Waiting for Isabel

“If anything will level with you, water will.” A.R. Ammons

By Mccabe Coolidge

Isabel has left. Hurricane season ended last month. But me, I wonder. I wonder about all that has been covered by water. Villages, fields, farms, old growth logs, docks, islands. And the memories. I wait for them to be uncovered, covered, an unending cycle.

A few years ago, I went sailing on Sonora Lake in the Sierras of Northern California. I sailed north, leaving plenty of space between the boat and shore and was just about to come about when I felt this dull “thud,” and the 22-foot Catalina came to an abrupt stop.

“Oh, I should have told you, that’s a hay baler that the farmer left when they dammed up this valley. The farmer just walked away, angry and frustrated about losing his farm. He left everything. Over there, in front of the manzanita tree, his tractor lies in six feet of water, I don’t go near that shore.” My friend John leans under the mainsail and points to a piece of water with little ripples surrounding it. He pulls up the centerboard and I let out the mainsail as we make a slow retreat from the underwater farm.

It’s noon on Wednesday and the waters are six inches over the dock, horse dung from Carrot Island and seaweed strewn up by the storm out in the Atlantic come floating over the dock toward shore, followed by an old turtle who I think has died until it runs into a pier, its flappers stretch out andit dives out of sight. I pull up the crabpot and discover a 22-inch flounder, and three blues crabs, one stone crab and empty them in the white plastic bucket, rinse off the crab pot, and tie it down to the dock. I break off one of the legs of the stone crab and throw it back into the creek, the custom along the coastal waters of North Carolina. I look up. The sky is getting hazy, misty, fast. Hurricane Isabel is on her way.

A decade ago while swimming near an island on Fontana Lake in the Smoky Mountains, my foot struck something hard. The water was too murky to dive into so I asked an old-timer that evening what I might have struck with my foot.

“Oh don’t you know, that’s where Moore Spring used to be. A right fine little village before they dammed up this lake. Needed to do it for some reason, had to do with World War II.”
Nailing up plywood covering my neighbor Melva’s window, I turn to gaze out toward the Atlantic where there is a long stretch of a low lying island, Shackleford Banks. When a hurricane hit at the turn of the twentieth century, gardens and homes were wiped out, livestock drowned, fresh water wells polluted. They abandoned their seafaring village, Diamond City, ferrying all scavenged building materials, pets, and clothing to the mainland, Morehead City, leaving only the cemetery, which is still there on high ground. Their new neighborhood is called “Promised Land.”

Gazing out past Shackleford, I can see the surf bounding up and past the first row of dunes. I’m three miles away, the storm has shifted direction and is coming in from the southeast. As I climb down the ladder, all windows protected by the plywood, the bright sunny morning has turned into a bright haze. I can’t see the Atlantic nor Shackleford, only the hazy outline of Carrot Island, just a quarter of a mile away. And the wind is dropping fast. An eerie calm hovers while the tide has turned and I still have to get my sailboat on a trailer and haul her out, tie her to a tree in my backyard. and hope for the best.
In the mid-seventies, I was hit by an internal storm. My oldest daughter was diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis and was given no more than a couple of years to live. Quickly I moved my family from an apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina to a parcel of land, twenty minutes south, near the Haw River.

The Army Corps of Engineers were proceeding to dam up the New Hope Creek and the Haw River to create a large body of water to be named Jordan Lake. But first the Corps had to clear the land of houses, barns, fences, and inhabitants. I bid a dollar on a log cabin and was given the deed as long as I moved it in thirty days. Like Lincoln logs, my friends and I moved her and then put her up on my five acres. By winter the dam was completed and waters covered the valley, the site of generations old family farms.

Ten years later, I bought a sailboat and went sailing along the western shore of Jordan Lake, near where my log cabin originally stood. A bald head eagle was roosting in an old dead tree, near the shore. I came back the next year, during a drought and found the undercarriage of an old car, rusting axles of a farm wagon, implements left by the owner of my log cabin. Not everything was cleared away. Who was he? Would he care to know that his old log cabin has been rejuvenated, transplanted and provides a sanctuary for a troubled family?

The wind has shifted to the east and is strengthening, it’s two hours past high tide and I hustle with a friend down to the public ramp to pull my sailboat. I have to wait in line. Finally I pull her up, forgetting about the horizontal branches of a live oak tree, drive the mast right into them. It’s dark before I’ve untangled the mess and store the boat and trailer in the backyard. The wind is whistling. My marine radio says it’s gusting 35-40 mph and clocking around to the northeast.

When I was ten years old, I took my first ride on a glass bottom boat. It put putted along the drop off. I had swum out there many times in summer with a mask and snorkel, but when I leaned over and saw so many different colored fish, I was amazed. Perch and small mouth bass, a walleye, and lake trout passed by.

