Part of a series about the effects federal budget and staff cuts and the cancellations of programs and services are having in coastal North Carolina.

MANTEO — In the six months since the chaotic and seemingly random cutting in the federal government began, a terrible uneasiness has descended on the northeast corner of North Carolina, where all of the state’s nine national wildlife refuges employ neighbors and family members who live in the rural communities in which they’re located.

At least 10 Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Complex staff and five employees of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s regional Ecological Services office in Raleigh, so far, are believed to have voluntarily left their jobs, whether nudged by coercion or incentives.

With staff forbidden to speak with media, and ongoing legal challenges and limited public information creating uncertainty, no one appears to know what will happen to their refuges.

“I just found out we should be getting some staffing numbers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the next couple of weeks,” Howard Phillips, the Southeastern representative for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, a nonprofit advocacy and support group for the refuges, told Coastal Review, citing informed but unofficial sources. “The dust seems to be settling a little and (the agency) is starting to get a handle on where they stand.”

But Phillips, who retired at the end of 2020 as manager of Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in Tyrrell County, says he fears that serious consequences are already baked into the refuges’ cake, no matter what the government decides to do. The lack of trust engendered by often abrupt, unexplained cuts of staff, research and budgets as well as the “crippling” brain drain of expertise, experience and local knowledge has only made the situation more problematic.

“Could the administration suddenly decide they want to hire everybody back and start doing conservation again?” he continued. “That would take at least six months, probably 12 months. They’d have to be trained.”

The stark reality, he added, is that without knowing the Trump administration’s timeline or goal in the current upheaval, it’s impossible to understand the long-term impacts and impractical to expect much to change, much less improve.

“I mean, they’ve just given no indication that they’re going to do anything that’s going to reverse the trend right now, which is down, down, down, down,” Phillips said.

An unnamed spokesperson from the agency’s public affairs office ignored Coastal Review’s request to authorize or facilitate a refuge staff interview, but responded to several questions about impacts on North Carolina’s wildlife refuges in a May 23 email.

“As part of the broader efforts led by the Department of the Interior under President Trump’s leadership, we are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency, and government accountability,” the spokesperson wrote. “While we do not comment on personnel matters, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service remains committed to fulfilling our mission of conserving fish, wildlife, and natural resources for the American people.” 

Refuges in the coastal complex encompass nearly a half-million acres of farmlands, swamp forests and pocosin peatlands, intersected by rivers, streams, canals, lakes and sounds within the nation’s second-largest estuarine system.

The nine refuges — Alligator River, Pea Island, Mackay Island, Currituck, Mattamuskeet, Pocosin Lakes, Cedar Island, Swan Quarter, Roanoke River — are stretched along vast swaths of geography in the coastal plain that provide habitat for unique species and globally important ecosystems.

For instance, the critically endangered wild red wolves, the only surviving in the world, roam within a five-county recovery area based out of Alligator River, descendants of Spanish mustangs range free in Currituck, and thousands of migratory birds and waterfowl passing along the Atlantic Flyway overwinter every year at Mattamuskeet and Pocosin Lakes.

Mattamuskeet, the state’s largest natural lake, is undergoing an innovative and intensive watershed restoration project many years in the planning. And Pocosin Lakes, named for the Native American term for “swamp on hill” because of its boggy peat soil, has been studied by Duke University researchers for its ability to remediate carbon pollution. The refuge has also nearly completed an extensive rewetting project to restore the ability of the pocosin peat to absorb carbon dioxide and resist wildfires.

Two major wildfires in and around the refuge in recent decades have burned deep in the ground for many weeks, spewing tons of carbon back into the environment, with one smoldering for six months before it was finally extinguished.

Therein lies the dilemma — and the risk — to the refuges: What happens when there’s no one available to take proper care of the refuges, and to even continue the conservation mission?

Pocosin Lakes, for instance, with the recent retirement of former manager Wendy Stanton, no longer has a refuge manager.

“You know, with Wendy gone now, I don’t know that there’s anybody left at Pocosin Lakes that really understands that hydrology restoration and how it works,” Phillips said.

But it’s more than the upper-level staff, said Bonnie Strawser, president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society, a local nonprofit group that supports all of the eastern North Carolina refuges. It’s also the loss of staff that maintain buildings and trails, she said, as well as the biologists who monitor water and test soil.

Strawser, who retired in 2020 after 40 years with Fish and Wildlife as visitor services manager, said that the project leader for Coastal North Carolina National Wildlife Refuge Rebekah Martin has designated acting managers in each refuge, but that’s in addition to their regular jobs with the refuges.

Martin is based at the agency’s Roanoke Island headquarters but is not authorized to speak to reporters. According to a 2023 article on the coastal refuges website, Martin oversees about 400,000 acres of habitat with more than a dozen endangered or threatened species. At the time, it said, the complex had 35 employees and more than 400 volunteers.

