Part 18 (1/2)

I must look confused.

”We love our peanuts boiled here,” the young woman behind the counter suggests, opening her vowels up wide. She's wearing a sirenred sweats.h.i.+rt from the University of Georgia, Athens.

”Can I try one?”

”Sure thing,” she says and dips a solitary peanut out of the steaming vat. It's white, like a fat maggot, a steamy slug. ”It's a bit messy,” she says apologetically.

The peanut tastes like any boiled bean, a little mushy, but sharply salted from the boiling brine.

We buy a bag each, plus some apples. If we get storm-stayed, we won't starve.

A van of Mexicans pa.s.ses us, young men wearing T-s.h.i.+rts and feed-store ball caps. Catholics travelling north to convert the Baptists?

Environmental refugees from the California citrus freeze, heading east to pick peanuts? We'll never know.

We stop outside a Hampton Inn. I open my computer and, yes, there's a wireless signal.

”Do you mind if we use your Wi-Fi?” I ask the woman behind the desk.

”Why sure, c'mon in. Here's the pa.s.sword. Y'all can sit in the breakfast room, if you like.”

Wayne settles at one of the small round tables and sets to work. I get him a m.u.f.fin and a coffee, then sit mesmerized by the flat-screen television that takes up one wall of the room. It has been almost five months since I've watched TV, and I stare at it like a toddler, struck dumb.

The screen is tuned to the weather channel. It's snowing in Dallas. Roads are closed, travellers stranded. The high-pitched drama in the announcer's voice reminds me of Albuquerque. There's a weather advisory for Shreveport, Jackson-all the places we've just left. Lubbock, Texas, is shut down altogether. The cold and wet are pluming north and east. Freezing rain predicted for Charlotte and Raleigh. The Shenandoah Valley is coloured bright pink on the weatherman's map. Who, I wonder, chose such a cheap and cheerful colour to denote treacherous weather? Only the Atlantic seaboard is still a benign blue line that defines the eastern edge of the continent.

The Doomsday Clock, the announcer tells us, has been moved one minute closer to midnight, in recognition of the threat climate change poses to the survival of humankind. Soon we'll all be environmental refugees.

”Looks like we made the right decision, for now anyway,” I say to Wayne. ”We'd better stick to that thin blue line.”

IT'S LONG past the time when we should have stopped for the night. We're both hungry and cranky. Darkness has descended when we finally reach Was.h.i.+ngton, North Carolina. We look for a nice mom-and-pop motel, but they all seem uniformly rundown, paint peeling, windows like cellblock slits, the parking lots deserted or spotted with wrecks. We give up and go to a Days Inn, where the young woman at the desk gives us a room right beside the only other guest in the place, a fellow with a medium-sized moving van.

It is eight o'clock at night. Normally, we'd be looking in the phone book for a decent restaurant or nibbling on duck pate and smoked salmon as we play gin or read amicably in our room. But tonight we order pizza and turn on the television, indications of how low our spirits have sunk. We're no longer travellers, we're a dumpy middle-aged couple wanting only comfort food and a mindless evening watching American Idol.

”You look like a distinguished gentleman,” the pizza delivery man says when Wayne answers the door. Wayne eyes him suspiciously.

”I mean it as a compliment,” the man says, smiling broadly. He's about Wayne's age, has a greying beard, and is wearing a thin black jacket that is soaked at the shoulders. Water drips from the peak of his baseball cap, but he doesn't seem to notice. He nods at me, lying rumpled on the bed. His smile is infectious.

I sit up. ”Looks pretty bad out there,” I say.

”Nothing that won't blow over,” he says brightly. ”Sun's supposed to s.h.i.+ne tomorrow.”

Wayne takes the pizza and sets it on the bed, then peels off a couple of bills. They all look the same here in the States, but I can see the numbers. He hands the money to the man and closes the door.

”That was a big tip,” I say, no disapproval in my voice. The man delivered more than pizza: he brought a bit of South Carolina into the room.

Wayne is searching through our kitchen things. When he finds the red plates, he lifts a slice of pizza onto one and offers it to me, like a gentleman.

”He earned it,” he says, a smile softening his face. ”There's a storm out there.”

13 / THE OUTER BANKS.

MELISSA, the night clerk, promised us there would be decaf in the breakfast room in the morning, but there isn't. I press the new man at the desk into making a pot. When the carafe is three-quarters full, I say, ”Do you mind if I stop it now? I like my coffee strong.”

