Editor’s note: Bland Simpson is a friend of the North Carolina coast and of the entire Tar Heel State. He’s a friend and supporter of Coastal Review and an occasional contributor. Likewise, he’s a friend of our publisher, the North Carolina Coastal Federation, having served long and faithfully on its board of directors.

He’s the Kenan Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1982.

He’s an accomplished musician, having been the award-winning Red Clay Ramblers’ piano player since 1986. His music career dates back to an earlier time, the heyday of the singer-songwriter.

Bland recently marked the 50th anniversary of his early ’70s quartet’s Columbia Records album, “Simpson” with a remastered release available at blandsimpson.bandcamp.com. All proceeds from the album’s sales go to the Food Bank of Central & Eastern North Carolina.

He has collaborated on numerous musicals, including “King Mackerel & The Blues Are Running” and “Kudzu,” and he has written numerous books about North Carolina.

His latest work, “North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky,” with photography by additional friends of ours, his wife and collaborator Ann Cary Simpson, Scott Taylor and current federation board member Tom Earnhardt, is set for release Tuesday by UNC Press.

An in-person and online streaming book launch event is set for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill. Flyleaf Books is offering seating for up to 25 in-person guests, with priority access given to those who purchase the book. If you preorder a copy through Flyleaf, you are asked to use the order comments form to indicate whether you would like one or two seats held for you at the in-person event. To purchase a copy of the book and/or register for the in-person event, visit https://www.flyleafbooks.com/event/simpson-2021.

The following is adapted from “North Carolina: Land of Water, Land of Sky,” by Bland Simpson, with photography by Ann Cary Simpson, Scott Taylor and Tom Earnhardt. Copyright © 2021 by Bland Simpson. Used by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress.org. 

         
Pecans

Not far from the river, just south of Elizabeth City, a large grove of pecan trees once grew, and cattle grazed lazily there. I never ventured into it, only rode past it on my bicycle, stopping whenever I was out that way (some miles from our home near Horner’s Sawmill) just to regard the blithe, benign way the modestly-spaced pecan tree leaves distributed light to the forested pasture below, the cattle chewing at leisure in their dappled light.

No other large trees growing so closely together, except beech perhaps, let so much light through their branches and crowns and still maintained shade: a bright shade, if you will. Just east of town, across the Camden causeway on the old Sawyer plantation, stood another such grove, which we passed often, on our way to see our Ferebee cousins in Camden and on our way to the Outer Banks.

At the age of eight, I had not yet fully formed my thoughts about the nature of pecan trees and the properties of sunlight shining upon and through them. That would come much later, when I started rambling around eastern Carolina in my twenties and noticing how many farmsteads, large and small, had pecan groves off to the side – two acres, maybe, or twenty – of the main house, or had the main house standing within them.  Sometimes only the old groves still stood, the homestead itself long gone. 

Here in Beaufort, at our family’s house on Orange Street in sight of Taylor’s Creek and only a couple miles from the widening inlet to the sea, five pecan trees held down the fort – two small ones out by the street, three large ones in the back yard. Summer evenings we sat under them and listened as ocean breezes and winds blew through them, sometimes mildly, sometimes vigorously with the full authority of Neptune’s Atlantic. They made a fresh, brushing sound that rose and fell, and the little postage-stamp of a yard seemed enclosed by the sound as much as by the body and branches of the big pecan trees themselves, and I loved the way the southerly breezes of summer soughed through their feathery leaves at night with the softest shushing, insistent, though, like all the sighs of the world.   

There was a long view out from under one of them, and through it one’s eye was drawn to a pair of massive pecan trees, lovely twin sisters seventy-five yards to our north, whose crowns danced and swayed in the summertime almost with abandon, showing me in their dancing the inlet winds, the winds that have come here unabridged and uninterrupted and unimpeded all the way from the wide Sargasso Sea. How often and how long I stared and wondered: a cleft in the high, billowing crown of one of those two pecan trees might just be a portal to another world.

