The Weather Report from Milestone.

The Chicamacomico at Milestone landing

This morning, the Chicomacomico woke me from a deep sleep with the low frequency vibration of its big diesel engine, powering down as it glided into the landing at Milestone. D O G heard and came to tell me it was time, putting one paw on my arm and I got up, leaving my husband warm and curled up on his side of the bed.

The Chicomacomico  does a lumbering, watery minuet with the River Neuse today. The schedule is regular, so you know more or less what time it is here by calculating the height of the sun and the arrivals and departure of the ferry. The two flat boats with tall, slender pilot houses cross each other mid-channel, moving vehicles across this widest section of the Big River near where it elbows a degree or two northeast before it bells out into the Great Sound. Both are about 275 gross ton ferries with a vehicle capacity of about 26 or less, depending on what kind of vehicles load on. Sometimes a truck pulling another boat will make the trip, taking up three or four vehicle's worth of deck space. But the car ferries are completely free, no matter what you're hauling, and they lace together the outer and inner shore points, from the great web of inland waterway out to the barrier islands that face the wide open sea.

I don't know what the Chicomacomico's doing here. Our wake up call usually comes from the Floyd J. Lupton, a larger capacity ferry which plies these waters regularly. The Chicomacomico's traditional route is from Hatteras to Okracoke, but apparently she's on loan to us, maybe because the Lupton's in for a seasonal over-haul. I wonder if she came here with crew and Captain, or whether they just delivered her into the hands of the usual crew. Which is more important? Intimacy with the boat itself, or knowledge of the river?

D O G and I go out for a walk at about 6:45. This early-rising is a sign of my new maturity. I am willing (and able) to haul myself out of bed this early to take him out for his morning walkies where once moving around at such an hour would have been almost physically painful for me. I can do it without coffee now. I wake, wipe the sleep from my eyes,  and pull on a soft old sweatshirt, chinos and some broken down Nike Airs. It gives me pleasure to wear my old clothes, and to pull a wool hat over my head in order to avoid brushing my hair, even with my fingers. I hook D O G on his leash, and we head out the door.

All D O G needs is one briny whiff of the outdoors and he's awake and wiggling down the stairs from the top of the Lighthouse, ready for adventure. We get to the bottom, and I can feel how much we both enjoy that first silent step onto the incredibly spongy coastal turf and the sweet, balsam scent that rises  from the soft, wet beds of pine needles. There's a light and bracing brininess to the cool mist and the air is still. The slight chill pouring in off the River is opening my eyes and bringing me gently to full consciousness in the half-light of early morning. Every thing's gray, and what's not gray is a muted version of its normal color. We walk down to the ferry landing to see what's going on.

The Chicomacomico does a slow 180 before sending up a black cloud of diesel and sliding bow-first into the slip at Milestone. The Lupton doesn't do the flip, and since I haven't ever been up in the wheel house, I'm not sure how it accomplishes the trip from Point A to Point B on the Big River going backwards. But these smaller vessels do the flip, and then power down to glide into the dock making silent contact with the cushioned pilings. The crew drops the metal gangway and it clanks onto land. Then there's the shout “UN-load!”. I am startled. It's the first human sound I've heard today. Two cars and one truck bump-bump over the gangway onto the reassuring solidity of the Ferry's asphalt lot and, once all three vehicles have disappeared west down the highway and into the pines, D O G and I turn to leave. That'll be all for the traffic in Milestone for the next 45 minutes or so.

I feel satisfied to have held off on the pleasure of the first sip of hot coffee that awaits me back home.

Gray morning and ducks on Big River, Milestone.

Advent at the End of the World

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

- Robert Frost 

Advent has come, and along with it the end of the world. Again.  FF, Dog and I are spending this apocalypse at the Lighthouse, our secret hideaway here on a high bluff overlooking the Big River in Milestone, not far from Bethany Crossroads in inter-coastal, down east North Carolina. 

This is not the famous Outer Banks, where jet-setters go to build million-dollar mansions and pursue the pleasures of yachting, deep water fishing and the perfect tan. These are the Inner Banks, a sheltered system of islands, rivers, creeks, bays, inlets and peninsulas that spread across the North Carolina coast like an irregularly woven fisherman's net. This is where the Appalachian waters filter into into the Sound before finally losing themselves in the Ocean. This is a place that feels as far from the center of things as you can get and still be able to find a hardware store.

