August 13 to August 28, Outer Banks and Tidewater Virginia
We had a classic beach experience. Fourteen people in the oceanfront house, family and friends, doing the time-honored rotation—house to ocean to umbrella shade to ocean to house; the occasional trips out to shell shops, beer stores, and local attractions; trying to wrangle a consensus for dinner. A week of sun and surf, playing with the grandkids Clementine and Tavish.
Got some work done on the trailer and truck. While getting the trailer’s wheel-bearings repacked the mechanic called my attention to one of the tires which was dangerously worn on the inside, near to coming apart. Brenda had read me some horror stories from the Scamp-owners forum of tires delaminating on the highway. Frequently the tire comes apart and rips through the wheel well and tears apart the electrical, plumbing, and gas connections that come together there. We were lucky to have caught the problem, and I was lucky to find a guy who had the right size tires in stock and made time to mount them. He also had to be the looniest mechanic in the Outer Banks, jabbering nonstop about everything and nothing; absolutely starkers.
I have to remark on how unbelievably clear the water was in Nags Head. In water that came up to my chin I could see the ocean floor in perfect detail. I have been coming to these beaches since I was a kid and have never seen the ocean so transparent. Also, it was teeming with fish, seemingly-endless flows of minnows and foot-long fish (herring? mackerel?) the whole week we were there. I have never seen any aquatic resource get better over time before this. A fluke of the sea.
Everyone else headed north to Maryland or airports at the end of the week; we went west a little ways to a campground in Rocky Hock, NC on the Albemarle Peninsula. A quiet spot near a little lake with a white and a black goose. One of our cats had an eye infection or irritation from a piece of sand so we took a trip to a nearby vet who was very accommodating. The campground was near Edenton, NC which is quite an attractive place, a sort of small-scale Charleston. Edenton was founded in the 1600s by adventurers from the Jamestown settlement, and was, for several decades, the colonial capital of the Carolinas. Its heyday was in the mid-19th century when the rail line allowed the town to capitalize on its seafood and its cotton mills. Fabulous mansions were built by the town’s many notable citizens, and scores of them still stand downtown, some for sale in the two million-plus range. Near the old cotton mill are a couple blocks of identical one-story mill-worker dwellings, some looking unchanged since they were abandoned in the 1950s, some gussied-up and selling for $200,000+. We knew nothing about Edenton before visiting so it was a pleasant surprise to find it such an inviting town to walk around. (If you go, don’t be tempted by the drugstore that advertises freshly-made lemonade and orangeade—they both taste like sugar.) Driving out after a three day stay, in nearby Southhampton, VA we saw historical markers noting the rise and fall of Nat Turner whose turn on the stage played out here in the 1830s. Since then, in just the last week, I have heard a lot about Turner—press about a new movie, and a bit in the New Yorker in connection with the African-American Museum on the mall. This must be Nat’s year. I remember reading Styron’s book The Confessions of Nat Turner when I was a kid and it might be time for a second look at that.
We drove north, and west a little, to Mount Medoc State Park which sits on the edge of the piedmont where it falls off to the coastal plain. Mount Medoc is not much of a mountain, barely even a hill at 325 feet. The park thinks they sidestep the issue by claiming that it was once a mountain in the distant geological past. By that reasoning you could call it anything—Vast Inland Sea of Medoc; Medoc, Center of the Supercontinent Pangea.
A well-kept camp facility, really nice trails through the woods, up the “mountain,” along the river. The wooded trails were draped everywhere with spider webs; it’s that time of year. Brenda made me walk point to intercept all the webs. I walked along swinging a stick up and down in front of me, and Brenda did the same just in case I missed one. We must have looked like a couple of medieval penitents on a pilgrimage through the forest.
Shortly after we arrived in camp the local state police officer assigned to the park came by. He assured us he would be on the job, coming by every hour or so to cruise the park. He gave me a piece of paper with his emergency number in 3 inch high letters. I thought, “Geez, quite a security presence here.” Next evening Brenda and I got to wondering why, for the second day, we were the only ones in the large campground. Connecting this with the police presence I wondered if there hadn’t been a recent spate of murders in the park, or maybe it bordered a prison or something. Brenda checked online and found a possible explanation—BIGFOOT HAD BEEN SIGHTED HERE WITHIN THE PAST FEW WEEKS! It was a statewide news story, complete with accounts from frightened townspeople who saw “something cross the road” or who had lost a cat recently. A local man took casts of large footprints found on the very trail we had just hiked. I couldn’t help but look around every few minutes for large lumbering hairy beasts. Here is my haiku “Mount Medoc Yeti”:
Bigfoot sighting here
And even though I don’t believe
I look, half-hoping.