So it was that (till one fateful night here in Beaufort, when Hurricane Florence felled one of the sisters) the two dancing pecan trees who were there for so many years swayed, presenting hypnotic delight and delight only, and the hands of the Great Choreographer who directed it all were at play, at play, at play.

The Battle of Rich Inlet

Several of us met about six years ago at the NC Coastal Federation’s Fred and Alice Stanback Environmental Education Center, our regional headquarters in Wrightsville Beach, and went on down with the Federation’s skiff and put in at the Lee’s Cut landing. Just after nine on a hot, blue-sky late August morning, we motored on up the Waterway, the Federation’s genial and skillful advocate Mike Giles at the helm, to the southern channel that would lead us over to Figure Eight Island’s soundside and then on to Rich Inlet itself.

First we would pick up Derb Carter, rock-steady leader of the Southern Environmental Law Center with his powerful ringing baritone and North Carolina Audubon’s coastal waterbirds champion Walker Golder at Figure Eight and continue past the huge, growing, hundred-acre tidal flat to a spot where we could film and tell a tale: why this natural inlet did not need that billion-dollar community’s board-of- directors-proposed 16,000-ton rock-and-sheet pile wall (a terminal groin, in engineering and political parlance) cutting through it.

And putting an end to the tidal flat and the living breathing inlet as we knew it. 

We beached on the upper back side of Figure Eight Island long enough to collect Derb and Walker and to wish a top-of-the-morning to one of our state’s most noted conservationists, Fred Stanback of Salisbury. Fred, lean and wry, stood at ease in the morning sun right at the shallows.

“Sure you don’t want to come on with us, Fred?” asked Tom Earnhardt of Exploring North Carolina, who was directing and producing this project. Fred smiled and shook his head.

“You all have a good day out there,” he said, standing still and unwavering, an elder statesman by the water’s edge as we pushed off, waving and calling to us when we were twenty yards out:     

“Good luck!” 

This honorable man and his wife Alice split their time between the island and their home in Salisbury. They had staked much of their family’s resources on preserving and protecting North Carolina’s natural world, and no one close to the task believed our state’s environmental movement would have been so strong, or accomplished so much, without them.

Soon, under Mike Giles’ sure piloting, we were on the far side of Rich Inlet, looking back at the enclave that seemed small and unthreatening at a distance, the sun climbing now and the wind picking up, and Walker pointed to the tawny sea oats waving in the breeze and recalled:

“I was out here recently, last October, very early in the morning with my son. And the shaft of every one of these sea oats was covered with monarchs that had spent the night on them, as they were migrating. When the sun came up and as the day warmed, the monarchs climbed slowly up the sea oats, till the top one on each shaft reached the tip, and then it’d take off, singly, and fly away, and that just kept on, till at last they were all away.” 

We would stay out on the lower, southwest end of Lea-Hutaff Island (which NC Audubon would later preserve in the summer of 2019) for over half the day, finding different spots to shoot, moving around and up the back side of the island, staying out of the wind, walking in the creeks. Minnows swam around my feet, gulls swept in to caw and check us out, white egrets glided by without comment. 

Our argument was compelling: Rich Inlet had a two-hundred-year history of migrating back and forth within a half-mile range, now close-in to Figure Eight, now close to Lea-Hutaff; a groin channel would finish off the inlet’s tidal flat forever and its abundant wildlife would disappear; all the island’s homeowners would have to finance privately the multi-million-dollar jetty, not just those whose homes were proximate to it; and, should it later be judged environmentally deleterious, a high likelihood we thought, all the homeowners would also be on the hook for the groin’s future multi-million-dollar removal.    

Once we wrapped, several of us boated back down to the Dockside on the Waterway near the Wrightsville Beach bridge. After more than half a day walking around in the shallows out in the great wide open, telling the story of just what was in the balance here, barefoot and pants-legs rolled, sitting down for a few minutes in the shade felt right good to me, face to face with a tall glass of sweet tea and an agreeably large crabcake sandwich. 

