Over the Years
In the earliest years on the Outer Banks, nothing like a truly good restaurant existed here, outside of Owens’ Family Restaurant at the bottom of Nags Head. In the 70s, if you wanted a decent meal, you cooked it yourself. But as the place became increasingly more popular with the demanding Washington DC crowd, their taste for better than Wee Winks hot dogs microwaved cheeseburgers began to change the scene.
Elizabeth’s was the first restaurant in Duck to receive starred reviews. It was where we used to celebrate–anniversaries and birthdays—always prime excuses. Elizabeth’s sat tucked away from Route 12 hidden amongst trinket and beachwear stores. It was a formal, five course dinner place, wine and cheese platters, soft candlelight, intimate tables in alcoves and excellent service. The menu was French with only two sittings per night. It was reviewed in Fodor’s travel guide. Reminded me of L’Auberge Chez Francois in Great Falls, or the Inn at Little Washington. On the Outer Banks of all places.
Leonard, the proprietor, would circulate through at one point in the evening, sitting with his guests, a glass of wine in hand. The restaurant’s wine list was a heavy black book, thick with wines I’d never heard of, and we did our best to become acquainted. Two pages listed Leonard’s personal collection of Pétrus vintages, way above our price range even now–and possibly above our pallets. Leonard was, as the euphemism goes, a sizable man, retired from a law career that must have provided him an ample income to match his girth. The food, from morsels of shad roe on delicate cucumber wafers, to first courses of sushi-grade tuna barely browned, nested in a beurre blanc sauce, to second courses of duck comfit with raspberries and onto desert—accompanied by the sommelier’s finest wine pairings. It was an education in living well.
Sadly, Elizabeth’s has been closed for a few years now. I hope Leonard is enjoying his retirement from being retired. One waitress we ran across at Blue Point who we recognized from Elizabeth’s told us Leonard had sold the Pétrus collection for a hefty sum.
The Blue Point, by contrast, began as a modest place with ambitions above what’s commonly found in a touristed beach town. It sat hugging the Sound, a funky, clapboard house-sized burger tavern with checkerboard flooring, retro high top bar seats and formica tables, the cook line flanking the cluster of tables. Hard to recognize the place now; it’s tripled in size, has an outdoor deck and lawn—still overlooking the Sound. Blue Point has grown into a top restaurant, and in its wake, several other aspiring places have opened. Seems the Great Falls folks, along with their great bank accounts, landed on the Outer Banks a while ago.
Arriving in Duck, usually close to dinner, my personal tradition is to stop at The Roadside, a far more laidback hangout. Their Pom Julio comes with that top drawer tequila, pomegranate liquor and lime, prepared in a frosted martini glass. Makes the five hour trip almost worthwhile. The owners are ex-hippies whose daughters are now part of the operation.
On a raw, rainy November night, Roadside is a great place to hunker down at the narrow bar for a cocktail and watch the cooks prepare their version of a southern classic, tomato pie.
Running in Place
When I first came to the Outer Banks in the late 70s, I was a distance runner with no place to train. Training for the fall racing season meant running through the hot, humid summer days. And on the Outer Banks there were no sidewalks and no road shoulders; either run in the sand or run on the road–and pray the RVs saw you. And biking was downright dangerous. So I would dog laps on the drive circling the Wright Memorial in Kill Devil Hills under a brutal summer sun.
Now a bike trail paralleling Route 12 extends from Corolla south to the end of Nags Head.
Several years ago, D caught a wild hair, and talked me into joining a group of bikers planning a ride from Cumberland, Maryland to DC along the C&O Towpath.[1] 180-some miles in three days, requiring we train–again–through the summer, mainly training our butts, wrists and backs.
That summer, our intrepid leader, Rob, found a perfect biking course leaving from the house in Duck.
