Mattamuskeet Lodge

             

Mattamuskeet Lodge (now closed)

Father and I left the wedding reception at the country club early. Even so, the roads were lightless except for occasional security lights on remote farms we passed along winding, empty country backroads that by-passed all towns between Kinston and Lake Mattamuskeet. With nothing to see from the car for two hours, we could have been anywhere on the planet. I had never been to that part of eastern North Carolina, so I would have been lost in daytime. At night, as a teenager, it was more like being in a horror film when the characters are lost and hesitant to stop anywhere to ask for directions, expecting antipathy, if not hostility, from locals who might prefer outsiders remain disoriented and unlocated.

              When finally we pulled into a small parking lot beside a large white building with broad steps leading up to a double door, it was nearly midnight, and no one greeted us. Only the deep impenetrable dark of night surrounded us. We could not even see the lake. A single bulb lit the stairs. Father pushed the door open, and we entered with all our gear: luggage, waders, shotguns and ammunition. We had arrived for my first goose hunt. Opposite the door against the far wall stretched a worn wooden counter empty except for a guest register and a key on top of a card with our last name, room number, and a scrawled note stating that breakfast would be served in the dining room at 5 AM.

              Was anyone else around? Where was the dining room? Who wrote the note, and where were they? Would someone wake us in the morning? How would we find our guide? I felt as confused and trepidatious as Jonathan Harker arriving at the Count’s remote Transylvania castle.

We could see a hallway to the left of the counter that we guessed might lead to the rooms, so we walked that direction and down darkened, creaking wooden floors until we found number 4 on a door to our right. Turning the old loose door knob, we pushed the door aside. The room was sparsely furnished with two twin beds, each covered with a thin blanket. A simple straight back wooden chair and a table stood under the one window. The window rose to the ceiling, but nothing was visible outside. Still, I could picture someone watching as I stood there preparing to close the curtains. There was no telephone, no way to call for help, set a wakeup call, or order room service. A small bathroom with faded pale green tile opened off to the left at the back of the room. The towels had been worn threadbare. We both dropped our gear and undressed for bed.

              Before I knew I had slept, there was a hard knock at the door. Our room remained unlit. It was still night. But it was 4:30 AM, time to wake. We dressed heavily in layers for a winter morning in a shooting blind on a cold, windy lake, then walked back down the hall the way we came when we arrived, hoping someone would be at the front desk to direct us to breakfast. As we walked, we looked around for signs of a dining room and saw only the absence of notable features from the night before, dull walls and shadowy corners.

              No one waited at the front desk, but a shard of light sliced the hall farther along. Inside we found rows of large tables, two of which had pitchers of juice, flatware and white stoneware coffee mugs. It could have been a prison dining hall for all the warmth and lack of welcoming atmosphere. Not at all my idea of a hunting lodge unless conjured by the brothers Grimm. We sat at the first table and each asked the other if he had slept well. Naturally, we had. Reaching our destination so late and finding it to be more eerie inn than cozy hunting lodge with a bright fire burning in the stone hearth, then sleeping less than five hours, our sleep had been deep if briefer than usual.

              Noise. A man pushed through a swinging door from the kitchen to ask if we wanted cereal or a hot breakfast. The aromas of sausage and coffee swirled in his wake.

              “Hot,” we both replied. We poured ourselves glasses of tepid orange juice to sip while we waited.

              Another table was set for guests, but no one showed. Why? My imagination returned to possible consequences in a lonely lodge in the middle of nowhere. Who would miss them? Father and I traded senseless banter until the cook emerged from the kitchen with fried eggs, sausage, grits, biscuits, and coffee. Ravenous after eating only hors d’oeuvres at the wedding reception the previous evening, we devoured the breakfast.

              As we drained the last of our coffee, a man in camouflage hunting attire strolled into the room and asked if my father was Dr. P. (Few people could pronounce our name correctly, and we were accustomed to it, taking no offense.)

              “Yes, I am.”

              “Name’s Carl. I’ll be your guide today. You have a swan permit?”