That moment would live in my memory as one of the truly grand days I have ever been given, the broad green plain of marsh and all those interwoven creeks we worked in, the purpose that had brought us there, the pitched battle to preserve North Carolina’s last natural inlet that was moving and flowing just as God had flung it there, and then, too, just being out there together with these wonderful cohorts, bonded by it all. I simply sailed up through the flat eastern terraces and back to the hill country of western Orange County that evening, replaying the moments and thinking a good long while about what it might mean, what it could mean to so many – men, women and children who loved this inlet, boated to it often and who were joined in this effort; fish, turtles, birds, and butterflies in migration, stopping off by the thousands in that small patch of Rich Inlet sea oats for one good night’s rest – for all those devoted to keeping this piece of the Lord’s handiwork intact, simply to have done the right thing for the right reason.

When word came forth a year and a quarter later that the Figure Eight homeowners had taken stock of this potentially-ruinous plan and at long last flat voted it down, people all over the state who love our wild Carolina coast stopped and smiled, remembering their best and oldest hopes.   

At U.S. Coast Guard Station Fort Macon in Atlantic Beach on Friday, Aug. 6, one breezy, blue-sky day before the 79^th anniversary of America’s Pacific Islands campaign in World War II, the U.S. Coast Guard convened a hundred officers, crew and family members to commission a new, fast-response cutter named for Chief Petty Officer Glen Harris, who was born in the Down East village of Stacy, married and lived in Beaufort. 

Harris, who spent much of his 25-year Coast Guard career here at Fort Macon, had also landed the first troops and run supply craft under heavy enemy fire at Tulagi, where the assault on the islands began, heroic service for which the Navy, by the hand of Adm. Chester Nimitz, awarded him the Silver Star.

On Aug. 6, a brass quintet — two trumpets, a trombone, a French horn and a tuba — set up a scant 20 yards from the gleaming white port side of the cutter Glen Harris, which was tied up at Fort Macon south wharf, and played tunes from a Sousa yesteryear for the crowd, while officers in dress whites and sabers moved forward midmorning to run through the serious steps of formally adding this ship to the fleet.

Few there knew of or mentioned service that the Glen Harris had already done during its pre-commissioned days, likely when it was on sea trials in April, suggested Coast Guard Atlantic Area Historian Dr. William Thiesen. A hurricane-like storm had blown up suddenly in the Gulf of Mexico, capsizing Seacor Power, a large 150-foot lift boat with a crew of 19 aboard, calling in Coast Guard vessels for search and rescue. The Glen Harris answered the call and saved a man, pulling aboard and rescuing one of the six crew members who survived the storm’s 12-foot seas and 100 mph winds.

Skip Bowen of Bollinger Shipyards spoke during the ceremony, acknowledging the scores of men and women who had welded and wired this 154-foot wondercraft together in Lockport, Louisiana, with its ability to run at 28 knots — “At least,” said historian Thiesen — and to launch and retrieve its own ship’s boat from a gated well in the stern at speed. 

Adm. Linda Fagan, vice commandant of the Coast Guard, by her presence conveyed the gravity of the ceremony. She declared: “This particular cutter is destined for Bahrain in the Arabian gulf where it will conduct national security operations in support of our (Department of Defense) partners in the region. We know this crew is ready and excited to get over there,” telling Lt. Reginald Reynolds that the Glen Harris was ready for service and for his captaincy and handing him his orders, which he then read aloud.

The protocols cascaded: the passing of the Long Glass, an honored telescope bound for the vessel’s bridge; the navigator’s setting of the watch …

Stacey Howley of Atlanta, the ship’s sponsor and Glen Harris’ youngest granddaughter, took the stage. A slender woman in a light-blue dress with warmth and authority in her tone, she was there “to share a little bit about Glen Harris and his energy and enduring spirit, which will no doubt be alive to help guide this incredible cutter on its future path.”

Calling him “one of the most honorable men I’ve ever known,” she described him as “an absolutely devoted husband to my grandmother, a loving and supportive father to two daughters and an extremely witty, fun-loving and sometimes mischievous grandfather to his four granddaughters … But above all, he was a man of the utmost character and integrity with a strong faith in God … an extremely humble man (who) rarely spoke about his time in World War II. But I believe if he were here with us today, he would most certainly say that his actions in the Tulagi Islands, as well as his crewmates that were by his side during the mission, were not heroic at all, but simply a reflection of the Coast Guard’s long tradition of lifesaving missions and of putting others before oneself.”