Rob’s course begins on the bike trail paralleling Route 12, heading south through Duck village. Then the stretch where you peel off into Southern Shores, dropping under a near continuous canopy of live oaks and quiet neighborhood streets, crossing the Route 158 highway coming off the bridge to find a lazy trail beside The Woods, a road running south on the Sound side through Kitty Hawk’s Coastal Reserve, (avoiding the Route 12 bike trail is in full sun through Kitty Hawk and Kill Devil Hills–with multiple driveways and tourists who don’t always see bikes.) Instead,
The Woods trail is in shade and quiet. A brief stretch on Kitty Hawk Road delivers you to Moore Shore Road (say it fast) where you’ll come on heaven in the guise of cattails and marshland, and a view looking out on Kitty Hawk Bay with Albemarle Sound beyond. Crossing the black water creek, all you hear are the cattails rustling in the breeze coming off the water.
The highlight, without question, is the several mile stretch from Moore Shore Road to Bay Drive. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll understand why. Ever seen osprey and eagles soaring on thermals? Yes, you can drive to Moore Shore Road and walk this stretch, but the anticipation as you bike those miles south, the feeling when you arrive, it isn’t the same.
Then if you get cranking again, you’ll travel the western edge of Kill Devil Hills–and the reason so many people have built homes there. this is Carolina the way the natives like to live. Eventually, the road swings south around the Wright Memorial bringing you back to Route 12 on the oceanside of the island. From our place in Duck to Nags Head and Route 12 is an approximate thirty mile round trip. Continuing further south along Route 12 brings you to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a National Park since 1937. Bring your suntan lotion and a full camelback of water. Bring your best mind–and eyes for the view.
[1] “The 184.5 mile long Chesapeake & Ohio Canal is located along the north bank of the Potomac River, starting in Washington, DC and ending in Cumberland, MD.” from the Bike Washington website.
La Virginea Pars map, by John White 1584 British Museum photograph of the map
First Colony in Virginia
Everyone who’ve been through elementary school in the U.S. knows “for a fact” that the first British colony was at Jamestown in the Commonwealth of Virginia—as the young state was called. May 14, 1607 is the date we were taught was the Jamestown landing–even the nuns in South Carolina taught it. Plymouth MA (as the Car Talk brothers liked to say) happened thirteen years later in 1620.
However anyone, vacationing on the Outer Banks with callow kids and desperate to entertain them, knows of an earlier landing, based on The Lost Colony, a reenactment play performed annually on Roanoke Island, . In fact, 1587 was the year the first British colony was founded (albeit short-lived) in the New World. Here we are nearly five hundred years later in this same vicinity. The Europeans may have their gothic cathedrals and the like. The Outer Banks has remnants of a culture that dates centuries before the colonists ever arrived.
The first British exploration of the Outer Banks was in 1584, followed by a second in 1585. These were scouting expeditions searching for potential places from which they could launch attacks against the Spanish. The third visit was to establish an actual colony. The story goes, the small colony of 108, mostly men with a sprinkling of women and children, started the first colony in 1587 on Roanoke Island (near the present day village of Manteo). That much of the history was documented in its day. Roanoke Island is surrounded by Pamlico Sound, which western edge is the Outer Banks. Hatteras Island, a portion of the barrier island chain, lies fifty some miles south of Roanoke Island as the pelicans fly.
In the three years between when John White, the first colony’s governor, sailed to England for supplies and returned, he found the entire colony had disappeared, the only clues two carvings left behind along with the destroyed fort and empty houses. The first was a carving of the initials ‘CRO’ and the second, ‘Croatoan’ boldly carved on the palisade they’d evidently abandoned by the time Smith got around to checking on them. Just plumb disappeared, hence the Lost Colony.
John Smith had brought his daughter and husband, Eleanor and Ananias Dare on the 1587 trip, who delivered the first British child in the New World, whom they christened Virginia Dare–for the virgin queen, Elizabeth. Perhaps virgins were rarer in the sixteenth century?
Photograph of label for "Virginia Dare Tobacco," copyrighted 1871. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Digital Collection
Seems Virginia Dare’s image has had an interesting history… complete with Leda and the Swan imagery.
“Nothing else is known of Virginia Dare's life, as the Roanoke Colony did not endure. Virginia's grandfather John White sailed for England for fresh supplies at the end of 1587, having established his colony. He was unable to return to Roanoke until August 18, 1590 due to England's war with Spain and the pressing need for ships to defend against the Spanish Armada—by which time he found that the settlement had been long deserted. The buildings had collapsed and ‘the houses [were] taken down.’ Worse, White was unable to find any trace of his daughter or granddaughter, or indeed any of the 80 men, 17 women, and 11 children who made up the ‘Lost Colony.’ ”
from Wikipedia article.