Big River, by R. Taylor Monk

The Inner Banks are our new secret spot. Now and going forward, this will be our place for going deeper, for thinking and meditating, for writing, for the solitary thinking work that can't seem to get done  even in quiet Piedmont. Milestone, where our place is, is further away from New York City than the map shows, and if the end of the world is today, I am glad to be here at land's end to greet it.

Quick investigation reveals that the Inner Banks are mostly inhabited by Carolinians, the majority of them farming and fishing people of humble means who are permanent residents. Even the seasonal and sporting folk that come here are mostly from the Carolinas, and they have their pleasure boats docked in marvellous, hidden marinas that are tucked up into the land like watery diverticula on the Big River. Houses and cabins are passed from generation to generation. 

Here people of any sort are blessedly few. Milestone, with its stretches of white sand river beaches, twisty live oaks and wind-tortured pines has a population of only 300 or so souls, and no town center. Just inland, Bethany Crossroads shelters 556 men, women and children in its piney groves and extensive tilled fields, and it lies along a curvy stretch of paved Croatan Indian trail that features five blood-curdling turns and at least as many small, private cemeteries. There is one market in Bethany Crossroads, one restaurant, one charter school, one post office and three churches of different denominations. In these parts, the love of God and guns is great.

Milestone is at land's end, and is part of an extensive and economically poor county that boasts only two traffic lights. All we have here is the ferry launch, a locksmith, a marine engineer's shop, a bait and tackle shop, a brick town hall that looks like somebody's granny's house, and a boarded-up commercial building on our corner that used to be a gas station but more recently was The Sunset Café. There's a country club here that appears to be the preserve mostly of folks from the bigger cities inland. And there are some summer camps in Milestone, too, but they sit silent and empty most of the year. In short, for most of the calendar year, we are among the very few people not from here that can find any reason to come to Milestone at all. Now you know about as much about the place as I do, which isn't much. We're new here. We'll learn.

The Lighthouse is my name for our place because it sits high on a bluff overlooking a sandy beach at a bend in the Big River which has the distinction of being the widest stretch of river in North America. Our place is tower-like, and therefore enough like a real lighthouse to warrant the name, and anyway I always wanted to live in a lighthouse since I was small. I like to turn our balcony light on at night and pretend that passing sailors are comforted and kept safe by the small, yellow lamp. From our high perch we also overlook the Milestone Ferry, and our days pass to the rhythm of its comings and goings and the thrumming of the big diesel engine which starts up at 5:30 in the morning and goes quiet just past midnight.  If it weren't for the activity at the ferry and the occasional private plane buzzing low overhead to the tiny airport across the river at Sandy Point, there would be little noise here at all except the nearly constant blowing of the wind. 

Soldier and Guardian Angel from the art bins at
Lowes, downeast, NC.

Advent is upon us, and today is the end of the world according to the Mayan calendar. The last time FF and I greeted the end of the world it was in a Greek Diner in Virginia Beach, before Dog came to live with us. This time we will greet the apocalypse resting and doing the solitary work of introspection that the season requires. 

The end of the world came early last week for a classroom full of children and their teachers in Sandy Hook, CT, and it made me so sad and tired inside just thinking of the fear and the sorrow and the hot gunfire, and the incomprehensible coldness inside of some people.  The end of the world comes every day for around 150,000 people by various means both natural and unnatural, but another 220,000 are born, too. So in the long, long life of the Big River, perhaps we people seem rather like an itch it can't seem to get rid of, always more of us creeping up on its shores. Are there already too many of us human beings? And has the tipping point been reached at which our sheer numbers, arrogance, evil ways and failure to grasp our correct place in universe has shifted the planet irrevocably in the direction of real apocalypse? If we have no mercy for each other, what mercy can we expect of God and Nature?

Dog has no existential questions that I am aware of. FF and I each ponder our own questions, those matters of identity and purpose that sometimes occupy the minds of people who have passed the half century mark and think perhaps a tad too much. At the Lighthouse we are companionable and unintrusive. He writes over there, I write over here. Dog, sensibly, sleeps.