Howley closed simply: “I can hear my grandfather saying, ‘A job well done by all!’”

And then Lt. Reynolds stood, giving his first command as the commissioned Glen Harris’ captain, the order that had brought us all here this summer morning to bear witness: “Officers and crew of the Coast Guard Glen Harris, lay aboard and bring our cutter to life!”

From the men and women of the crew came the accepting shout in return: “Aye!”

And the two dozen in dress blues went marching briskly toward the edge of the wharf and up the gangplank, taking evenly spaced parade-rest positions along the ship’s port side, the newly broken and unfurled Union flag flying above them. These enacted protocols in sum sending not only a clear message but also a palpable feeling abroad: that the newly-commissioned ship had indeed come to life — and no one there in that moment was unmoved.

Reynolds spoke of Harris as “the chief” and “a surfman,” invoking the spirit and heritage of the Life-Saving Service that, melding with the Revenue Cutter Service in January 1915, then became the Coast Guard. He spoke of the crew and its training on the cutter, its journey to Key West and Mayport and on to Fort Macon. Saluting them, he said “I am honored to call them shipmates.” 

He acknowledged family members of the ship’s crew who were on hand, including his own from Hawaii who had brought him a lei to wear, and he noted as well the long separations all had accepted as their duty. Affirming with a special dignity accorded the heroic dead, Reynolds said the ship’s mission was “to preserve, honor, and be worthy of Glen Harris’ legacy.”

A single white skiff lay at the edge of the turning basin, a hundred yards or more astern of the Glen Harris; sea gulls flew over, squawking; a baby cried at the back of the crowd; and after a brief prayer of benediction, the brass quintet played the morning to a solemn close with the Navy Hymn:

O hear us when we cry to thee
For those in peril on the sea!

This vessel will be leaving home this fall, just as Carteret County’s Glen Harris once did to be in position in the Pacific almost 80 years ago, helping keep the forces of darkness from overrunning the world. Just as Glen Harris would do now, a sleek bright ship out upon the oceans of the world — semper paratus, always prepared.

Author and coastal native Bland Simpson wrote this as an introduction to Our Coast magazine. Published by the N.C. Coastal Federation, the magazine highlights the importance of clean water to healthy fisheries. Look for it now and throughout the summer at restaurants, supermarkets and, yes, fish houses along the coast.

When I was a boy, my mother often sent me on my bicycle to the small, busy fish house on Water Street in Elizabeth City, just across from the Pasquotank River wharf where boats that had been fishing down on Albemarle Sound tied up.  I don’t recall now whether I was showing up in Thomas Crank’s shop for flounder or drum or trout – at the age of eight, it was all simply fish to me and it was all good.  My mother would have already called in her order, so my job was just to pedal a mile and a half from home and pick it up.

Back then, I did not know any more about Mister Crank than what I saw when I walked through the door:  an active older man behind cases of ice and fish, hawking and selling and wrapping them at a rapid clip, with jovial banter to match.  Playing on a then-current radio jingle, every time his door swung open he said brightly:  “What’ll you have?”  Before the customer could name his fish, Mister Crank laughed and quickly shouted out, “Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

I knew I liked his fish-house spirit, and only much later learned how many years he had been in it, and at it. He was carrying on a family tradition of long standing:  Thomas Crank and his father had been “Dealers in Fish, Oysters, Terrapin, etc” since 1896.  A 1915 commercial circular wrote of them:  “These gentlemen are unusually careful in the purchase of their products and handle strictly pure, wholesome and fresh fish, oysters, terrapin, etc. in season. All orders promptly filled and delivered, and at most favorable prices. These gentlemen are natives of Dare County.”

Though that shop is now a by-gone, as are others to be sure, many fine family establishments still remain up and down the coast, and thrive on selling fresh fish and shellfish that have come from healthy, nearby waters only hours before, and not from halfway around the globe.  The food our North Carolina fish dealers take off the ice and put into our hands not only ties us to the given place and its fishermen, but also to native American people who came here long before us, many centuries to many thousands of years ago, and lived on this same diet – the best in the world.

