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Carolina's
enchanted isles Bland Simpson is a man in love -- in love with landscapes and waterscapes, boats and voyages; dolphins and pelicans; history and legend; and the energetic, often cantankerous, and wonderfully generous individuals who live along the Carolina coast. He is also generous. In "The Inner Islands: A Carolinian's Sound Country Chronicle," he shares his passion by taking readers on a rollicking cruise down the coastal sound country, starting in the north with Machele Island near Elizabeth City and ending down south with the Cape Fear group -- Roan, Battery and others -- not far from Wilmington. Simpson's passions are enduring. A creative writing teacher at UNC-Chapel Hill, he has written other books, notably "Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's Coastal Plain" and "The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals," about this region that stitches the water to the land. Indeed, ghosts play prominent parts in these new tales. "Nowhere," he writes, "do ghosts come forth and consort any better than they do over water." And if we listen carefully to Simpson's stories, we'll hear them, too -- Algonkians, English explorers and colonists, Confederate and Union soldiers firing their cannons. Not all are anonymous. We meet Capt. John Smith, who named Heriots Ile and the Purchace Iles near Plymouth; Moses Grandy, "the slave freightboat captain who bought his freedom once, twice, thrice before it took"; the pirates Blackbeard and Capt. Kidd; and Neva May Gaskill, postmistress of a community in the Hog Island group, who killed herself with a potion of Coca-Cola and Red Devil lye. Nor are the living scanted. We encounter Mark and Penny Hooper, proprietors of a crab-and-clam seafood operation, who take Simpson and his family to Davis Island in Core Sound in their workboat, a 22-foot "chugger, pushed along by a nice big eight out of a '79 Cadillac El Dorado." We accompany Simpson to Big Foot Island in Pamlico Sound where he and longtime birders Micou Browne and John Weske "herd a fortune of young terns, a waddling multitude of them into the corral" to be counted and banded. And we salute feisty, outspoken Lena Ritter, who with her fellow oyster-tongers kept Stump Sound's Permuda Island, "a mile long and toothpick thin," from being covered stem to stern by condominiums. Permuda is now safely part of the North Carolina Coastal Reserve. Oh, the stories that reside in these scraps of land! Simpson tells us of the kayaker trying to paddle from Elizabeth City to Morehead; he tips over on Christmas Eve, is rescued by the Coast Guard, but his kayak drifts away, to be found later on Durant Island. We hear of a livestock operation on Browns Island in which a bull was manhandled onto a barge and tied down "just as the Lilliputians once tangled and tied Gulliver" and of Pynkham who escaped from the Carteret County jail and managed to hide out for a whole day on Carrot Island. Simpson has a gift for painting vivid verbal pictures that help us see what he does, and our vision is made even clearer by the fine photographs by his wife, Ann Cary Simpson. These include shots of tumbledown hunting clubs, Stump Sound oyster shells, the remains of the menhaden plant on Phillips Island, old ballast stones on Shell Castle Island, and much more. Commenting on the ways in which river towns, large and small, are similar, Simpson writes, "Cypress trees and their short wet knobby diminutive forests of knees fringe the ports' waters, greening them up deliciously each spring with the promise of yet another year of lowland fecundity, then going a rusty, melancholy gold each October." As for Castle Island, located in the Pamlico River near Little Washington, we learn that the name came from the turreted appearance of the chimneys of the island's long-gone lime kilns. And Simpson takes us on a mid-December adventure there as he goes bushwhacking through the island's woods with the poet Michael McFee: "McFee and I thrashed about through the smilax and catbriars, picking up whiskey bottles (federal law prohibited resale or reuse, though it needn't have, as we saw no bottles we considered reusing) and assaying other odd flotsam, the corner panels of an old cooler and such." And in a chapter called "The View from Bird Shoal," we see the ponies that live just off Beaufort on the islands where Rachel Carson once studied the marriage of shore and water: "Bird Shoal is an astonishingly easy place to turn one's mind loose, like those twenty-odd wild ponies on the run hereabouts, which slow to a walk, kicking up veils of sand behind every hoof before disappearing into the labyrinth of black-bird haunted myrtles like Bedouins in an oasis. It is a spot to shake off the jangled onrush and overload of everyday images and to encounter as unencumbered as possible this one sublime, elemental edge of the sea." The view from Bird Shoal encompasses the past and the present of the whole coast. And what of the future? Bland Simpson has long been active in the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which seeks to preserve the integrity of the sound country. And the shared burden of "The Inner Islands" and "A Sound Country Chronicle" is to instill in us as deeply as possible his sense -- no, his certainty -- that the sound country contains treasures of geography, history and everyday life. He mourns the fate of Harkers Island, where outlanders are buying up the land, and prices have so escalated that people rooted on the island for generations can no longer afford to live there. He notes the destruction of fisheries, and the unstoppable ways in which high water and hurricanes eat away at islands. Simpson states his thesis clearly: "One great test of our collective mettle is the strength of our resolve in the protection and restoration of these waters, to see if together we can make them models to the world." But "The Inner Islands" is hardly gloomy. Its main note is celebratory: We have these small but splendid places in our keeping. And the book would make a grand tour guide for anyone boating in the sound country. Let Bland Simpson have the last word: "These inner islands are not rocks nor metal hammered hard at Vulcan's stithy and made final for all time -- they are simply mud and sands, or shells, or swamps, massed for moments mere. We may stand and stride upon them and take their measure, feel the brevity of their moments (how like our own), and perhaps feel too some sense of kinship between animate and inanimate, the kinship of all ephemera." |
