Outer Banks, Late 1950s
.
I was eight years old the first time I saw Hatteras Island, my father taking me all the way there from Elizabeth City and back one very long fall day. A small state ferry carried us and another car or two across naked Oregon Inlet, this vessel alone tying Bodie Island to Hatteras, and then we drove through the wildlife refuge at Pea Island, at what seemed an ambling pace down the long, narrow, scarcely populated Highway 12, which undulated at many a spot and which, I recall, in some problem places had sections of Marston mat — long, rusty, parallel perforated-steel panels left over from World War II — tying disconnected pavement together.
Our early afternoon’s drive down to Buxton was not a fast one, by any means, yet it was a good and delightful one, this strange yet familiar coastal country, all new to me, in the company of my father. We eased through villages then almost too small even to be called that, Rodanthe and Waves and Salvo, stopped out of curiosity to walk through a field of sand out to an abandoned two-story plank house, nothing else but sea oats and myrtle scrub visible for miles, then drove farther south through Avon — beyond which I could see at last our coastal standard-bearer, Hatteras Light — and on to Buxton right at Cape Hatteras.
My father pulled his ever-ready maroon humpback ’52 Dodge in at a diminutive post office there, and we stepped inside to speak with the veteran postmistress, a friendly and astute woman in her late fifties named Maude Miller White, who had kept a sharp eye out for any suspicious coastal matters for the Navy during World War II. I was growing weary from all the driving, and even more so from thinking on what I now knew would be an epic distance back, crossing Oregon Inlet again going north, so I paid little attention to their talk.
Politics was in the air, though, and I did realize that he was checking in, paying Mrs. White a courtesy visit – he would be running for solicitor (district attorney) not too many years from then, and maybe something else down the road, and he would need her help.
Suddenly a boy my age burst through the post office door and excitedly addressed the postmistress:
“Miss Maude, Miss Maude, can I use the flushbucket?”
She nodded, and he disappeared around behind her.
And then I knew for real, never having heard flushbucket before, what a distinct and different place Hatteras was from Elizabeth City, where I was growing up, different even from Kitty Hawk where we spent family time on the northern Outer Banks.
And I knew too that I would want and need to know more.
***
Sometimes, perhaps once a week or once in two weeks during our Kitty Hawk summers, my father would drive my cousin Johnny and me over from Kitty Hawk to Manteo, to let us roam around the tiny town (we were about 8 years old) while he took care of legal business at the old Dare County courthouse there.
Maybe we would go see a Western at the half-timbered Frontier movie theater there. Maybe just prowl slowly the lanes of the five and dime, handling but not buying, as we had no cash, small plastic replicas of Davy Crockett and other popular culture heroes of our day.
Or maybe we would walk down and just hang around the docks and look at boats and men on boats, messing with sails and rigging, painting, coiling and uncoiling ropes. Every so often a small boat would go out or come in from Shallowbag Bay. Nothing and nobody ever seemed to be in a hurry.
Still, this was a town, the one that reminded us we had not really escaped society just because we had been favored with six weeks in Kitty Hawk. And the drive to and from it also reminded us what it meant to be out on the edge of things, for much of an hour’s drive stood between Kitty Hawk and Manteo, with only the narrow beach road back then, and its single line of cottages, now Highway 12 (and no bypass) with very few businesses along it — except a few fishing piers and the Casino bingo parlor and second floor dance hall — for 16 miles, and then Whalebone junction just below the four-mile emptiness of “the Epstein tract.”
Sometimes, his business in Manteo done, my father would come back to the banks, across the two bridges, and drive us over to the soundside and drift along mushy marsh roads near Nags Head Woods and the Fresh Pond, where most always there were folks fishing. Sometimes he would take us by the soundside village of Colington, where a few fishing boats would be tied up, and other times he would stop by my grandmother’s early ’30s cottage with its roundabout porch not far from where the Navy’s Huron went down long ago, maybe take her a few blue crabs to boil up for supper later on.
I recall as well those lazy drives and looking out on the deep blue ocean and even more the miles of empty sand to our left as we drove back up to Kitty Hawk, an emptiness so broad and captivating that not all that long before our youth it had been called Arabia, long low stretches only briefly interrupted by great sand mountains called Jockey’s Ridge, Run Hill, Kill Devil Hill, a desert almost as unrivaled as le Sud of Algiers, though as endless as it looked and seemed, we did know, thanks to my father, of the live oak and pine woods of the soundside, those marsh lanes and the fields of cordgrass and needlerush fringing the shallows.
Johnny’s and my town out here, though, was not Manteo, or even the soundside village of Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers made friends and spent time during the years they worked to invent human-powered flight. It was just an intersection, a quarter mile north of our cottage, where Bill Anderson’s brick box of a store stood on the west side of the beach road and the Kitty Hawk Fishing Pier lay just across from it on the ocean side, and the road to Southern Shores went north to Duck and almost nothing else back then, except the jeep-worthy sand lanes through myrtle scrub all the many miles on up to Corolla and Wash Woods.
At Anderson’s we would regard the floats, especially when one of ours had gotten a hole in it and we did not have the cash to replace it. And there, if Bill Anderson, rugged and deeply tanned, did not have a story for us, the man known up and down the Banks as “Gov” surely would. Gov was shaped exactly like Sarge of the comics, and seemed a younger version of old beach hand Anderson, except that he stood outside, leaning against the building, beneath a sign that read “Gov – Surf Boards – Lessons,” awaiting trade.
On the Ocracoke ferry many years later, I learned that Gov was a shrewd trader always looking for a deal. A man in his sixties told me that Gov haunted the flea markets, looking for lamps, chairs, trinkets stashed in cigar boxes, anything he could buy for five and sell for ten, and always flipping a thousand-dollar roll of cash up into the air to let everyone know he could make a deal right then, in the moment!
“He almost bought my motorcycle, an old Indian – Gov wanted it bad,” the man said. “Every time I stopped in at Bill Anderson’s, he’d say, ‘That bike of yours for sale?’ But I didn’t want to let it go.
“And then I moved away from the beach, gone fifteen, sixteen years or so, and when I went back, stopped in at Anderson’s for old-times sake, you know, and there was Gov, hadn’t seen each other for all that time, and he looks up, soon as he sees me, right off the bat he says,
“‘You still got that Indian? You want to sell it?’”
The only items ever sold to my cousin and me were things we were sent to Anderson’s to buy for my folks, the morning’s paper (the Virginian Pilot, down from Norfolk) or a gallon of milk, and all we carried was exact change, so we could not buy anything else . . . but we did have free range of the long fishing pier across the road, though, and, on longer outings, of an abandoned Coast Guard station just several miles up the seashore, and, taken all in all, we were by our own lights and wanderings from Manteo to Kitty Hawk, with pocket knives and little else, plentifully and endlessly entertained.
Bland Simpson, North Carolina’s oft-honored voice of the state’s coast, is the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Kenan Distinguished Professor Emeritus. He is the pianist for the Red Clay Ramblers, the Tony Award-winning string band, and has collaborated on such musicals as Diamond Studs, Fool Moon, Kudzu, and King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running. This story and several other recent pieces for Coastwatch are part of his forthcoming The Sea Buoy, a sea-and-sound-country collection.
More from Bland Simpson in Coastwatch
“Public Trust: A Fisherman Challenged at Rich Inlet”
“This Wet and Water Loving Land”
lead photo credit: NCDOT/CC BY 2.0.