One of my earliest memories is that of blue crabs steaming away on the stove at my grandmother Simpson’s old cottage in Nags Head. Years later, I arrived at another cottage late one evening after a long hitchhike from Chapel Hill to Kitty Hawk, my younger sisters having gone to bed, my mother brightening my arrival and banishing my road-weariness by firing up a skillet and frying several dozen oysters.  Similarly, much later, my wife Ann’s mother, Pat Kindell, used to greet Ann and me and our three young children, upon our arrival in Beaufort along about suppertime on Friday evenings, with a groaning board of steamed clams and oysters and shrimp, and a crabcake or two (with a little chopped green pepper and onion and maybe a blessed hint of cayenne, too) for each of us.  That was just a start:  Pat also would have on the back burner a pot of perfection:  Core Sound clam chowder, clam juice and a little water its base, full of clams and onions and potatoes and more God-given pepper.  We ate heartily and well, and we ate it all.

Whether we have gotten river catfish or soft-shell crabs from Willy Phillips’s Full Circle Crab Co. in Columbia, or smoked mullet or bluefish from Bill Rice’s Fishtowne in Beaufort, or red snapper from Clyde Phillips Seafood in Swansboro, or more soft crabs from Eddie and Allison Willis’s Mr. Big shop on Harkers Island, or red drum from the working watermen’s Ocracoke Seafood Company out on that grand sandbar, or grouper or flounder from John Haag’s lively fish house on eastern Oak Island, or shrimp from Austin Fish Company up at Nags Head or Garland’s Seafood down in Supply, or a bushel of salty bivalves from the Rose Bay Oyster Co. in Swan Quarter, or rockfish filets from Tom Robinson’s Seafood upstate in Carrboro, or any number of other high-grade, down-home Carolina seafood spots, it only matters that we will have gone to the right places and we will have gotten real, good seafood from real, good folks, and we will be eating better than Louis the Fourteenth, Queen Mary, and J. P. Morgan all put together.  As the vaunted Cajun cook Justin Wilson would emphatically spell it out:  “I ga-ron-tee.”

We might just push a few spots and pompano around the pan, frying them for breakfast, two or three per person, along with toast and fig preserves and scrambled eggs.  We might lay a slab of rockfish or drum in a big baking dish, put olive oil and capers on it, some lemon pepper and garlic powder too, and give it a scant twenty-two minutes, if that, in the oven. We may even scoot a few butterflied jumping mullet onto the grill, for this is one gorgeous fish that absolutely loves smoke.

What’ll we have? I hear the ghost of old Mister Crank still asking. And how will we have it? When it comes to the fish house delights, the fruits of North Carolina’s legendary coastal and sound-country waters, no questions are as joyfully put, or answered.

What do we do here in eastern North Carolina?, some might ask. How about taking in sunsets like this over Bogue Sound in Carteret County.

When I lived in New York City years ago, people learning that I was from eastern North Carolina seemed truly perplexed when they said:  “What on earth do people do down there?” “Well,” I would say, “I’ll tell you,” first asking how many hours they had for my answer.

On foot, with a bicycle or small craft, anyone can deeply experience — and in a very real sense own, literally get a purchase upon — vast expanses of our coast’s and coastal plain’s many waters, great forests and marshes that stretch from horizon to horizon and seem never to end.

Starting next week, you can read many of those places in Our Coast magazine, the N.C. Coastal Federation’s annual travel guide with a conscience. The third edition of the free magazine has been totally revamped with new stories about places you can visit to experience the beauty of our region. From the swamps of the Roanoke River to an uninhabited island near the S.C. line, Our Coast also gives you an appreciation for the fortitude of your fellow North Carolinians, many of who fought to save the places featured in the magazine.

The Waterman’s Museum in Ocracoke offers a glimpse of life as a commercial fisherman.

The abandoned village of Portmouth, meanwhile, offers a look at what it took to be a rugged Outer Banker.

