DEC-C-3
THE NEXT ROAD TRIP—THIS TIME
SOUTH,
AWAY FROM THE BUFFALO SNOWFALL RECORDS,
HEADING TOWARD NORTH CAROLINA’S OUTER BANKS’ BEACH
TO TALK ABOUT FARAWAY MALAWI,
MEETING A NORTH CAROLINA BEAR HUNTER
AT JORDAN’S OVER STEAMED OYSTERS AND SOFTSHELL CRABS
Dec. 29—31, 2001
Touchdown, Derwood! Even if very briefly, and with time enough only to clear the mail and the refrigerator, and hold the mail until I return two weeks later, I got my minimal domestic chores done and packed the car with sandwiches and what I hoped would be directions for the trip to the Outer Banks, NC. I had called the Pinehurst NC home of George and Betty Poehlman who were out, but Arthur, the Malawian medical student who is working with them here and will be returning when they are the first of February, answered my call so that they knew I would be headed their way. They had planned to leave early on Saturday morning for their condo in Moorehead City, and I would take off later to arrive there after they had been there a half-day already.
I went to GW and plugged their Map Quest instructions into the printer, as I had done before, when nothing but the Map Quest site data had printed out. I tried about ten tricks, cutting and pasting, sending it to my own email, and nothing I did would allow the printer to make a printout of the detailed, mapped itinerary –only the “cover” from Map Quest and not the “Frame” of the instructions I had pulled up for the Outer Banks, for Paul Gibbs, and for Donald’s house. I had twenty printouts of the same worthless cover sheet, and could only get the primary information I sought by copying it over with a pen and paper. I sent out some postal mail and email from my stop at GW to clear the incoming in each, and then called George who had already made it to the Beach condo. He advised that I simply drive 95 south to 70 east and I would wind up on the Atlantic—which I did, by setting the Bronco on Cruise Control and plugging in audio books on tape.
I had come back from the north coast of the Eastern USA, and now would be going to its furthest extension out into the Atlantic East Coast on the furthest Southern Outer Banks sea Island, before heading still further south to the last of the barrier Islands, Cumberland later in the week. I expect everyone else was trying to retreat from the first of winter also, since I-95 would be at 70 mph for twenty minutes, and then parked stationary—idling in a ling parking lot—for over forty-five minutes. This alternated, as I used my cell phone to call and tell my hosts how I was making good time only half the time, and I eventually pulled in at 10:00 PM.
This was soon enough to be deeply into stories of Africa. They had been a year in Malawi, and their younger son applied as an anthropologist for a Fulbright for which I had recommended him. Their friends Hayden Boyds had come to my “Out of Assa” book signing, and had applied at my urging for a Fulbright also, as a means of retiring from his position as Undersecretary of Commerce—for which the good news has recently come through that he has made the final cut. So, all of us—Malawian Arthur, the Boyds, the Poehlmans and their son, and John Sutter and I—may all rendezvous next in Embangweni, Malawi the middle of February.
I had made reservations to travel around the world to go from Mindanao through Jo’burgh to Malawi. Then it turned out that I would actually be going East, through London to Hong Kong and Singapore to reach the Philippines and backing up to go to Africa. The cost of this non-round the world ticket (which is still more miles than a round-the-world trip by overshooting the far side of the world for each destination) is $6.950. If I made one ticket into a trip west from DCA through DFW and LAX to Manila and onward, then returned all the way to DC eastward—as I had done last year—the fare would only be a bit over a thousand dollars. Immediately upon my return, if I then went Eastward through London to Jo’burgh and on to Malawi, the combined fares of the two trips beyond the far sides of the world would sum to less than half the single trip I had previously planned, so—despite the longer hours and miles---I will be making two trips around the world in February, and march, to be returning for a one week trip to Cuba.
RUNNING THE REPLENISHING ATLANTIC
BEACH,
TOURIJNG THE MOST VISTED TOURIST SITE IN NORTH CAROLINA—
THE NC AQUARIUM IN MOOREHEAD CITY—
A STROLL AROUND TEDDY ROSSEVELT’S PRESERVATION PROJECT AND THE MARINA
OF THE PINEKNOLLS COMMUNITIES,
AND A SEAFOOD DINNER HOSTED BY A BEAR-HUNTER OYSTER-SHUCKER AT JORDAN’S
ON THE COAST
I liked the idea of running the beach along the outer banks long strip of sand, courtesy of the Gulf Stream out in front of the Diamond Shoals. After twenty-five years without a single hurricane, this area of the barrier islands got hit by five big ones in less than five years, and the beach has eroded away. There was a referendum on a tax-funded County plan to ‘re-nourish the beach” by a commercial dredging company that pumps sand on the beach from offshore to make an additional 100 yards of beach sand frontage, but it was defeated, since the Bay side and inland residents would be equally taxed without beach frontage. So the town of Pine Knolls elected to do it instead—at a million dollars a mile—which comes to $1100 for small frontage of the valuation of George and Betty’s condo on the beach. We saw the dredge, working even on a Sunday morning in the holidays, pumping up big volumes of tarry dark sand from offshore onto the beach. They are allowed to suck up four turtles in any defined period of time, but when that number is exceeded, they have to stop the dredging for a period of days until the turtle traffic decreases, and they may resume again.
