Narrow Dog to Indian River

by Terry Darlington

  Monica appeared on the bow, Jim in her arms, preparing to abandon ship. Then there was a heave and a slurp and the Phyllis May wallowed sideways and settled.

  Start the engine! shouted the young man.

  I did and dropped into reverse and gave her full welly. The Phyllis May didn't want to move, but she crawled off the bank and came back to life. The young man made a gesture of wiping his brow—I thought you had me there, Cap'n, he said.

  I thought you had me too, I replied.

  The dog barked—he thought we had him as well.

  The dolphins had exhausted themselves and had gone away to tell their mates with those little squeaks dolphins make. I bet they were all squeaking like mad up and down the Atlantic coast and holding on to each other with their flippers.

  The German shepherd dropped the inflatable into gear and with a wag of his tail he was gone.

  I have been thinking what is the matter with you, Terry Darlington, said Monica, and I have worked it out. There is only one term to describe a person like you and do you know what it is?

  Yes, I think I do, I said.

  SO IT WAS LATE, GENTLE READER, WHEN WE reached Wrightsville Beach, which is the resort near to Wilmington, the largest city on the North Carolina coast—mile 283 on the Waterway.

  Hundreds of cormorants were sitting on the telephone wires over the bridge. I didn't know telephones still had wires, but here they were in Wrightsville Beach, and cormorants sitting on them, settling down for the night. There were enough wires to score for a full orchestra and if you used the birds as notes it would have been the Sea Symphony— I could hear it singing in the wires—

  Of sea-captains young or old, and the

  mates-and of all intrepid sailors,

  Of the few, very choice, taciturn, whom fate

  can never surprise, nor death dismay …

  Suckled by thee, old husky nurse-embodying

  thee,

  Indomitable, untamed as thee.

  Just about sums us up, really.

  What do you call those birds? I asked the young lady who was helping us moor.

  I don't know, she said, as if it were a topic no sensible person would explore. Ravens? Blackbirds? Grackles? Spackles?

  NEXT MORNING THE CORMORANTS HAD GONE fishing and Jean, the sister of Oriental Bev with the shark's teeth, showed us round Wilmington, fifteen miles up the Cape Fear River, with her husband Eddie.

  Old wooden houses, classical public buildings, the sun, the river, the university campus, and outside the city long suburbs with large plots and fast food. Then we drove back to Wrightsville Beach and the coast—stilted houses and condominiums and the dunes and the crashing sea. What are condominiums? I asked.

  Apartments, with lots of rules, said Eddie.

  That afternoon Jean and Eddie sailed with us to Carolina Beach. We were glad of their help on the tiller as thanks to the young man in the rubber dinghy and his dog my right shoulder didn't work any more.

  Jean's right leg didn't work very well either. She had gone out of her back door and a fox had jumped her from the top of the garden shed and bitten her twice, very hard. Her muscles were damaged and she had to spend a lot of time making sure she did not get rabies.

  It's a savage land, I said—it was the chiggers got me.

  Eddie and Jean handled the Phyllis May well, which is not surprising as Eddie had been a pilot in the navy and the couple had recently qualified as sea captains—We were hoping for jobs taking boats down the Intracoastal, but people say we are too old—they are looking for kids who will blast along it in ten days.

  The north wind and the current joined in on our side and we were blown down the lakes and cuts at over eight miles an hour, with dunes and the Atlantic to our left, and soon we arrived at Oceana Marina, Carolina Beach.

  Over the road was the ocean. The houses at Carolina Beach are on ten-foot stilts and look a bit peculiar but mock not, stranger, because from time to time a hurricane sends the ocean over the dunes and across the road, spreading hell and destruction.

  RIGHT, SAID MONICA—A RUN FOR JIM. JIM SMELT the sand and pulled past the stilted houses and over the dunes to the edge of the bounding main, which bounded pretty high after days of wind.

  We played the Game.

