Narrow Dog to Indian River

by Terry Darlington

  One had an English accent—Yes, it's an English canal boat, he shouted into his mobile phone—heaven knows what it is doing here.

  I thought why not knock on the boat if you are that interested in what we are doing here and I'll show you round and you can tell us what you are doing here, but don't talk about us as if we were stuffed in a museum, you bastard. I was tired after our first day, and I should have been ashamed of myself.

  There were four other boats at the jetty. They were Canadian, and had come down the Erie Canal from the Great Lakes—two yachts, a trawler, a catamaran. Everyone was a foreigner on the Great Dismal Swamp Canal—perhaps the Yanks had more sense and went to Albemarle Sound via the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal.

  The Canadians seemed very pleased to be shown around the Phyllis May, though one of them seemed to be a dick—Tomorrow there will be wind, he said—twenty-five miles an hour. If you are going down the Pasquotank to Elizabeth City then watch out. The Pasquotank is a big river, a big fetch for the waves to build up. And Pelican Marina is very exposed. Fuck you, I thought.

  I think I was nervous.

  Some frogs put up a faint chorus. If they had sung loud the snakes would have got them. The North Carolina night fell like a steel trap.

  THE PASQUOTANK RIVER STARTED THE SAME size as the Thames or the Marne. It was heavily wooded, then the woods backed away and the river was a quarter of a mile wide and then half a mile. The water turned blue under a clear sky and the wind kicked up a chop against the current and the tiller buzzed and wriggled.

  We are canal boaters, used to a few inches of water beneath our flat bottom. If we fall in we can walk to the side. We can reach out and touch the bridges and the locks and the quays, and often we hit them very hard. It all gives you a feeling of security. You don't get much feeling of security driving into the wind on a river half a mile wide, choppy blue water in front and behind for ever and no other boats for hours and no houses: just woods and jungle. It's unstable, it's nasty, it's wide and uncertain. OK you have a life jacket, but it is a skinny thing that might or might not inflate when you hit the water, and we have not put one on Jim and he is just bones and will sink. The boat with its concrete ballast and steel hull would hit the river bottom with a thud. And we are in the water and Jim gone and the boat gone and what happens then? We drift and splash around and after a couple of hours we reach the bank and we wander through the woods soaking wet and the snakes get us. Oh Lord the banks are going further away!

  I had the big chart spread on the roof next to the new electronic compass which cost a fortune and which I hoped would cut out the magnetic bias from our boat. On the GPS screen there was the little ship jerking bravely down the magenta line of the Intracoastal Waterway. But the GPS was wrong—the islands were wrong and all the turnings were wrong—nothing tied in, nothing fitted. And the compass was reading 165 and then 167 and then 164 and what the hell does that mean? If it goes to 193 do we explode? Do we abandon ship on 208? A flashy compass won't help if the wind gets up and we go over. It might help the guys who drag the Phyllis May up from the depths—Ah, 164, most interesting, explains a lot—take that back to the lab—and don't forget the watch and the dog collar.

  Ah now I see what's going on! I was lost because I made an error of scale—I thought I had sailed into the broad river estuary, but I am still right back in the thin wiggly bits. The thin wiggly bits are half a mile wide.

  That's better—I can match the shores to the chart, and the GPS is telling me where I am to the metre and I know which way to go round that island and look at the little boat on the screen, what fun. And the Phyllis May is riding well and Jim is safe inside and why not be a sailor and go to sea? Ours is an island race, shaped by millennia of adventure—Celts and dreamers, hardened with the warrior blood of the North. My grandfather looked just like a Viking, though he spent his life telling stories and never went anywhere at all except up the pub, and my other grandfather didn't get around much either. But blood will out—sooner or later the corpuscles will carry you kicking to the starting line and fire the gun, and you will know what to do and you will do it. You have no ordinary adventurer here, my man—this is Tits Magee, who circumnavigated the globe in red satin, by the light of his fearless eft Kilroy, the one with the orange belly with spots. Let's screw a few more revs out of the Phyllis May—come on, you old trollop, boogie!