I ran north for a half an hour to get to the place where the pipeline was ashore, piling up sand, which is later, bulldozed along the frontage. It is darker than the sand on the beach, which it will resemble only after a year of weathering and dissolution of the organic material it carries. Still, it would seem to me, “You can’t fool Mother Nature”—and the futility of building on the shifting sands of the remodeling Outer Banks would assure that these condos would be swept north toward Cape Cod, inevitably and eventually—as certainly as that the debris slopes of the California coasts would sweep the multi-million dollar real estate toward the Aleutian trench. That the government, the Army Corps of engineers, and the real estate developers still insist on insuring this, despite the futility of it over any long range time frame, or—given a few force ten hurricanes—a very short and violent time period—is irrational. But this is big money and real estate speculation, which are not to be stopped from short-term windfalls, before the wind really does fall.
We went to the most visited NC tourist attraction—the Aquarium on the Outer Banks. WE could introduce Arthur to a number o f the creatures and places along the Coast. He is a resident of the nation named for and adjacent to the furthest south of the Rift Valley lakes—Malawi—from which exotic tropical fish are harvested for aquaria, as one of the leading export items for cash-starved Malawi. Yet Arthur does not understand several things about these bizarre Americans—why they would run along the beach when nothing particularly dangerous was charging after them; why they would eat bottom-feeding scavengers, like crabs and oysters, and consider them a delicacy; why they would make any effort to get close to a body of water, and perhaps even swim in it; and why they seem so fascinated with the big game species of Africa as to spend time and money going to make movies about it and stare at TV specials about them when they are not even trying hard to eat them—as every living thing in Malawi has long since been foraged for food.
Betty was interested in getting to know more about Virginia, and I told her that she was interested in getting to know Africa also, although I could not raise her on the cell phone since she was feeling ill. I could not reach Donald, either, since I was trying to make plans on whether I drove south to Gainesville or Atlanta following my visit on the Outer Banks. Paul Gibbs called several times, so I made the plans to go for5m Moorehead City to Atlanta on New Year’s Eve—a bit naively figuring it was just a hop across the state. I navigated with my new Garmin GPS, which Joe Brewer had got for me. I had tried hard to call him in the Fort Bragg area before I had left, and there is no record of him in the state, even when I gave the precise information on his address in Spring Lake near Fort Bragg, since I would have carried the big rack of the Phantom of the Derwood Deer Woods and the cape that Christian saved for me from the big New York buck he had shot with an arrow this fall (in the 200 pounds dressed category!) Since I could not reach him before leaving, I took the rack and the cape out of the Bronco and stored them in the cold shed outside the house at Derwood, and may carry them over to North American Taxidermy in Rockville whom I had also called to leave a message before leaving Derwood.
It is “just across the state”—only 600 miles away!
On the evening of December 30, we all went to dinner at Jordan’s, a seafood place where the owner Joe, took us into a back room, after we had stayed in the bar watching the first of about thirty college football games around the New Year holiday. I saw signs of “Bear Crossing” as I had on the highway Route 70 coming around New Bern, NC on my way in. I asked what was the story about the bear signs, and he replied that he was a bear hunter. Now we can talk, as he was shucking our buckets of steamed oysters (Arthur ate chicken fingers and French fries while looking askance at us.) He said he hunted right here in the county, where there were lots of bears. He had got several already this year, and heard of a record bear up in the eight hundred pound range taken nearby. He has a number of good bear dogs, Walkers, black and tans, and if they run deer he sells them off as deerhounds. With $1800 invested in a good lead dog, he was disappointed when it had died of old age after only a few weeks’ hunts. But he is used to having a few dogs each year torn up by bears. He shoots them with either a 30/30-carbine rifle, or a pistol—44 mag or .357 mag—naming as he did the three weapons that I have in the back of the Bronco right now. When I told him I had shot a big brown bear earlier this year, he asked what I was doing early in the morning. Unfortunately, I am driving across the state. But, after chowing down on fresh soft shell crabs and big steamed oysters—each from Maryland just as I was—he gave me his card and invited me to join him at some time in the future. George and Betty offered the beach condo as a “bear-hunting base” and who knows—I might be pursuing black bears through the swamps of North Carolina before long!
With farewells to George and Betty and Arthur, we will all be rendezvousing in “”The Warm Heart of Africa” from which they had brought a video they had made and an annual report of the Embangweni Hospital where I will also meet—again—Michael Hall and his wife, whom I had met during my visit to Malawi in 1996. He was the one who had given me the quote: “Since I was last here, the population has doubled; and nothing else has!”
And, now, it is time for the next chapter—as the Bronco gets gassed and ready to roll across another large piece of the Eastern and Southern US real estate. Y’all come!