  You can't play the Game just anywhere—you need plenty of space and not many people, because of the screaming. The wind carried Jim's cries past the surfers but few looked round as they spun and rolled in the high metal waves with the ridges of chalk that fell and thundered. Jim yelled and yelled and I could barely resist his strength. Monica was fifty yards away, now a hundred, and I bent and let Jim slip.

  Jim hit the sand hard every ten feet. He was not bounding—he ran in horizontal flight. His ears were back and he looked straight ahead.

  Like all great sprinters he did not fight for speed—he took power from the air, his blood, his muscles, his balance, his will: each step hurling him faster, relaxed between strides—into the zone, into the place where sportsmen sometimes go and they always say it was easy. Forty miles an hour, and for Jim today it was easy. He started to slow down as he passed Monica and stopped a hundred yards on and stood grinning and drifted back and Monica pulled his ears—my beautiful, my boy.

  The surfers rose and swept and fell and the metal sea threw itself up and fell shattering and the sun was cold and the wind blew foam across the beach in sacksful.

  My beautiful, my boy.

  WE'VE HAD AN E-MAIL FROM MARGARET OF Atlantic Yacht Basin, said Monica—

  There is one thing I meant to mention to Terry after I saw his awful bug bites. Fire ants are prevalent down south and they are dreadful. They get on your ankles, but the first one doesn't bite right away or the second one. They wait until a bunch of them get on you and then they all attack at once. Stings, itches, blisters—they are fearsome creatures and they have been known to kill small animals.

  It says here in the travel guide that insects and animals get worse the further south you go, I said. And it's not just the fire ants. There are bees, hornets and yellowjackets, as well as mosquitoes, chiggers and ticks. Ticks carry Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever. There is no cure for Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever can be fatal. Ticks are everywhere. It says your pet is often the one who carries the tick to you.

  Great, said Monica. I won't be able to let Jim have a run or stroke him.

  It says the black bear can kill you, I said, and an alligator will attack anything that moves. And remember that gentleman on his jetboat on the Intracoastal in Florida and a stingray jumped out of the water and stabbed him in the heart? And what about that report in the Daily Telegraph?—ten people hospitalized last year after attacks by sturgeons.

  Mrs Poirier, who had her jaw wired shut for eight weeks, lost her memory and ran up medical bills of £66,000.

  ‘It was like 1,000 razor blades hitting me at once when that fish jumped.’

  You would think the fish would stay in the water where they belong. And pythons are eating all the pets in Miami and one was found last year with a half-eaten alligator in its jaws. The alligator was six feet long. It must be true—it's in The Economist.

  What are we supposed to do? asked Monica.

  The book doesn't tell you what to do, I said.

  WE WERE GETTING USED TO BANGING ON THE roof—this time it was one of the young men from the marina, with a fine silver fish for our dinner. A bluefish. Watch its teeth, said the young man.

  Pardon, I said, and the fish sank its teeth in my finger to the bone.

  My God, I said to Monica—look at it—it's a piranha. If we fall off the boat they will strip the flesh off us in seconds and our skeletons will fall grinning to the bottom of the cut. In the book they didn't even mention the stingrays or the piranhas.

  What about the foxes? asked Monica. If you don't get to a hospital in forty minutes you die mad and foaming at the mouth. They didn't mention the foxes. What about the snakes that float on the water like a moccasin and ki
ll with a single strike? What about the burrs that Jim gets in his paws and when you pull them off they stick in you like teeth? Even the vegetation attacks you.

  This book is a disgrace, I said—it doesn't mention half the things that get you. It's a whitewash job by the tourist people—you never see an American on the bank or in the woods. The countryside is full of death. The tourist people know it but they won't tell. And they never say what to do, because there is nothing you can do.

  Yes there is, said Monica. We can head back north as fast as we can, and then go home.

  That day there was a tornado in Wilmington. Houses on top of cars and cars in trees. Nine people were killed. There was six minutes' warning.

  AT OCEANA MARINA WE LAY ON THE OUTSIDE pontoon and a dolt in a powerboat rushed by and his wake threw us up and the pontoon came up as we went down and went down as we came up and the drawers opened and the cupboards emptied and Jim ran shivering to his kennel and our mooring ropes snapped.