Later that summer, a couple of professors from Northern Michigan College came and asked it they could walk out in front of our cottage to look for sunken logs. My dad said, “Sure,” but we both wondered why they were interested. They clumped into the lake with their black rubber flippers on until waist deep, they slowly descended and all I could see were the air bubbles. Much later, a ball popped up and another one. Then they came ashore and explained they were researching old growth pine trees, the ones that early foresters had pulled across the frozen lake with a team of horses to a nearby sawmill. But many logs on sleds were lost when they fell through the ice and were lost and were now valuable.

“You know what I think? It was just a good old mullet blow!” Melva whispers this to me as she watches me hike the plywood back down the ladder a day later. Melva and I hadn’t heard yet what happened down east or up Adams Creek where a tremendous amount of surging and flooding occurred or even nearby Town Creek where anchored power and sailboats were driven ashore, lifted over Turner Street and deposited in the backyard of an adjacent neighborhood. One of the first reports I heard was that five wild horses were washed ashore onto Harkers Island, drowned by the surge. Later, a ranger at Cape Lookout reported a newborn foal with her mother standing behind the lighthouse. Somehow they swam safely over from Shackleford Banks.

The local television station provides photos of Nags Head and Hatteras. Highway 12 is gone, houses were washed out to sea and a new inlet was created south of Hatteras. A breach in the island, ten to twenty feet deep in places, and school kids have to take the ferry to school. At Food Lion, the next day, Lee talks to me as he fills the wine shelves, “My God! I was looking out the window and Betty’s roof flew past, I couldn’t believe it. Hell, I ducked, even though I was inside the house. You know many talk about the storm of 1933. Isabel was just like that one.” His eyes soar upward, past the florescent lights, beyond Food Lion’s roof, up toward that unimaginable God, the one with fury, the one who calms.

The wild horses across the creek are feeding on all the new green spartini. Yesterday a half dozen dolphins came plowing up the creek against the tide, which is unusual for them. Usually they cavort, jump, leap, and fish with the tide. I’ve raked the horse dung off the lawn, swept the dock of the detritus from the flood tides, and even mowed the lawn. Here it is, the day after New Year’s and the grass is still green. One of our live oaks got toppled so I chain sawed it up and will wait for the winter of 2004 to put in my fireplace. I’ve never burned live oak before. What will that be like? A salty residue? A reminder of September 2003.

One of my writing projects in October was to research a little creek, the Green Mill Run, a tributary of the Tar River. The Tar becomes the Pamlico Sound as it runs east toward the Atlantic Ocean. I wanted to see what Hurricane Isabel did to it so I walked along its banks observing the massive number of logs, styrofoam cups, old tires strewn about. Then I saw a man digging near Green Springs Park. I jumped down the bank and watched him.

After a time he ambled over, picked up a wooden frame with screen on one side, shuffled it a bit, and picked out a large looking tooth.

“Think maybe that’s a white shark?” He looks at me as if I might know. I shook my head and watched his right hand scramble the stones and one by one he found some one half inch ebony colored teeth.
“Shark’s teeth, plenty of them, here you want some?”

“Sure,” I said, holding out my palm and he quickly filled it with a dozen more.
“My name’s Jimmy Holden, what’s yours?”

“McCabe. How often do you come down here?”

“Oh, I walk up and down the creek after a big storm, been coming here for six months. Every Saturday. Started here at 7:30 in the morning, I’m getting kind of hungry, what time is it?”

“Oh, about 3:30, I guess.”
“Really. Well I think I’ll pick up my shovel and get on back. Good meeting ya. Whad you say your name was again?”

McCabe. A family name out of Duluth Minnesota. Crew and captains on the freighters of the Great Lakes. Only one captain in our family went down with his ship in a storm. Charles, in the early 1900s. Aunt Marg who remembers him when she was a little girl told me, “He shouldn’t have been out there, last trip before winter. November. Really cold, big winds. They’ve never found the ship or the crew, iced over too fast.” I have a very old photo of Charles, a great bunch of a man, shaggy beard, sea captain’s hat, a walking cane, a dog sits nearby. That’s about it, a seafaring man, he and his ship, at the bottom of Lake Superior. That’s all I know of my ancestor. The Edmund Fitzgerald, a great ore carrier, went down several decades ago, a popular folk song tells of that storm, the sinking. But all those hundred of ships, they remain hidden in the cold dark deep.

Plentiful cotton and tobacco now cover the land along the banks of the Green Mill Run and the Tar River. Sharks teeth, whale bones, femurs of tigers have been found along Green Mill Run, a 100 miles inland from Cape Hatteras. But a million years ago, for as far as you could see, water covered the earth.