              “No. Why?”

             “That’s fine. For those who do, we usually just knock that off first thing. Those birds are so big, they are hard to miss. Kind of like shooting a B-52 bomber gliding in slow for a landing, so we shoot one of them first and then hunt for geese. Anyway, take your time. I’ll be waiting up front.”

              Last slurps of coffee, then we hurried to the restroom (not knowing when we might be near one again), grabbed our guns, filled our coat pockets with ammo and headed up front to connect with our guide. He would drive us to the boat ramp and ferry us to the blind in his boat through an icy fog. We would be sitting in the blind with the decoys arrayed across the water before sunrise. As we sat shivering in the pre-dawn dark and brisk northerly winter wind, we strained to see anything moving in the sky. In a low voice, Carl told us what to expect, which birds to target, and he insisted we wait for his okay before we shoot, so we would not shoot too early or try to kill birds too high (“skybusting”) and, especially, not to shoot out-of-season birds that also wintered over on Mattamuskeet. In the dim light of dawn, anything with wings might appear to be a goose to novices like us. With an impaired depth of field in the low light, even a sparrow or any of the generic tweety birds might appear fair game. Weary but excited, we sat on a hard board bench a few feet above the lake and waited for the sun to creep over the horizon.

              We heard geese and swans honking and calling back and forth among their flocks before we could see them coming off surrounding fields to land on the lake, honking as if powered by their own sound. “V” formations of geese littered the sky at the limits of our vision while we gazed along the surface of the lake between our blind and the shoreline searching for the peppered clusters of birds intending to land. As the sky turned gray with the light of the rising sun, we could see a few flocks in the distance. Our eyes began to adjust to the dim light, fingers tested the safeties on our shotguns, and we double-checked that chambers were loaded. We tracked birds that were too far away to shoot, testing our sight and reflexes.

              Flights landed in front of us, left and right, all too far away to shoot. Carl nudged my leg and nodded toward a small group of three that banked and dived toward our decoys, beginning to lock their wings in long arcs as they slowed, dropping in low and close. I stood, selected my target, led the bird slightly as it approached us, then pulled the trigger. The sharp and sudden explosion of the shotgun quickly vanished into the mist over the lake as the Canada goose crumpled into the water near the blind. My first goose. And the only one killed that day by me or Father. No other flights came close enough to shoot.

              I had shot doves, and I found myself wishing there had been a fanfare or skyrockets exploding overhead to commemorate my first goose. Then again, it was just a bird, a beautiful wild bird with a black head and a body of light gray, dark gray and white feathers that had flown thousands of miles trying to reach a warm place to spend the winter. A dead bird. My father wanted to have it mounted. My first goose. We should have eaten it. There was no trophy, only wild meat.

 

 Swans on Lake Mattamuskeet

 

 

Juniper on Lake Mattamuskeet near Shore

HURRICANES

This week, there are three storms off the eastern coast of the US with the possibility of developing into hurricanes, Fred, Grace and Henri. Each emerged as a late player in the hurricane lottery with minimal strength projected. Yet we follow them if for no other reason than to reassure ourselves that they will all remain away from the shores of North Carolina (the Gulf shores and Bermuda have our sympathy).

Every year, June 1 marks the begining of Hurricane Season. The National Hurricane Center posts its list of names for the year and starts tracking potential storms, low pressure depressions, wherever they originate in the Atlantic. The largest and most worrisome seem to spin out of the Sahara, past the Cape Verde Islands and eastward to the Leeward Islands. The storms that become hurricanes before reaching the Caribbean pack the fiercest punch, fully formed with an eye and covering hundreds of miles of the planet’s ocean.