Look for Our Coast at more than 150 locations along the coast. You’ll find them in supermarkets, restaurants, visitor centers, aquariums and other places where tourists gather in the summer. A digital version will be available next week on the federation’s Web site.

Take some time on your visit to the coast to discover the Albemarle Lagoon — what the hydrologists call the Albemarle and Pamlico sounds and all the rivers that feed them. It is one of the largest enclosed embayments in the world, and also one of our planet’s most highly articulated, and fruitful, estuaries — half of eastern America’s fisheries are nurtured here.

A grand chain of publicly-owned territory stretches from Mackay Island in northern Currituck Sound all the way south to Bird Island at the South Carolina state line, a collage of public (or held by non-profits) coastal lands comprising tens of thousands of acres. Nearly half the seacoast is accessible conservation land: from Currituck Banks, Nags Head Woods, Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout national seashores to Bear Island, Masonboro Island and the Bald Head Marshes.  Just behind the barriers lie such glorious and enormous wildlife refuges as Alligator River, Pocosin Lakes, Mattamuskeet and Cedar Island, along with big forests like the Croatan. All in all it’s a naturalist’s dream.

Our island paradises are legendary. On Roanoke, Fort Raleigh and the Elizabethan Gardens beckon visitors afoot, and Dough Creek off Shallowbag Bay and the Roanoke Marshes along the southeastern island-side call kayakers to action. Most of Hatteras’ 50 miles is undeveloped sea and sound shore, and Buxton Woods, the 1,000-acre maritime forest just behind Cape Hatteras, boasts several miles of trails, as does Ocracoke and its Springer’s Point Preserve and Jim Stephenson Trail.

In the 2,300-acre Rachel Carson Reserve, a short boat ride across Taylor’s Creek from Beaufort, one might walk through short cedars in the sand where the wild ponies hide. Here Rachel Carson worked (she wrote of its huge tidal flat in The Edge of the Sea) — from the beach at Bird Shoal, one looks out on the long barrier island of Shackleford Banks and, north, toward the lighthouse sentinel of Lookout Shoals.

Farther south, for a passenger-ferry or kayak ride, Hammocks Beach State Park offers us the rewards of Bear, Jones and Huggins islands, and, below them, coastal reserves at Masonboro and Bald Head deliver even more.

Most of uninhabited Lea-Hutaff Island on the southeast N.C. coast is a protect bird sanctuary.

On Lake Mattamuskeet every winter, tens of thousands of swans and geese and ducks splash down, glancing hopscotch-style as they take off, or just take it easy rafted up within sight of the pull-offs along the N.C. 94 causeway across the lake.

Each spring, not long after those swans fly north, songbirds by the millions flood our eastern swamps, returning from the Caribbean, the Yucatan and Cuba, warblers singing to beat the band and find their mates. Hidden oases like Great Lake in the Croatan Forest give the osprey nesting space atop hundreds of short cypress, and, out on island sanctuaries in the sounds from Cape Fear to Currituck, terns and pelicans nest in sand scrapes and crude cushions of straw.

Just north of South Mills, a pedestrian bridge leads one into the edge of a vast morass in the Dismal Swamp State Park. On Merchant’s Mill Pond, near Gatesville, one canoes through cypress trees heavily hung in gray with Spanish moss, and campers on beechwood hillsides beneath a full moon hear barred owls crying Who cooks for you all? all through the night.  From Buffalo City, just west of Manteo, one of the loveliest paddle trails in the Carolina east leads to the deep-green conifers and freshwater marshes of Sawyer’s Lake, then to long, lake-like Milltail Creek, where alligators sun on wind-fallen pines.

Ours is a breathtaking, water-loving land, and the glories one finds in these wild redoubts are many. A great hope I share with all my cohorts at federation is that our fellow citizens will ramble, afoot, afloat, afield in any way, to coastal spots both easily accessible and well off the trodden track, and will come to love, or deepen their existing affections for, the tidewater and riverine lowlands and the many waters that belong to us all.

What do we do down here? We wish all comers a warm, hale and hearty welcome to the sound country and, indeed, to all the coasts of Carolina.