  The Phyllis May slopped into the waves and the river widened another order of blue magnitude and the banks began to sink under the horizon and you could see the arch of the earth. We hammered on, south, south, south, and the sun ignited the spray. Flame, and the flakes of flame.

  Monica and the bridge-keeper at Elizabeth City were squawking at each other—I could hear it on the VHF radio by my knee. I had said something into the VHF yesterday going into the lock at the start of the Great Dismal Swamp Canal, and someone heard me and squawked back. I got nervous and froze up and couldn't remember what button to press or what to say, but after a bit of practice I would soon be spicing up the airwaves with my manly repartee.

  The keeper lifted the bridge and we were blown sideways into Pelican Marina by a wind from the south, a wind racing up the Pasquotank from the Albemarle Sound, which opened out before us and went on for ever.

  We have reached our first new city on the route, I said to Monica—we are under way, we have begun, we are off, we have done fifty-five miles. We are haulin'—perhaps a rum?

  We have over a thousand miles still to go, said Monica—and we are averaging twenty-five miles a month. We'll all be dead before we get there.

  ON AN ADVENTURE MUCH OF THE TIME YOU feel rather as you would do at home, perhaps a bit happier at times, a bit more bored at others. But sometimes you are scared—jolted and empty and cold and tasting metal in your mouth. It is not a nice feeling and you don't forget it.

  In the dead of night we were woken by screams and the boat pitching and bucking. I looked out of the bedroom window and there was the water right on me, rising up the hull to the window, shining and surging. My God, I thought, where is the pepper spray, where are the life jackets? Someone is being murdered and we are going down!

  I tried to put things together in my mind.

  The screaming was not Jim, who was hiding in his kennel, preparing for the end. Nor was it Monica. It was coming from outside—Oh heavens it's the wind generator—it's gone into the screaming mode. The bucking is the sea—we are on an outside berth and there is nothing between us and Albemarle Sound and this is some sort of squall—it must be the wind the dick was talking about. Out of the galley window the sea seemed to be in the right place. So how can the bedroom be sinking? Has the back of the boat broken? Can a squall snap a seventeen-ton steel tube? Is it metal fatigue? Poor welding?

  I realized it was an optical illusion. From the galley my gaze hit the water ten feet from the hull. But in the bedroom I had to stand right up to the window and look down. The water was right on me, inches away, just through the hull, and it was surging up in the darkness—but then it was falling back to where it ought to be. I sat down but I still felt awful and so did Monica. From his kennel in the corner the backs of Jim's eyes shone green.

  We have never had a mooring out at sea before, said Monica—we are not used to it.

  I know, I said. We are used to flowery banks in three feet of water in a twenty-foot cut, not the edge of a bloody ocean. It's like when we were driving down the Pasquotank, when I felt I was standing by a precipice. The sea is powerful and cold and frankly, my dear, it doesn't give a damn.

  The wind is dropping, said Monica, and I think I'll have that rum. Come out Jim and give mistress a cuddle.

  The wind generator dropped to a howl and began to moan and fizz and the boat settled down. I looked out of the cabin window at the waves—We are very very near, we can scare you any time we want, we can get you any time we want—any time at all.The marina lights polished the waves and their teeth flashed and their lips smacked as they washed by.

  From no
w on whenever I went to sleep, I would be underwater.

  NEXT MORNING AN E-MAIL ON MONICA'S laptop—

  Dear Granny and Grandad

  How are you? Are you having an exiting adventure?

  We love the picture of Granny carrying Jim through

  the floods!

  We are all fine and missing you.

  Lots of love from Bethan

  Bethan is so sweet, said Monica—but I was hoping to get across these sounds alive and do my exiting some time later. I thought perhaps we were exiting last night, and this wind doesn't look like dropping. We'll have a look around Elizabeth City today and go on that charity walk tomorrow, and meet a few people.

  PLEASE SIGN IN, SAID THE YOUNG LADY IN THE Elizabeth City Information Office. Here is a map, and a booklet, and yes there is a grocery store. I am obliged to mention to you that not all grocery stores meet the standards of hygiene that other grocery stores meet.