Although the tropics loom in the back of our minds early in the summer, it is August through September that concern us most. Summer heat peaks on land, and sea water temperatures rise to provide the “fuel” for tropical storms. There is little we can do aside from being prepared for loss of power: solar lights, camp stoves, a generator for the refrigerator and a small airconditioning unit to ease the tropical humidity hauled north by the storm. If the storm arrives as a Category 3 or worse, we would likely evacuate, a false sense of safety as storms that intense spread across a massive swath of real estate, so the “safe zone” can easily be an area too far to reach in a practical amount of time. Hurricane Florence, a few years back, was such a storm. Safety was projected to be west of Greensboro, i.e., the mountains, the opposite end of the state, a six hour drive under favorable conditions and normal traffic. However, if we fled west, the flooding delivered by the storm would likely prevent us from returning to our home for two weeks or more as area highways would be inundated by local rivers swelling beyond their banks with the ultimate rise and fall of storm waters continuing well past the departure of the storm itself. Trees blown down by high winds and/or tornadoes would block roads that might not be flooded. Our conundrum: stay in our home and experience the storm directly with no option to depart once the storm arrives, or plan on paying for more than a week of food and lodging somewhere near the mountains without knowing when we might be able to return.

Hurricanes are complicated. I do not mean in the sense of how they function as weather, although they can be difficult to track and future paths challenging to predict. They are complicated in terms of the problems they present for those who live in the target region. Flooding, loss of power, loss of communication, flying debris, falling trees (especially the tall pines prevalent in the coastal plain). Services that customarily provide health and safety, such as police and ambulance services, may be unable to reach those who need them and also unable to reach the hospitals where serious treatment is available. The complication comes down to this: whatever decisions you make before the storm is upon you, you live with. The birds and squirrels have long since fled. There is an eerie quiet that accompanies the approaching storm, a gloomy stillness that drops over the world. As a practical matter, you cannnot change your mind and leave once the winds and torrential rains begin to limit visibility and impair safe travel. You spend days waiting and watching the progresss of the hurricane only to be stuck in your home waiting and watching the storm as it rages around you, mostly the sound of rain bands pulsing past and the noise of trees whipping to and fro interrupted occasionally by the explosion of a transformer.

A day before the eye makes landfall, the outer bands of the storm begin to arrive like family early for dinner, expected but not on time. Skies dim as clouds skim across the blue, thicken, and scattered showers test the air in bursts forecasting the torrents that follow. Winds mostly remain light, their power absorbed into the inner circles of the storm’s vortex. If we are in the path of the hurricane, we pay closer and closer attention to the speed, direction and predicted path of the eye. We seek telltale conditions such as wind direction. If we are west of the eye, northerly winds will lead the hurricane. If we are east of the eye, southerly winds will arrive hot, aggressive and carrying the highest gusts, the heaviest rains. East of the eye lies the most severe damage zone, the red and purple on the radar, the spawning ground for tornadoes.

By the time the eye crosses onto the land, darkness has descended, dusk in the day, impenetrable black if the night. We are enclosed in a disorienting bubble of limited information, limited view, surrrounded by the droning of wind and rain. We listen for broken limbs cracking through the night and the beeping alarm of weather alerts. No matter how many flashlights you light, the inside of the house is dim. This might be cozy on a winter night with snow softly drifting, but the scene feels more like a horror film when the sparse lighting and quiet suggests impending doom, the approach of a zombie or the disappearance of a guest who just stepped into the kitchen for a cup of tea. We read by headlamps, one part of the brain following the words while the other listens for any break in the sounds of the storm, a falling branch, dropping pine cones, surprisingly strong gusts of wind, the roar of a train that might indicate a tornado.

Time slows, each second a full and casual breath. Exhausted from the preparations and the anxiety of studying the approach of the hurricane, sleep should come easily. It does not. Part of each of us knows that we need to remain alert, hear the crash of damage before it harms any of us, hear the shattering in time to throw a tarp over a broken window or door to minimize the rain that blows into the house. And the clock barely marks seconds as minutes, minutes as hours. Only when the storm has departed and the winds subsided, the sun rises in a clearing sky, do we begin to see how the weather has ravaged our world, what has survived and what has not.

