
14 White House Press Office, “President’s Council on the Future of Princeville,” February 29, 2000. Executive Order EO 13146.
15 Chris Burritt, “Historic N.C. Town Standing Pat,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 24, 1999.
16 It’s worth noting that I was not present at this vote. My recreation of events is based on multiple personal interviews with Delia Perkins, Anne Howell, Linda Worsley, and Sam Knight, as well as several newspaper articles, including Burritt, “Historic N.C. Town Standing Pat”; Lynn Bonner, “Town Picks Dike Repair over Buyout,” News & Observer, November 24, 1999; and Associated Press, “Flooded Black Town Decides to Rebuild,” New York Times, November 24, 1999.
17 Thad’s son Sam Knight, who oversaw the distribution of many charitable donations in Princeville, says that he gave his father less than his fair share. “I didn’t want people to think there was any favoritism going on,” he told me.
18 George Howe Cult, The Enigma of Suicide (New York: Summit Books, 1991).
19 Michael T. Aubele, “Flood Issues Rise on Opposite Side of Princeville Dike,” Daily Southerner, December 14, 1999.
20 Thomas McDonald, “Princeville Imposes Gag Order on Tarboro Council’s Decision,” Daily Southerner, December 16, 1999.
21 “Republican Floyd Plan Includes More Money, but Leaves out Princeville Dike,” Associated Press, March 7, 2000.
22 Natalie Phillips, “Road Warriors,” Anchorage Daily News, June 8, 1997.
