The Southeast

Image Gallery WILLIAM WALRON

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REPORTS FROM AMERICA

From Blackbeard to the dogfish hole

Erected in 1859, the 150-foot Cape Lookout Light-house still flashes "I am right here" every night.

What on earth happened to the "Ye"?

BREVARD, NC—It was well past midnight, and I sat glued to the television weather channels as Hurricane Hugo's 135-mile-an-hour winds bore down on the eastern Carolinas. As reports of damage poured in, I was torn between grief over the destruction in and around elegant Charleston and relief that the beautiful coast of North Carolina, which I had looked in on only two weeks before, was little affected by the storm.

Many visitors to this stretch of land and water sandwiched between South Carolina and Virginia tend to find one favorite spot to return to year after year. In contrast, I'm equally drawn to many of the area's attractions; the stately past and dynamic present in the bustling port of Wilmington; the sleepy ambience of the village of Ocracoke on the southern portion of the Outer Banks; the sense of time standing still I find in Bath, North Carolina's oldest (1705) incorporated town; the Federal, Italianate, and Victorian homes of New Bern; and the youthful mind-set and the art-colony atmosphere of Manteo on Roanoke Island, the site of England's first attempt to settle this continent. Even so, a small area of North Carolina's Carteret County that calls itself Down East seems to me the quintessence of everything that's best about this sea-and-sky lowland.

Lying just east of the North River, Down East is dotted with several small maritime communities strung along Core Sound—towns so tightly knit that, as one person put it, "there are no such things as secrets." It includes places like Harkers Island, the villages of Atlantic, Davis, and Sealevel, and—at the tip of the county—Cedar Island, best known for the ferry that makes regular runs to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks.

Each of these waterside hamlets contains numerous direct descendants of pre-Revolution-ary settlers, many of whom still speak in a unique and rapid Elizabethan brogue, richly interspersed with their own sea-salty expressions. Hearing it makes me always want to turn casual encounters into lengthy conversations, just so I can enjoy the dialect's melodic meanderings. People don't seem to mind. These friendly "high-tiders"—as Down Easters call people who are raised "on the water"—move at a slow and easy pace anyway and tend not to get "agawaited" (aggravated) very easily at "ding batters" or "dit dots," as outsiders are called.

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