 

                                                          Hurricane Florence Storm Debris

 

                                                                        Walls Missing

                                                                Rocks from the Seawall

                                                        The Sky of the Passing Storm

 

Life on the Neuse River

 Alligators, Bull Sharks and Vibrio

Growing up in coastal North Carolina, many people I knew dreamed of retiring to the coast, and some of them kept a cottage for weekends and summer vacations before they retired. When we decided to dock our sailboat in Oriental, the opportunity to live surrounded by water excited us even though we did not truly know what to expect. We had a dinghy with an outboard and two sea kayaks for exploring the river and local creeks, and of course, we could easily sail the wide river at our leisure. I thought I knew a bit about the river after having grown up in Kinston, a town midway the river’s course. In Kinston, the river flowed a sluggish mocha muddy brown through dense cypress swamps. Closer to the mouth of the river, the water remained dark but not obviously polluted despite my memory of when a local pork processing plant used to dump pig carcasses in the river. Still, the river appeared dead as it stretched for miles with no visible current.

The Neuse River flows from north of Raleigh, the current capital of North Carolina, to the Pamlico Sound several miles downstream from New Bern, the eighteenth century capital of the state when governors lived in Tryon Palace at the confluence of the Trent River and the Neuse. The widest river in America, the Neuse has been thoroughly abused, contaminated by municipal sewage and agricultural spillage along its length. Connected to the ocean thirty miles south by various creeks and canals, inlets and estuaries, the river is salty enough to support all manner of sea creatures from oysters to shrimp, sea trout, red and black drum, tarpon, dolphins and sharks while alligators lurk in the adjacent marshlands. Rumor has it that the only ocean creatures not previously spotted in the river are whales (yes, dolphins are members of the cetacea family). Smart mammals.

While our sailboat was docked at Whittaker Point Marina, we enjoyed a ten mile unobstructed view upstream, our faces cooled by the prevailing southwest winds. Pods of dolphins played in the river and sometimes swam lazily up Whittaker Creek to feed on shrimp. Cow nose rays gathered in uncountable numbers, at times appearing to create an undulating light brown floor in the shallow water of the cove. Jellyfish bloomed seasonally, and blue crabs filled our traps during the warmer months. Sadly, all the oyster beds had expired. On the peninsula, a pair of ospreys maintained a nest in the top of a dead pine that I was sure each storm would topple. But year after year, they called to each other with a high pitched screech and hovered high in the sky above the cove or river scouting for fish they could dive on. We marveled how they always carried the fish back to the nest head first to preserve their aerodynamics.

A soft-spoken gentleman named Mark often walked the dock fishing in the afternoon. He told me his family was tired of fish and usually offered me or other liveaboards a large sea trout or flounder when he had good fishing. Some people think that flounders are limited in what they can eat because of their mouths being sideways at the head of a body that swims horizontally and hides itself in the soft bottom, eyes on top. It is easy to overlook just how wide its jaws can open. Mark once caught a 24 inch flounder with a conspicuously distended belly. The misshapen belly looked like a tumor, so his wife refused to cook the fish. Mark cleaned it anyway because he knew he would eat it. When he cut into the belly, he found the source of the misshapen gut. An 8 inch croaker. Whole. As Mark noted, “That big fish was so aggressive that, even with a whole croaker in its stomach, it still seized the lure I cast. These flounders are more voracious than people think.”

Although we knew there could be sharks in the river, we never saw one and never worried about them because we never swam in the nasty water. In addition to the reports of human waste after hurricanes as well as knowing we were downstream of several cities and towns (including Oriental) that released their sewage, treated or not, the creeks of the local estuaries also hold vibrio, a flesh eating bacteria that killed one person in Oriental while we lived there. Mix a small open wound with infected water and vibrio can flourish. Emergency rooms do not always recognize the threat at first, but even if they do, the patient may die because the bacteria spreads so quickly through the body. Commerical fishermen dose their cuts liberally with bleach. Even Scout, our black Labrador, avoided the water, unless he fell in; each time he swam his eyes and ears would get goopy and need treatment.