  Over there under a great bridge Snow's Cut led to the Cape Fear River. A cabaret of pelicans glided and swooped and dove. Pelicans even dive slowly.

  I stood on the pontoon repairing the mooring ropes and worrying about currents. Snow's Cut and the Cape Fear River were known for bad currents and poor markers, and the Cape Fear River was many miles wide and full of big ships. Brent and Michele had insisted on coming to pilot us—The currents are terrible, you will be swept away—so I knew we would be safe but when the captains had gone we still had eight hundred miles ahead and the tides are stronger the further south you go.

  I tried to tighten a rope but I couldn't pull the boat in against the tide, which seemed to be going faster and faster.

  I heard a hissing and I looked up and there was a band of brown in the water a hundred yards away, and it was foaming and kicking up waves. It was coming to get me. It hit the pontoon, which jumped and rejumped, and it carried on under me and poured like a waterfall over the line of rocks which made a breakwater behind us, then more water came and more, dirty and threshing and fast, and I walked along the pontoon and the current was moving quicker than I could walk. My engine would have no chance against this.

  The currents worry me more than the animals and insects, I said to Monica.

  That's the answer then, said Monica, to the wildlife problem. The currents will sweep us out into the Atlantic, and turn us over and drown us then the alligators won't get us or the foxes or the ticks. I don't want to be eaten by a reptile or die foaming at the mouth or covered with spots. I will end my days under the glassy cool translucent wave, with the dolphins, and a bit of dignity and romance.

  What about the piranhas? I asked.

  BRENT AND MICHELE MADE SURE THE CURRENT was with us, and we rushed down Snow's Cut on to the Cape Fear River, which was white silk—on its seaward rim five miles away great ships and little ships and daymarks, like scratches on your retina, mirageing in the early sun.

  Brent stood on the back counter and told me again about the daymarks. These green triangles and red squares on poles are very important, because without them you lose the channel and run aground, or lose direction altogether and sail out into the Atlantic. You keep the red ones on your right and the green ones on your left except when you are going upstream or is it downstream, at which point they change. If you don't know if you are going upstream or downstream I suppose you look at the daymarks but of course that wouldn't help unless you were already sure which way round it all was. Sorry not to be more definite but I hope that helps a bit, because one day you may have to sail down the Cape Fear River, which reaches from one side of the world to the other, and as I say the currents are strong. To my delight Brent got confused about which side of the daymarks to go, but I think he got straight pretty quickly, though I wouldn't know.

  Brent showed me the lines of foam where the currents met, and how when we crossed into the new flow our speed changed. The surface of the water tells you what the wind and the tides are doing, as the clouds demonstrate the currents in the sky. I imagined the deep tides shearing across each other, felt the power, remembered the sea at our windows in Pelican Marina, and felt afraid.

  My God, what's that? A great ship frothing towards us out of the sun, changing shape in the slippery light like Omar Sharif on his camel. I had forgotten what it feels like when you are on a tiny vessel and a big ship is coming your way. The more scared you get the more it seems attracted by the vibrations of your terror. Even if it misses us the wake is sure to sweep us under. She's going over there, said Brent, she's military, and she passed to our left and she was not that big and hardly moving and I was glad Brent had not realized how frightened I was.

  It was Monica's turn on the tiller and she sailed on a quarter of a mile from the shore, and after a while she turned across the tide into the South River, and followed it through the yellow marsh grass which stretched for ever on each side, jigsawed by creeks and patrolled by shrimp boats.

  AT SOUTHPORT I SAT IN THE BOW, DRINKING A bottle of the excellent India Pale Ale our gallant captains had left—an undeserved gift. A cruise ship docked nearby. It was full, as is normal for cruise ships, of the recently dead and those soon to cross over the river—not the Cape Fear River, but the one that is muddy and cold and chills the body and not the soul. They came down their gangplank, carrying those who had crossed over since their last docking, or wheeling them in chairs to their final rest, and wandered into Southport. Mercifully they did not notice the Phyllis May, being occupied with the next step they had to take, which would so very likely be their last.

