Part 18 (2/2)

According to the sign, as many as thirty-five thousand tundra/ whistling swans congregate here, down significantly from the hundred thousand that Carson estimated in 1947. With a wingspan of close to seven feet, whistling swans are the second-largest waterfowl in North America. There are smaller birds, too: snow geese, osprey, bald eagles, some twenty-two species of ducks. We identify blue-winged teals, mallards, black ducks. Alligators still swim lazily in the ca.n.a.l, thankfully out of sight. Canada geese circle overhead, honking at us to carry on.

Go home, the sound says to me. Go on home.

WALTER Raleigh dedicated his unfinished epic, ”The Ocean to Cynthia,” to Elizabeth I. In it, he styled himself the Ocean and Elizabeth as Cynthia, the Moon. It was a nice conceit, erotic but not lese-majeste. Raleigh was the vast, unpredictable, moody sea, but he was ultimately controlled by Elizabeth's unanswerable lunar sway. They may have been lovers-the poem hints at it-but no one will ever know. She claimed not, but her excuse was an abnormal v.a.g.i.n.a- queens talked like that then, apparently-an unusual and inhibiting disposition of bones and flesh, rather than disinclination. She was, however, pleased with Raleigh's tribute. She liked the idea of an unsullied English monarch ruling the oceans.

We are crossing onto Roanoke Island, where Raleigh sent a boatload of explorers, in 1585. The island is in North Carolina now, part of the Outer Banks, but Raleigh called this land Virginia, another homage to his virgin queen. Carolina was for Charles, who would come later.

After a year of reconnoitring, the group, led by John White, returned to England to prepare a larger party of settlers, a hundred men, women, and children, to build a permanent colony in the New World. They arrived on Roanoke Island in 1587 and proceeded to build houses and fortifications, plant crops, and generally prepare for winter. The first European born on American soil was born here, a girl named Virginia Dare. White returned to England, promising to come back in the spring.

For various reasons-not least the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588-White didn't make it back for three years, by which time the colonists had vanished. He found the letters ”CRO” carved into a tree, indicating that they might have gone to the native village of Croatoan to join the friendly chief Manteo, but White was unable to travel the fifty miles to the village to check. He returned to England.

None of the original settlers were ever heard of again. They may have been killed by unfriendly natives, they may have a.s.similated into Manteo's clan, or they may have tried to make their way north to Chesapeake Bay. It is known that a hurricane swept through the area in 1589, which may account for the missing buildings, but the fate of America's first European settlers is also America's first mystery.

Roanoke seems, to us at least, a remarkably good choice for a colony site. Thin but fertile soil, an excellent climate, a strategic location that commands the narrow run of ocean that separates the Outer Banks from the mainland. The town of Manteo still has a comfortable feel to it. It's the first place we've been where there is universal free Wi-Fi. There is also a good bookstore, where I buy a copy of The Lost Colonists, by David Beers Quinn, and Muriel Rukeyser's biography of Thomas Heriot, the mathematician Raleigh sent to Roanoke, on the theory that every successful colony needs a great mathematician, to make maps, calculate tides and full moons, and generally astrologize and geomance.

I am in my element: I wrote my master's thesis on Walter Raleigh, and although I never finished it, I've never lost my fascination with the man or his time.

The parking lot at Fort Raleigh-a reconstruction of the palisade constructed by the missing settlers-is big enough to accommodate a dozen tour buses, but this is January and the island is as deserted as it was when White returned. There is a slight drizzle. The light in the surrounding woods is grey and shadowless. We try the door to the small stockade and find it locked for the season, on its porch a faded map under a sheet of Plexiglas. The signage tells little about Raleigh's lost settlers and a lot about the Freedmen's Colony that replaced it during the Civil War.

In the first year of that war, Roanoke Island was captured by the Union army in an attempt to block the South's ability to s.h.i.+p cotton to Europe. Without its primary export, the Confederate army would starve, they reasoned, and a hungry army makes mistakes. Under Union control, the island became an unexpected haven for runaway slaves from North Carolina and Virginia. By 1862, there were 1,000 blacks living around the fort, 3,500 at the colony's peak, all of whom depended on the government for support. Some of the men formed the First and Second North Carolina Colored Volunteers and fought against the South at the battles of Ol.u.s.tee, New Market Heights, Jackson's Creek, and Petersburg-it might have been one of their bullets that killed William S. Grady. But when the war ended, the government broke up the Freedmen's Colony, and although some families pet.i.tioned to stay on the island without support, most of them returned to the mainland to work for their former owners, ”going back to semi-slavery for the present,” wrote one of the missionary-teachers on the island, ”but hoping for better times in the future.”