As for the sharks we did not see, a wildlife officer assured me that bull sharks were common. I pulled into Endurance Seafood one afternoon and noticed a stuffed six foot bull shark hanging from the roof. I ask Keith if he had bought it from someone. “No, we caught it in our net.” “Near here?” “Yep.” A few years later, a young woman was driving a jet ski and trying to pull her father up on water skis. As she towed him through the water, a bull shark bit a hunk out of his gluteus maximus. Thanks to swift action by his daughter who rescued him from the water, wrapped the wound and hurried him to the hospital, the bite was not fatal.

We associate alligators with the upper reaches of the creeks where the marsh is most dense and few people venture. However, a couple years ago, one of our friends who lives on the river spotted something swimming along the seawall while she was pouring her coffee. Thinking it was an otter, she called for her husband to come watch. He grabbed his binoculars. “Honey, that’s an alligator. Looks about nine feet long.” We have heard rumors of a 12 foot gator up Kershaw Creek, a 14 foot mother gator lounging off the Camp Don Lee beach with her babies climbing onto her back and jumping off, and a 12 foot gator up Baird’s Creek. With perennial reports of alligators all around the area, I never paddle up small creeks without being alert for nests or eyes or any other signal that I was invading an alligator’s habitat. Yet, I have not seen one in more than ten years of living here. On one level, that suits me fine. I would like to see one in the wild (the one I saw in the Ten Thousand Islands was too small to fully satisfy my curiosity), but I know that Murphy’s Law means that I will see the next one at a time and place not of my preference. The gator that attacked a kayaker on the upper Waccamaw in NC in July 2020 (Pedro Jose aka Peter Joyce video of "Alligator Charging Kayak") looked about eight feet or less, but the thrust of its snout was sufficient to capsize the kayak.

Wildlife is not the only hazard in the river. When we lived at the marina, sometimes I would assist inbound boaters, catching and securing a line. Many had never been on the Neuse previously. I recall one power boat manned by two solid construction guys from New Jersey. They had picked up the boat in Wilmington and proceeded to make a long fast run up the Intracoastal Waterway in hope of making it back to Jersey in two days. They said the run had been easy, but they were relieved to reach the Neuse before nightfall so they could tie up, eat dinner and rest before the next long day. As they emerged from Adam’s Creek and spotted Oriental across the river, they relaxed. Too soon. They had never crossed the Neuse and assumed it was a quiet body of water like the rest of the ICW they had traversed that afternoon. But a stiff southwest wind had stirred, and the river was wild with whitecaps. The boaters were unprepared for rough water. How could a mere river lift waves and chop to four feet? We, on the other hand, had both observed and experienced the angry fetch that ripped the river to shreds and crashed the bows of huge phosphate barges with spray that rose twenty feet and more into the air. As I caught the dockline, I looked into the eyes of the “first mate”. He was shaken, his eyes locked in the wide-eyed stare of fear. When the captain/owner stepped on deck, his face revealed the same. He seemed on the verge of tears, the fear of sinking.

“Is the river always this rough?”

“No, you just got lucky. It does get sporty though.”

“God, I wasn’t sure we’d make it across. When we came out of Adam’s Creek, I thought we would have a quiet crossing, home free y’know. I couldn’t believe how badly we were tossed around.”

I just smiled and nodded my head. “Well, you’re safe now. You can relax.” And I thought to myself, you’re in a power boat designed for lakes and quiet water. If you did not know that when you bought it, you have more surprises ahead of you. The two slept late before heading north on a calm river the following morning.

Other wildlife included a myriad of frogs, tree frogs, bull frogs, all mixing in a nighttime symphonic serenade. Several varieties of woodpeckers, kingfishers, mink, and deer. Pelicans, both brown and, one year, white. The annual manatee who overstayed the summer season. Migrating ducks of all species. Never have I so enjoyed living where I was surrounded by all that was wild. There was an odd comfort in being trapped aboard the boat by a winter storm and icy docks with buffleheads and scoters swimming past in the gray and white swirl of blowing snow while I sipped a cup of hot tea.