A local man had established a “museum of cryptozoology” in his home to document the bigfoot sightings that had occurred in the region in recent years. He was, in fact, the guy who found the footprint in the park. The “museum” was just a collection of odds and ends of unremarkable artifacts and framed newsprint. The cast of the footprint found in Medoc was unrecognizable as a foot, sasquatch or otherwise; he might as well have, and indeed may have, poured plaster of paris in a Kroger bag. (Kroger is a supermarket chain found in the south and the Midwest. A guy I knew from West Virginia said a paper shopping bag from Kroger was “West Virginia Samsonite.”) Interestingly the curator of the museum was a seemingly-sane and engaging guy who only moved to North Carolina a few years earlier, after retiring as a writer for the New York Daily News. I don’t recall anything he said as revealing that he actually believes in Bigfoot; Brenda thinks he is taking advantage of peoples’ interest in paranormal things to make a few bucks. The museum in Littleton NC is free, altho you feel obligated to make a donation. Call the guy up and he will invite you over to see it.
We made the perilous descent from Mount Medoc and took up residence in Jamestown Virginia at a county park called Chickahominy River. Since coming back into the states almost a month ago the heat has been extreme and debilitating, and the further south we went the more humid. We wondered if it had been this hot when we were kids and just didn’t notice. I did some cursory research that wouldn’t stand up under peer review and found the following: in every year of the 1960s the average temperature in Washington DC was in the low to mid 80s for the month of August. The maximum temperature in August for eight years of the decade was at or below 90. In 1965 and 1968 the maximum temperature was 95. In August of 2015 and 2016 the average temperature was 92 and the maximum 101.
We visited the state-run Jamestown site. The National Park Service has a park at the original site of the settlement but it is almost all outdoors and it was too hot to go there. The state-run site is extensive, with a 20 minute movie, a fairly-interesting museum that took an hour to go through, and life-size recreations of the ships, the fort, and an Indian village, peopled by costumed interpreters with accents and accoutrements of varying degrees of accuracy. (“Hey Powhatan, where do you buy your eyeglasses?”) I was curious how the displays would handle the recently-discovered (2013) evidence of cannibalism among the first settlers and the movie did cop to it with a brief reference.
After a few days along the fetid Chickahominy we went to VA on the Chesapeake at the mouth of the Potomac. I had long been curious about this area, home to Omega Protein, the perpetrator of genocide against the Bay’s menhaden population. The campground, Chesapeake Bay RV Camp Resort (another campground almost entirely to ourselves) was in a piney wood by an inlet of the Bay about ten miles from Reedville. The camp is on a downhill slide—the founders are aged and the kids are incapable or uninterested. It was okay by our standards but unless somebody gets motivated this place is going to be overrun by weeds and spiders come spring. There are some vicious screeds on Yelp about this place that make for good reading, along with an equal number of less-interesting entries that are positive.
Historical markers of the area are uninteresting for the most part. George Washington’s mother came from here, Northumberland County. Jessie Ball is a favorite daughter with a roadside marker noting her birthplace, a small national historical site of a schoolhouse where she was a teacher and principal, and a roadway named in her honor. She was famous for marrying Alfred Dupont and spending some of his umpty-ump millions on charitable works. You might not be able to buy your way into heaven but you can spend your way into the consciousness of Virginians.
Reedville has a watermen’s museum that was closed during our stay, a couple of restaurants, a handful of 19th century homes worth the restoration they have received. The whole Northern Neck of Virginia, between the Rappahanock and Potomac Rivers, is a pleasant landscape of hills, farms, river- and bay-side views. It is sparsely-populated, possessing a handful of small towns, notable manses, and historic sites. Most of it is played-out farm fields, reduced to sand through centuries of tobacco farming. The area seems something other than southern even tho the region’s glory days were allowed by plantation economy. I suspect that the Northern Neck is still peopled by descendants of early settlers.
The pleasure of traveling as we have is spending time in places and regions that, in previous travels, we had just blown through en-route to someplace else. To have the time to soak up the atmosphere of Kentucky, the various ecozones of North Carolina, Tidewater Virginia, rural Ohio, has been enjoyable and enlightening. Some ideas I have long held about certain places and peoples were little more than caricatures or stereotypes based on scanty information; with the addition of each additional detail gleaned from actually being in a place I feel a little more connected and sympathetic to that place. So don’t you go bad-mouthing Lenoir City, Tennessee around me, you hear.