  We must not miss the Dirty Grocer, I said to Monica.

  We passed along the waterfront where the dick from the Dismal Swamp Canal was waiting in his square plastic trawler for the weather and there was a huge building with a short pagoda-like tower—the Museum of the Albemarle. Please sign in, said the lady on the desk. In the main gallery there was a plough and a traction engine and someone seemed to be building a shed.

  We headed north for the Dirty Grocer.

  Imagine a child has laid out a town on the floor of his playroom, but has put all the buildings in the wrong places and mixed up the kit with another one called Build Your Own Ghetto and one called Small Ugly Sheds of the Late Twentieth Century and one called Assorted Builders' Debris and the layout was much too big so there were not enough pieces to fill the plots.

  Next to a fine church or a charming old wooden house a goalmouth of mud and in the middle a mustard cube, pebble-dashed, with rusting windows, or a rotting bungalow. An alley off one of the main streets looked like a murder had taken place there daily for some time. We picked our way along the smashed pavements.

  The Dirty Grocer was a big shed with broken Coke machines outside. Like most buildings in Elizabeth City it stood in an oversize plot. There was a smell of drains. I am not leaving Jim outside this place, said Monica.

  People were going in and out. I worked out my strategy for when one of them mugged me—Go on, spoil my looks, but don't take any of my money.

  Or just smile and treat it as a normal transaction—Certainly my dear chap, now let me see what I have got on me—turned a bit cold don't you find?

  • • •

  NEXT DAY THE HUNGER WALK. SIGN IN PLEASE, said the man at the desk under the roof in the park, and here is your receipt. Where are you from? Nice of you to support our cause. The walk starts here and goes for four miles.

  Dozens of people came to pet Jim and soon off we went, two hundred of us, walking for the Food Bank of the Albemarle. We were young and old, black and white, fat and thin: mostly fat. We all wore trainers except Jim, who dropped into a fluent saunter. You don't need trainers when you don't touch the ground.

  Do you have a lot of hungry people? I asked the lady alongside.

  Yes, and drugs, particularly in the public housing projects. Half our population is African-American. We try to keep a store of food for when it is really needed. There is nothing here, no industry. Here in the east North Carolina is poor, and then in the middle it is rich, with cities like Charlotte and Raleigh and Greensboro and then it is poor again over in the Appalachian Mountains five hundred miles away. We came here because my husband is a urologist and there were no urologists here and we like boating. Now there is a four-lane highway to Elizabeth City and new building starting up because the military can get from Norfolk in less than an hour.

  What about that museum, I said—forgive my saying but it looks to me like a vanity project.

  That area was one of the poorest, said the lady. A lot of state and federal money went into the museum. When we saw it going up we all thought My God, look how big it is!

  We walked along the waterfront, past the brick or shingle palaces of the rich, and back to the park where the walkers were queueing for free Coke and hot dogs and crisps. I wonder why they do not miss this meal and give it to the poor, said Monica. And instead of the museum they could have bought some pavements.

  From the boat we could see the museum crouched dejected across the bay—without detail or delight, its green roof nearly reaching the ground. Oversized, overpriced, and over there.

  THE EASTERN COAST OF THE USA IS FLAT AND the rivers are broad. Sometimes several of the rivers come together in estuaries and sounds. The widest of the sounds will be the first we meet—Albemarle Sound, the estuary of the Pasquotank and the Perquimans and the Chowan and the Alligator Rivers. It is thirty miles wide. The Albemarle Sound had frightened me for a long time.

  But strangely, though our fear was great, it was not as strong as the longing that came on us in the Pelican Marina before dawn the first morning after the wind had dropped—

  Down the long quay the slow boats glide

  While here and there a house looms white

  Against the gloom of the waterside

  And some high window throws a light

  As they sail out into the night

  Monica and I watched them, the plastic sport-fishers and trawlers and sailboats as they left the quay under the museum and passed across the palaces over the river and dwindled into the earliest light on Albemarle Sound, the masts of the sailboats the last to go.