Their actual buildings and gravesites were neglected and lost until 2001, when anthropologists used satellite imagery to locate traces of foundations and cemeteries among the trees. Following the map's directions, we drive along Airport Road to the new aquarium, where, nestled between two modern buildings, we find a small, treed triangle with three grave markers carefully set in concrete. One says: Rachel Dough, born Jan 15, 1815, died July 20, 1895, 'For I know my Redeemer liveth.'

In ”Report of Transportation Furnished to Freedmen, January 1866,” an Amie Doe is listed as having been s.h.i.+pped off the island to Plymouth, Virginia. I had a cousin in Windsor whose last name was Doe. It's a slender thread, I know, but sometimes the finest tapestries are made with the thinnest of threads.

MY mind turns constantly to home. Wayne, too, has a bad case of the Channels, he tells me over lunch at the Full Moon Cafe in Manteo. Small and intimate, it reminds us a little of our favourite cafe back home, where we courted in our early days together and still often contrive to share a meal.

”Channel fever,” he explains, though I know what it means; he's told me before. But that's what couples do for each other: listen to their stories. ”When British s.h.i.+ps entered the English Channel, the crews could think of nothing but getting back to their families. Along the way, if the vessel had to stop at an English port for some reason, they'd jump s.h.i.+p and head off on foot; they were that anxious to get home.”

I've been away from our house for almost half a year. I'm keen to be back, but I'm a little worried, too. I've been spoiled-no cooking or cleaning, and now I haven't made my own bed for more than a month. How will I manage a household again? I don't look forward to all the work, or the cold, though I yearn to be home. Maybe we should move. Go to Jefferson. Or Selma. Or Manteo.

Wayne leaves for the bookstore. I stay at the Full Moon, nursing my coffee. The only other patrons are three women who look to be in their seventies. All through lunch they've been chatting about kids and grandkids and clothes. Now, their talk turns to politics.

”Did you catch Larry King last night?”

”No, what did he say?”

I miss a few sentences, then pick up the thread when I hear Condoleezza Rice's name.

”Well, she sure knows how to wave getting off a plane, I'll give her that.”

”You know what they call her, don't you?”

Their heads bend together. I have to strain to hear.

”Bush's little black puppet.”

They move from dissing Rice to dissing Bush, glancing at me now and then to see if I'm taking it in, and if I am, how I respond. I give them a wan smile, trying for disapproving approval. They giggle.

I find Wayne in the Manteo Booksellers. He's jubilant.

”The best bookstore I've seen in a month.” Maybe that's all we really need: a book fix. I buy a few novels: John Updike's Terrorist, The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. At the checkout, I give Wayne a present, a ball cap with ”Can't Live Without Books” embroidered across the front.

We're getting back into the groove. I ask Wayne if we couldn't please find a real mom-and-pop motel for tonight.

”Our last night.”

”OmiG.o.d! It is, isn't it?”

”Right,” he says. ”No more chains.”

Tomorrow we'll be in Princeton, with friends, a short day's drive from home. The trip is barrelling toward its conclusion. Suddenly, I want to slow it down. See every sight. Talk to every local. Eat real food. A fish fry. Carolina barbecue. And in the morning, for once I want real hash browns.

At one time, the Outer Banks, this skinny, two-hundred-mile band of islands protecting Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds from the Atlantic Ocean, was nothing but a ridge of high, s.h.i.+fting dunes. Nags Head (Americans have given up on apostrophes, too, it seems) was inhabited by pirates like Blackbeard, who lured merchant s.h.i.+ps aground by tying lanterns to nags' heads. There are so many s.h.i.+pwrecks along this stretch that it's known as the graveyard of the Atlantic. Feral horses, they say, gallop across the dunes, descendants of the Spanish mustangs that swam ash.o.r.e from wrecks. This is where humans first took flight: in 1903, the Wright brothers lifted off from Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk in the world's first powered heavier-than-air vehicle.