FF and I are older now, but our species is still so very new. The Big River is old. All that lives and breathes on these shores even since the heydays of the Croatan and Lumbee nations is just a speck of dust in the eye of the Big River. Births, deaths, loves, losses, suffering and joy, all those things that are big to us now are trivial and unimportant to the river. For it, there is only water moving from the mountains to the ocean. For it, there is no search for meaning. And we human creatures who fuss and bother about our houses, boats, families, money, guns, religions and existential questions are as gnats to the Big River which is eternal and imperturbable.

During  Advent I like to face my search for purpose head on, and while I sort through what I have done and what I have left undone, and the Big River is never far from my sight. Even at 52,  I wonder what I should become and while I wonder, the river is there. While I struggle to write these sentences, to make sense, the river is there. And if I were to truly model myself on the Big River, perhaps I would never write another word. What if I were to find my own ocean and pour myself into it again and again? Is it possible for a woman to become like a river? 

Last night there was a storm. The wind blew hard, and the rain pelted the Lighthouse in buckshot sheets.  The river doesn't mind heavy weather and it keeps on rolling along. But FF and I huddled together last night with Dog curled up at the foot of the bed as the temperature dropped and the wind raised its voice to a howl, and we registered with mild trepidation each tremor that passed through the Lighthouse's wooden beams.  We just held each other quietly in the darkness, waiting for the storm to pass, waiting for the sky to clear, waiting for the sun to come out again.

Swept Away

My extended absence from this blog would make it seem as if my breakup with New York were complete. Things have demanded my attention: the election, my business,  the fall planting, and an array of time-consuming personal matters that demand more attention as the years pass. Principally, though, the urge to do write about you, New York, deserted me as FF and I passed our one year anniversary here in Piedmont. After 28 years, New York, you'd think it would take me longer to get over us, wouldn't you?

Am I over us?

Photo by Tenured Radical

I felt keenly vulnerable in my last years as a resident of New York City.  I knew what it was to watch a skyscraper crumble, a subway line flood, a mischief of rats storm up the A Train platform to escape the fire and fumes of downtown. I knew what it was to bend myself double against a winter blast, ten times harsher and colder than normal because of the glass canyons of midtown. I knew the desperation of walking more than 100 blocks in summer heat to get home when the transportation system shut down.  People weren't made to live like that, I thought. I wasn't made to live like that. And what pretty pipe dream of fame and fortune is worth that much trouble, anyway? Why endure it? Just to say I live in New York City?

As Hurricane Sandy pummeled the Northeast last week, here in Piedmont we  were sitting pretty. Cozied up here in the folds of these ancient hills, we were spared and are spared the worst weather most of the time. Hurricanes rarely penetrate deep enough inland to threaten, and the scattering of tornadoes seem to come to a cartoon-ish, screeching halt at RTP. Sometimes it rains a lot, but our abundance of fragrant balsam forests handle the water pretty well, except in those spots where developers have been too imprudent in their love affair with concrete. 

Last week, FF and I noted that we still had our preparations from hurricane Irene pretty much in place: The baker's shelf of canned goods, the lantern, lamp oil, flashlights and batteries, the Coleman stove and bottled gas, and the gallons of bottled water. This time, we added sandbags, filled and stacked neatly against the cellar door, and a backup sump pump and a manual pump just in case of power outage. Seasoned firewood was stacked cozily in the garage, the patio furniture stowed in the crawl space and, thus prepared, we waited. But we didn't have to break into our stores for Sandy and we merely passed several cold, gray days watching the hurricane gather itself, follow the train tracks north, and then punch you, New York City, right in the schnozz.

When FF and I left New York for the last time a year and a half ago, having dropped the key to my Harlem apartment with a clatter into the mailbox, we passed over the George Washington Bridge and I felt a tug at my heart as we made our way to the mainland, the lights of Riverside Drive receding in the rear view mirror. But beyond the nostalgia, I felt an urgent sense that I was getting out just in the nick of time. And when the apartment finally sold and I pulled my last material  assets out of the city, I experienced a breathless feeling as one might if a nightmare magically resolved itself and that dream suitcase you had been trying to pack was finally packed, or the dream person you couldn't find was finally found, or whatever anxiety-charged situation you were facing in your sleeping life suddenly morphed into a nice dream from which you woke up, warm and smiling in your own bed. I felt as if I had cheated fate when I got out of New York City without suffering heavy losses, like a person who had the presence of mind to leave the casino with a few dollars still in his pockets.