Reason for all this babble is a book I found in a bit of serendipity last week in the Duck Cottage book store, The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island. The author, Scott Dawson, is a local boy who grew up in this backyard. He claims his family heritage here goes back to the 16th Century. The core of the book, published this past June 2020, is a narrative of years of archeological digs on Hatteras Island, and some fascinating discoveries.
Dawson himself wasn’t educated in archeology but in psychology. An amateur archeologist himself, Dawson has worked with those who are professionals, chief among them Dr. Mark Horton, an archeology professor from the University of Bristol in England. Though reading his book, Dawson is obviously steeped in the history of the region his family had lived in for generations, and quotes from a variety of primary sources, including John White, Richard Hakluyt and Thomas Harriot to tell the story.
“The written accounts collected by Hakluyt and Harriot together with the John White paintings are considered the ultimate primary sources for early Native life in the New World… In order to understand the fate of the Lost Colony, it is important to know what happened in each voyage, starting with the first in 1584.”
From The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island by Scott Dawson.
There’s a scene in my first Outer Banks novel where the two chief protagonists speculate about the early lives of Native Americans. Based on my usual perfunctory research, one protagonist says that the Indians would have had a hard time living year round on the Outer Banks with a lack of fresh water. Wrong on both accounts. In the excavated middens that Scott Dawson describes, they found the preserved shells of a variety of shellfish from oysters to clams and shrimp, oysters being the giveaway species, since they are mostly available in the fall and winter. To top it off, the town known as Croatoan sat squarely on Hatteras Island, near to present day Buxton, so fresh water wells must have been dug by hand, or rainwater collected. The archeological digs found it.
When you stand on the wind swept dunes of Hatteras Island–or Ocracoke Island–and squint just a bit to overlook the beach houses, it isn’t difficult imagining why the Native Americans might want to have lived here. Ten million subsequent tourists can’t be wrong.
But here’s what’s curious. Early accounts of an assimilation of the colony’s members into the Native Americans living on Croatoan (Hatteras Island) are dismissed by the mythologists of the Lost Colony. Hatteras Island, and its Native inhabitants were known to the English explorers. The English had landed there on the earlier voyages. An account by John Lawson’s voyage of 1701:
“Hatteras tribe: These tell us, that several of their Ancestors were White people, and could talk in a book, as we do; the Truth of which is confirmed by gray Eyes being found frequently among these Indians, and no others…
“It is probably, that this Settlement miscarried for wont of timely Supplies from England… for we may reasonably suppose that the English were forced to cohabitate with them [Natives] for Relief and Conversation; and that in the process of Time, they conformed themselves to the Manners of their Indian Relations. And thus we see how apt Human Nature is to degenerate.”
from John Lawson’s account in A New Voyage to Carolina as quoted by Scott Dawson.
While evidencing the Roanoke Island colony’s abandonment, why the disinclination to recognize what stared Lawson (and his Elizabethan audience) in the face–or in the eyes as he writes? One suspects, had the English of Elizabethan times ever encountered space aliens, they’d have been just as convinced of their superiority over them as well. Not everything the English carried with them to the New World was to its benefit, English belief in their own superiority least of all.
Dawson’s Story
“The knowledge gained [from the archeological digs] about the Native Hatteras people, known as the Croatoan, and their way of life has been profound; however, the knowledge gained regarding the English-Native contact period has been astounding… It is a story that leads to assimilation and family, a joining of two cultures from opposite sides of the ocean… It is a blending of races and cultures… far advanced for anyone of that period and even more advanced than some of the people in the world today… This is what makes this story so unique, so special. It is time we honored them for what they were and are and stop hiding them in shame. It is time to stop saying they were ‘lost’ simple because there are those who don’t want to admit they were the first assimilators, the first cross-cultural, cross-race family in America.”
From Scott Dawson’s Introduction to The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island.
While reading the introduction, I was afraid the entire book would be speculation based on myth, however once Dawson starts into the known history, he drops the editorializing for the facts at hand, making a credible case. It’s a recommended read for history buffs.
