Tue 31 March 2009
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past
OCRACOKE, N.C. — You lose sight of land on Pamlico Sound, and I lost track of time. At that point where the last of the marsh reeds disappear on the southern horizon, and before the water tower at Ocracoke provides evidence to the north of a spit of an island in the Outer Banks, I realized I had fallen into a misadventure and would probably not be seeing my friends anymore that day.
In Chicago, the snow keeps falling in what has been the coldest winter of my life. It snowed again this past weekend, and Tom Skilling at WGN is threatening snow again this weekend. Imagine snow on Opening Day as it warms to a high of 41 degrees at Sox Park. Today, it's mostly melted but there are still little mountains of snow a-hanging around.
I escaped for eight days, headed down to North Carolina to see a good friend at Camp Lejeune and keep his wife company as she hobbles around on crutches, having blown her knee out on a bunny slope. He's in between tours of Iraq. It was important to me that I see him. And who doesn't want to a place with an ocean and a state that at least sounds warm, like North Carolina? It was a really nice time, before my misadventure on the North Carolina Ferry System.
We saw giant hovercraft come out of the sea and bear down onto the sand, practicing a faux Normandy invasion. The latest winter storms had blown black sand and fossils all over the beach. We ate venison steak and drank Irish beer. On the first full day there, we took a walk deep into the swamp with his dog, and the neighbor mutts panted along, under electric fences, past piles of bear shit and across mini-streams. When the water overtook the land, we paddled along in a canoe. Much of North Carolina's coast is endless swamp, a sandy soil where pine trees cover the dry spots. Beavers made it worse, flooding the land with their stick-built dams. Out of spite or out of ignorance, the dogs pulled at the beavers' dam with their jaws, ripping out the logs. The water gushed out. The beavers slapped their tails.
I landed in Raleigh on St. Patrick's Day, and it struck me as a coincidental trip toward origins. My family immigrated to Raleigh from Belfast, Ireland, 300 years ago, give or take. I had never been there, but I could see the history of the place. The beautifully old sagging brick buildings, the antebellum debutante feel of Meredith College, where I met an actual Irish girl on the day of green. (She was otherwise a disappointing lass, alas.)
And my friend taught me how to drive a stick shift so I could drive along the ocean. The ferry to Ocracoke Island takes 2-1/2 hours. I thought it would take less than one. I never realized how slow boats are, beating back all that friction of the nautical miles. There's a lounge on the boat and, half-starved, I raided the vending machine of its chips and its honey buns and its twinkies. Mostly people just sit in their cars. There was one attractive girl who kept wandering lonesome about the top of the ferry as the wind blew hard across the blue sea. I liked the way she fit inside her pants, but it was too cold to stay long in the wind, and her boyfriend waited for her in the truck, indifferent to the view.
I sailed to these Lake Michigan waters a year ago guided by a Polaris that no longer shines for me. I have only my own light to guide me from now on, and I don't know what to think about that. I keep reading back lines from Hamlet: There is nothing neither good nor bad, only thinking makes it so.
But isn't that a double negative? With one more credit, I'll have a master's from Northwestern University, the Big Ten's top university. I really like Chicago, actually, despite its terrible weather, and I live a solidly, writerly Nelson Algren type of existence. But I don't think I'm going to stay. I don't know. I have the ghost of faith that a couple of opportunities in San Francisco might come through. And so I may sail on, this time with the current. To a good harbor town.
The ferry left me off on Ocracoke, finally, and I raced the Corolla across the 14-mile island only to be denied passage onto the other ferry that would take me north towards Cape Hatteras and Kill Devil Hills. I had to wait another hour for another boat. The wind was whipping about on that unprotected island, but I took the time to gather seashells by the seashore. Another 40 minutes on a boat, and then I saw the sunset beside that famous lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, N.C., the one with the candy stripe of black on white. I drove far out of the way to avoid another ferry and got back to my friends' place. I arrived just before midnight. The next morning, I left their house before dawn to catch a bus to the airport, anxious to return to my Illinois home.
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