We see none of this. No horses. No wild inventors. No dunes. Even the Atlantic is reduced to flashes of dismal grey between holiday houses that run chockablock along the sh.o.r.e. On either side of the road, fast-food joints and chain hotels wave billboards in our faces. We might as well be driving through any resort town in the coastal United States.

Then suddenly, a gap in the faux Cape Cod construction and there it is, the motel of our dreams, a low red building settled cozily into the sand with a white porch giving onto the sh.o.r.e. The room is panelled in knotty pine, with bedspreads our mothers might have bought.

The woman at the desk is chatting with a friend about her daughter. ”She's graduating this year,” the friend says. ”The first person in our family to finish high school.”

”Is that a fact?” the motel owner says. ”If you want, I could do her hair.”

We find a restaurant that isn't a chain. This is our last night in the South, and though we are on the sea and should be eating fish, we order barbecue, succulent pulled pork in a vinegary, peppery sauce. It is unbelievably delicious and deeply satisfying. I remember something I once read about the South, that the sole duty of a man was ”to holler right, vote straight, and eat as much barbecue as any other man in the country.”

After dinner, we walk along the beach under a brooding sky, kicking through the sand past a rhythm of wooden stairways that reach out to the moon-silvered sea, our senses heightened by the understanding that we will likely never be in this particular place again.

WE drive the next morning farther up the Outer Banks, past Kitty Hawk, then follow Highway 158 onto the North Carolina mainland. We're still on a spit of land jutting down into Albemarle Sound, the road running straight up the middle, so there is no good view of water. We pa.s.s through the towns of Mamie, Powells Point, and Jarvisburg without feeling the urge to stop: they are not really towns but ”populated places,” with populations in the low hundreds. The highway becomes the Camden Causeway and crosses a wide arm of Albemarle Sound at Elizabeth City before turning abruptly north again to skirt the Great Dismal Swamp.

John White's original plan had been to return to his colonists on Roanoke Island and establish a new settlement on Chesapeake Bay, where, he thought, the soil would be richer and the Chesapeake Indians friendlier. So when he finally made it back in 1590 and found the palisade deserted, he thought the settlers might have moved north, possibly up the Elizabeth River, which we are now following. What really became of them is anyone's guess.

Mine is that they disappeared into the Great Dismal Swamp.

The swamp, all 111,000 acres of it, is to our left, a vast expanse of sedges, bald cypress, tupelo, and pine. It is the migratory home of more than two hundred species of birds and is said to shelter black bears, bobcats, racc.o.o.ns, and seventy species of reptiles and amphibians. For a long time, from the seventeenth century until emanc.i.p.ation, it also sheltered a colony of runaway slaves.

The American definition of ”slave” can be traced back to this part of the country. In 1675, Nathaniel Bacon, a white colonist, led an uprising against the Crown that was put down quickly by the colonial forces-twenty-three men were eventually hanged-but not before ”Bacon's Army,” as it was called, burned Jamestown and looted many nearby plantation estates. One of Bacon's demands was the total eradication of the local native population, for reasons of national security, and one of the odd results of the rebellion was that after the uprising, the colonial government pa.s.sed legislation defining what it meant by ”slave.” It identified three kinds: an indentured Christian servant from England, who was freed after serving four or five years; an ”Indian” (i.e., native North American) servant, who served twelve years; and an African slave, who served for life. Plantation owners quickly realized that African slaves were cheaper, since they would never have to be paid for their work.

With the pa.s.sage of this law, which const.i.tuted a life sentence for blacks, many African slaves fled into the Great Dismal Swamp, where they mixed with the Tuscarora Indians, as well as with white pirates and vagabonds who had also set up camps in the swamp, forming a large, tight mestizo community. It isn't hard to imagine that descendants of the Roanoke Island settlers may have been there already, providing a base upon which this rebel group could grow and prosper.

As we cross the border into Virginia, I keep craning my neck for a glimpse of the flat, grey gra.s.slands of the distant swamp. Closer to the road, an endless strip of body shops, used-car lots, and every now and then mysterious low structures made of weathered plywood and old tarpaulins obstruct my view.

When we stop for gas, I venture into a sagging, one-storey building with a sign on the roof that says Liquors. Inside, between darkly gleaming rows of Jack Daniel's and Jim Beam, is a neat stack of Virginia wine, ”product of the Shenandoah Valley.” I take two bottles up to the cash.

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