”I don't know,” he says, waddling over with a worried look. His toupee is a peculiar shade of brown. ”You might burn yourself.”

”I'll be careful,” I say, sliding the carafe aside and slipping a cup under the drip. He looks dubious. I'm Canadian, I want to say, I'm not going to sue you, but after all these weeks such easy distinctions no longer seem fair. I nod my thanks and take two polystyrene cups and the carafe to our table in the lobby's breakfast nook.

I've forgotten my notebook. When I go back to the room, the swipe card doesn't work. The manager is summoned, but his card doesn't work either. It is agreed: no cards work. Whatever happened to keys? I stand huddled in the rain, imagining us stuck here for days while they look for some computer nerd to come and open our room. I contemplate the cost of a broken window.

At last, a congenial cleaner produces a gizmo from his trolley that somehow opens the door. ”No close,” he warns me sternly, shaking his finger in my face.

I nod vigorously. No close. Not on your life.

It is all too much, too early, especially today, when travel has lost its l.u.s.tre and I just want to be in my own kitchen with my own coffee pot, my own favourite br.i.m.m.i.n.g mug, not this plastic at my lips.

We eat the comes-with breakfast in the motel lobby: plastic tubes filled with garish Froot Loops and other puffed and sugared grains, cook-your-own waffles that smell of neoprene smothered with fake maple syrup, uniform slabs of white bread that move desultorily through the conveyor-belt toaster, plastic packets of sickly jam and b.u.t.ter and peanut b.u.t.ter. It all tastes the same.

”Let's not do that again,” I say as we get back into the car.

”It's quick,” Wayne says.

”But deadly.”

”Okay, tomorrow we'll find you some great hash browns.”

We're aiming for the coast, where the names of the towns-Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head-suit our mood. I look out through the rain-smeared window at houses flanked by palms and tall shrubs flowering pink and white against bare branches-hibiscus? magnolia? The slight rousing of my curiosity lifts my spirits a little, too.

The landscape is as flat as settled earth can get-ocean-bottom flat. We've left Route 17 for US 264, which takes us out onto a protuberance of North Carolina that extends farther into the Atlantic than Miami. Only Long Island, Rhode Island, and a bulge of Maine are farther east on the continental United States. On the map, the coastline here looks nibbled by mice.

”Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge,” I say, reading a huge billboard. Wayne's mother used to do this: read every sign she pa.s.sed- McMann's Dry Goods. Pedestrian Crosswalk. No Turns Between 3 and 6 pm-a running commentary that used to drive him crazy. It still does. I try to keep my roadside reading to myself, except for times like this, when we could use a break, a diversion, a way back into our travelling selves.

”Birds,” I say, leaning forward to squint up at a fan of white waterfowl flapping low overhead. ”Swans! Could this be that swan wintering ground Rachel Carson wrote about?”

Wayne pulls over to the side of the road.

Rachel Carson was the first to sound the environmental alarm with Silent Spring in 1962, but I've always felt a kins.h.i.+p with her, too, as a fellow fan of the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, the author of Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost, books that led both of us as children into nature. Carson started out writing pamphlets for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1947, she produced one on the Mattamuskeet, at the time one of the wildest places on the Atlantic coast, with dense woods of pine, cypress, and gum and wide expanses of marsh gra.s.s crawling with alligators and trembling with birds, hundreds of thousands of them. It has been a wildlife refuge for more than seventy years: fifty thousand acres that take in Mattamuskeet Lake, a long, shallow indentation less than three feet deep. In the fall, ducks, geese, and swans swoop down the skyways from above the Arctic Circle to winter here on this mild nub of wild land sticking out into the Atlantic.

I have a bleak thought. We're not only travelling against the flow of American settlement, we're travelling north against the wisdom of the world's waterfowl, too.

We drive down a side road, and sure enough, tens of thousands of sh.o.r.ebirds are milling on the lakeside, warbling to each other, suddenly breaking into flight, as if they've had enough, they're going home-but no, they circle round and glide back to where the others continue to scrabble and squawk.

”Tundra swans,” Wayne says.

”Whistling swans,” I say, still feeling querulous. I seem to remember that the windpipe of a whistling swan has an extra loop, which causes it to emit a high note, something like an oboe or a clarinet. I listen intently while Wayne searches for identifying marks, on the birds and in the bird book.

”Same bird, two different names,” he says, looking pleased. ”We're both right.”