This feeling of having escaped in the nick is not something I've talk about with almost anyone. It's not a conversation I imagine that my old friends, who still see the City as the center of the worthwhile universe, would want to have with me. I lived through 9/11 there, and I experienced first-hand what it's like when things go very, very wrong in that  huge Rube Goldberg device called Manhattan, and I know how hard it is to make it work again.  I was there in hurricane Gloria in 1985 which, though it didn't hit the city head on, caused the evacuation of all the high rises. I'll never forget fighting my way in to work that day because I was new on the job, and finding no one on the darkened 32nd floor of the Time and Life Building except my obsessive compulsive boss, reading the Times in the yellow glow of a desk lamp,  and the big plate glass windows shimmying so fast in the wind that they rang like bells. I've been in floods, snowstorms, blackouts and pretty much everything that could go wrong in a big city except invasion by zombies, and when the chance presented itself to opt for a less disaster-prone environment, I leaped at it and into the waiting arms of my beloved FF, who never trusted the place, anyway.

Sandy with and her peak 80 mph sustained winds doesn't come close to matching The Long Island Express of 1938. Sandy was a big fat, wet storm, but she wasn't nearly as powerful as the storm of '38 that killed nearly 700 people in the New York City area and changed the topography of Long Island forever. But it's possible that when all the numbers are added up that Sandy will be the more expensive date, not only in terms of dollars but also for the cultural losses. Coney Island is a muddy memory now, and Staten Island a place of  homelessness and death.  Out in the Rockaways, fire and water consumed communities that had already suffered airplane crashes in the last decade, and had lost nearly 300 people in 9/11. The word "apocalypse" has been used a lot for Sandy, and such low-lying places as these cannot help but continue to be victimized as changing climate, urban congestion and global political unrest heighten indefinitely. 

Idiots and heroes were in abundance on TV this week, making me hoot and weep as I watched you take it in the teeth, New York City. I fumed angrily at the story of the man who refused to open his door to a woman in distress with two little boys who later drowned. My heart swelled in admiration for a man who rescued his 81 year old mother from her flooded house with only waders and a surf board as equipment. And yesterday, somebody put up a YouTube featuring the whole Lower East Side cheering for about 15 minutes all up and down First Avenue and beyond because the electricity was finally back on. And at that moment I had a pang of missing you, New York. I actually missed being part of that cheering crowd that had spent the last five days dealing together with the miserable cold, the food rotting in the refrigerator and no hot showers. Briefly, I felt as if I were missing the main event. Will I ever know such difficulties again? Will I ever know such triumph? Are the highs you offer worth the insane lows you inflict?

25 years in New York and I was never convinced that I was a real New Yorker. I felt most like a New Yorker when I was somewhere else, on a stage singing in Germany, or working a cruise ship. "You're from New York? Wow!" the Europeans would say, a glimmer of admiration in their eyes.  But it felt good to bask in your reflected glory, good to accept that prize of specialness that being from New York (undeservedly) gave me.  Back home, though, I lived in Harlem where I was nicknamed Snowflake and where I was never really an accepted member of the Harlem club. Neither in the other neighborhoods where I lived did I ever feel like a New Yorker truly, nor did I understand what truly linked New Yorkers to each except the capacity to endure insult after insult, and a tireless belief that maybe one day they would "make it". Or at least know someone who did.

Here in Piedmont, life is smooth. The mountains are old and round, the rivers are many, the forests are big and the coast is long.  I know already that I'll never really belong to this place any more than I did in New York City. But I have adopted Piedmont wholeheartedly as the place I will likely spend the rest of my life, and I hope I can offer it something while I'm here. Carolinians are not, in the main, interested in far-fetched ideas of glory, power or drama. They like to be outdoors, enjoy the back porch, watch the seasons pass, and they are known for making things with their hands that take patience, like guitars and quilts. Carolina smells good, and the beauty outweighs the ugly by a long shot. These old mountains don't care about roller-coaster highs and lows: they are the face of eternity and the glory of nature, and are unconcerned with the self-glorification of mankind.

As they say here, there may be something better somewhere, but this is as good a place as any to wait for better to come along.  So  I can't imagine a true Carolinian ever feeling, as I did for a brief moment this week, that I should have been in New York City, not in this peaceful place, when a bunch of cold, dirty, tired New Yorkers cheered in the streets just because the lights came on.