The gist of his theory is that after a series of attacks from another Indian tribe, the colonists sought safety with the Croatoan tribe with whom they’d previously established relations, abandoning the more exposed colony site on Roanoke Island. Eventually they intermarried, or ‘assimilated.’
Dawson’s sentiment is obvious. Though I wondered if the assimilation he talks about wasn’t more common in the sixteenth century than in the twenty-first. We seem to have become less tolerant rather than more–certainly more so in our current age of anxiety. And though Dawson’s book sets down a sound theory based on the lean written history and archeological findings thus far, the final story of the Lost Colony, he admits, remains less clear; additional archeological explorations will be needed to confirm it–if they ever do.
Sebastian Junger writes in Tribe about colonists in the New World who were either captured by Indians or willingly left to join their societies, so what Dawson is suggesting shouldn’t be a surprise. And the European children raised by Indians who were later ‘rescued’ often returned to their homes among the tribes, which doesn’t speak so well of where they’d come from.
Unlike my own image of the dry, sand islands forming the southern end of the Outer Banks, removed from the mainland with little shelter from the sun, Dawson describes a lifestyle of well-fed natives living long lives on Hatteras Island, and other tribes organized around towns scattered along the coastline. Nothing like the savages James Fenimore Cooper droned on about in The Last of the Mohicans. Redskins, yes, like most of the locals met even today on the Outer Banks, reddened by the baking sun. Finding deeply tanned ‘redskins’ on the Outer Banks is no surprise here. This place’s natives have always lived under an unrelenting sun. Removing them to other parts of the country–say to New York or Boston–would make them stand out in a more ‘white’ population.
The final irony being all those lily white Euro-American tourists who travel here and their fetishizing browned bodies–not black, lord no–though only half a shade lighter.
After seasons of excavations and careful siftings, the archeologists’ team found tools of Native Indians and European mixed, and dating to the correct time, late 1580s, but the book’s ending is a cliff hanger. Dawson reports no DNA testing has been done on the hundreds of remains discovered in the digs. The Indians of that time and place practiced a staged burial, first with the dead raised on platforms, and later gathered in groups for common burial, their bones “disarticulated” in an orderly arrangement. Should European and Native bones ever be found side by side, and carbon-dated, it should answer the question–and put the Lost Colony show out of business, much to the distress of overstressed tourists and their offspring.
In closing, I’ll note of Dawson’s comments regarding these Native Americans and their pets:
“The people along the coast of North Carolina also had dogs, which the English described as ‘wolfish.’ The type of dog has never been identified.”
from The Lost Colony and Hatteras Island by Scott Dawson.
When I reached this point in the book, Layla looked up at me and grinned. I swear she did.
Outer Banks’ Present Day
For the tourists on their seven day hiatuses from the daily grind, their best fiction is free time in the sun. To those who’ve spent more time on the Outer Banks, there’s a quiet, subtle feeling of a slower existence here, less complicated, more humble. The reason for this fascination is the infinite sea nudging the sand, sometimes quiescent, sometimes angry and mindless–put there to remind you of the proper scale of things. At four years old, staring at the sight of an ocean for the first time, tremulous hesitation befits what’s before the child. At seventy, what familiarity has grown over a life–is more a recognition, acknowledgement–if still a yearning.
Is there an instinct buried in our primal brains still joined to the seas that those predecessor species first crawled from? That we happened at all, Steven Gould would call the most random of chance, and I’d have to agree with him. Yet, predetermination brings us to these places, just as much as happenstance. Paraphrasing Yeats’ famous expression, “to know God’s Choice is not to know his Chance” has stayed with me since I first came across it. It’s become something of a talisman since then.
From atop a high dune on the Outer Banks, you can spy the storms rolling in from a distance, watch a pelican phalanx pushing north, steady strokes at a time, and if you understood their chants they’d be like oarsmen pulling against the high airs’ currents. Gulls mucking about, like hanging out on a favorite street corner. Sand crabs scurry from the tide washing across their field of play. You can walk out into a full moon night needing nothing more than to stare at a universe of stars, as you canine companion sniffs the air for a better comprehension of the world around her than you’ll ever know.