  Some events open up instincts and longings—a fish on the line, a kiss, applause, a new baby, your first late cut to the boundary. Yes—this is what I am for, this is one of the reasons why I am here.

  Our feelings surprised us both—this longing to sail out into the dawn, this ache to try our courage, to extend our range, to know what we did not know, to be who we were meant to be.

  NEXT MORNING I LOOKED THROUGH THE GALLEY window past the shiny Swedish lamp that I paid too much for and love so much and the Ron Hough roses and castles plaque with the lake and the yachts and there fifty yards away was a real yacht: red hull, white sails, tall and leaning hard, the spray on the window blurring it into an old painting. The Phyllis May rushed into the wind, neither pitching nor rolling, foaming at the neck, most like to a swan. She loves it, said Michele, she's beautiful—we'll never get Brent off the tiller now.

  No one would know it was Brent anyway—he looked just like me. He had bristly hair and a bristly beard and he even had my funny Burmese eyes. Michele was small like Monica, and neat. Maybe we could go home, I thought, and sit in the Star and make the book up and leave Captain Brent and Captain Michele to finish the journey. They would have a lot more chance of finishing it than we would, and no one would know.

  Monica had put her little back-up GPS on the roof and plugged it into her computer and there on the sideboard was the beetle Phyllis May, creeping the magenta line of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, ten miles from shore, right in the middle of Albemarle Sound. Out of the windows on the edges of the sea a hint of darkness, but no land, just the chopping waves and the spray and the rain and the low clouds and boats falling over the horizon and rising behind.

  A hundred-foot powerboat hurled up on us, slinging a six-foot curtain of tea left and right. Such insolence, such force. Brent said something into his VHF and it crackled a reply and slowed and the crew took pictures as it tiptoed by.

  I stood by the door, watching the spray chucked sideways by our bow, and looked at the grey waves and sought the horizon, which was not there. We were going south—we were haulin'.

  Time for my second hour on the tiller. Brent stood with me and told me about missing the crab pots and what to say into the VHF to ask a powerboat to slow down and what to do if it won't and that the crenellation on the edge of the world was the Alligator River Highway Bridge, and tucked in its armpit was the Alligator River Marina.

  We went into the Alligator River. As it was four miles wide you couldn't rea
lly tell.

  We had crossed Albemarle Sound.

  ALLIGATOR MARINA IS A GAS STATION ON ROUTE 64, at the approach to the Alligator River Highway Bridge. There was a lighthouse and a wharf and our ropes were taken by a lady of our age with yellow hair and a stern face. Michele said this was Miss Wanda, who was well known on the Waterway and it would be wise if Brent and I went on deck to negotiate as Miss Wanda did not greatly care for ladies. Half a dozen red-faced men in camouflage stood on the quay and watched us—Hunters, said Michele, for deer, even bear.

  Even boaters, I thought.

  The Alligator River Highway Bridge leads to the North Carolina Outer Banks—the barrier islands that lie out to sea in a bow for two hundred miles and protect the shore from the Atlantic. Along the Outer Banks there are hundreds of wrecks, but there are few inside the Banks. We had met no ocean swell on the Albemarle Sound, just a foot-high chop, and the Banks would shield us for many miles yet.

  Come along the quay and I will fill you with diesel, said Miss Wanda, and smiled.

  Outside the Alligator Marina store there was a car with SHERIFF on the outside and a sheriff on the inside. A notice over the check-out offered smoked alligator. There were T-shirts and plastic lighthouses and plastic fish and plastic pelicans and half a dozen Formica tables and chairs. On the counter fresh coffee and a pot of boiled peanuts—Fill the plastic cup and take to the check-out.

  I was brought up in the war and can eat anything, and I can eat boiled peanuts, but I would rather not—they were soggy and hot and wet and I couldn't get them out of the shells and they tasted of wet starch. Brent took over—when you bite them the hot water can squirt out of the shell, he explained, over your shirt. He was shucking and swallowing the boiled peanuts with one movement of the tongue. Brent has the skills to survive in the most desperate situations.