  The captain of the ship walked along the quay. He was an American, a big chap. I am John, he said, I like your boat. He shook my hand. We are two hundred feet long, he said, and forty feet wide, but there is plenty of room for us on the Intracoastal. About three years ago I had forty narrowboaters from England on board together with a dozen Yanks. It was a cruise on the US canals organized by one of your British waterways magazines. The Brits all started drinking at ten o'clock in the morning and then gathered speed during the day. They were a grand lot—the Yanks were horrified.

  DON CAME ALONG THE PONTOON WITH A BOTTLE of wine—I'll pick you up tomorrow morning.

  Don was a mild and friendly man, slightly built, who had been on the boat alongside when we arrived at Portsmouth in June. His home was here in Southport, three hundred miles down the track. He was our age and had been a pilot in the navy.

  Tomorrow morning was Sunday and he took us to the Episcopal church, with his new wife, Pat. He introduced us to Rhiannon. These are writers, he said.

  Rhiannon was middle-aged, a bit of a looker, tall, well-dressed, a touch arty. Her eyes were grey.

  How interesting, she said—and you folks are from England.

  Her voice was soft and flat. Yes, I said.

  How interesting—and you write books. What sort of books?

  We told her.

  How interesting—where are you going next?

  We told her.

  How interesting—where are you going after that?

  We told her. Her eyes seemed to glow. She turned and there was a whirring and her eyes followed her head round later than they should. I thought I could smell smoke. Her shoulder jerked and she walked away—I'll just die if I don't get that recipe, she was saying—I'll just die if I don't get that recipe.

  She's a robot, explained Monica. You can tell by their eyes, and everything they say follows logically from something else, or if a fuse goes they talk absolute nonsense. Real people talk a sort of half-nonsense all the time—the robot people haven't worked out yet how to copy it.

  The minister came up. He was one of those cheerful little guys who get fat but you know he is still a ball of muscle. He had been in the special forces in Vietnam. He shook my hand and I was afraid he was going to throw me over his shoulder. We didn't talk for long but I liked him a lot. The US has little to fear if it can keep the Episcopal ministry on side. During the service he asked any veterans in the audience to
stand and a quarter of the congregation stood.

  After the service a tall thin woman—You are on a boat?

  Yes, I said, passing through you know.

  Oh well done, said the tall thin woman. She was wearing a twinset and pearls and her tall thin husband had white hair and a tweed suit. They were both quite old.

  Where have you come from on your boat? she asked.

  Portsmouth, Virginia, I said—you are English?

  Goodness yes—English, oh yes indeed.

  They explained they had lived in the US since the fifties, the husband working for a British conglomerate. They sounded like the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.

  Where do you live in England? asked the lady.

  We told her. Oh well done—do you know the Lichesters of Lichfield?

  No, sorry, I said.

  Do you know the Barchesters of Barlaston?

  Sorry, said Monica, but have our card, with the website on it about the book.

  Oh well done, a card. A card—well done.

  They went away.

  That couple are professional English persons, I said to Monica—they have an act you could take on the road.

  They have been on the road for fifty years, said Monica.

  AFTER CHURCH DON BOUGHT US A FINE SEA-food lunch looking over the Waterway and lest we shame him by dying of hunger on his territory before nightfall he followed up with dinner at home.

  Don and Pat lived in St James Plantation, which is a gated community. It took ten minutes to drive from the marina to the community gate and ten minutes to drive from the community gate to Don's house. St James Plantation has three golf courses and a marina, and soon will have a bigger population than Southport. Don explained that the Carolinas are attracting a lot of people from the North because of the climate and the price of property, and gated communities are popular and the properties sell fast.

  Their house was open plan—lots of wood, lots of space. Jim roamed around the polished floors And rugs and found landfall in a corner. That photo is me, said Don, and the alligator is six feet long. I blasted it with a shotgun and it didn't die so I shot it in the eye with my revolver.