“We are currently down to 10 staff, and this is regular O and M — operations and maintenance — funded by general funding, refuge funding,” Strawser said in a recent interview. “Now that does not include firefighters or law enforcement, because they are funded through different programs.”

Strawser said that there were no probationary employees in eastern North Carolina, so no one had been outright fired. Some staff who agreed to resign under one of the agency’s two rounds of the deferred resignation program, she said, were quickly shut down and put on administrative leave for varied periods of time while collecting their salaries.

Cuts in both the U.S. Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service will also hamper the agencies cooperative response to wildfires and disasters, including with the national interagency incident management teams. Strawser is a member of one of three teams in the southern area.

“I don’t know what in the world we’re going to do when fire season comes,” she said. “They stood down our team. It’s not going to be available, they said, at least until after July.”

As Strawser noted, a lot goes on behind the scenes to keep the refuges humming, including procedural processes to keep records and run programs, as well as have sponsors to maintain the “casual hire” personnel to respond to emergencies.

“But the Fish and Wildlife Service, because they lost so many people in the administrative positions, they don’t have anybody to handle the payments and the travel, so they can’t sponsor” for a team member, she said.

For the time being, the public many not notice much difference when they go to a refuge, Strawser said.

“The visitor centers are run by volunteers,” she said. “The public programs are conducted mostly by volunteers.” But there’s only three maintenance people for their nine national wildlife refuges.

“There’s been no talk of closing anything, but it’s just common sense there will problems if there’s nobody to grade the roads, if there’s nobody to do the mowing on the road shoulders, she said. “And if there’s no ‘daylighting’ of the roads, they’ll get overgrown, the sun won’t reach down, and the mud doesn’t dry out and the road is destabilized and before you know it, they’re not drivable.”

Mike Bryant, who was succeeded by Martin, had served as refuge manager for 20 years, from 1996 to 2016, and he witnessed decreasing support for the refuges from the federal government, he told Coastal Review in an interview. After retirement, he had also served as consultant for the National Wildlife Refuge Association, and was former president of the Coastal Wildlife Refuge Society. Although he said he keeps in touch, he is no longer directly involved with either group.

Since about 2010, Bryant said there has been a steady decline in staffing.

“You have refuges where there were multiple people, and with some of them, there’s just one person left, and so that’s part of the story,” he said. “So it had nothing to do with the past 60 or 90 days, whatever it is now.”

But it’s not just mandated reductions in staff that threaten the refuges, he said. The management challenge is also an aging workforce that may not be replaced.

“You got over half a million acres of National Wildlife Refuge in multiple counties, and spanning across North Carolina to the Virginia border, with all kinds of infrastructure and management mandates and no staff to get those mandates done,” Bryant said. “They’re just wondering, how are we going to meet our responsibilities if we’re the only ones left? It’s a morale buster.”

After being fully staffed around 2003, he said it seemed as if the Department of Interior stopped prioritizing conservation and Congress slowly began losing interest in supporting the refuges.

“The Fish and Wildlife budget has so many facets to it, so many other responsibilities under various laws, endangered species and ecological services and all these other entities within the agency, fisheries and all those things, are all important,” Bryant said. “But Congress was never convinced to budget specifically for operations and maintenance of national wildlife refuges.”

Meanwhile, scores of new refuges came on line in the last 25 years. And rather than hiring more personnel, more work was heaped on less staff.

“I was hired in 1996 to manage Alligator River and Pea Island,” Bryant said. “Two years later, when the manager left Mackey Island and Currituck refuges, the regional office called me and said, ‘Hey, we want you to manage those two.’ All of a sudden, I had four refuges.”

Two years later, he was told to hire and supervise a new manager at Pocosin Lakes. Then staff was reduced, forcing him to share staff between the refuges. Next, Roanoke River was added to his responsibilities — along with the 90-minute drive each way. During all those years, he was bumped up just one pay grade.

Bryant said he gets why people get frustrated with the inefficient, cumbersome aspects of the federal government. But he remembers back when the Clinton administration had reduced both staffing and regulations, and not only succeeded, but ended up with a balanced budget.

“We went through all of those things without ever feeling like the sky is falling,” he said. Rather than taking rational steps to achieve efficiency, the interest now seems more in “just destroying the government, constantly degrading it, and yes, crafting corruption.”

“There’s a few bad actors, no doubt, always, in every organization everywhere, no matter what the enterprise,” Bryant added. “There was a rational process to deal with bad employees, grounded in policy. And the policy was grounded in regulation, and the regulation was grounded in law.”

The first official unit of the National Wildlife Refuge System was Pelican Island in Florida, established for conservation in 1903 by President Theodore Roosevelt. Today there are 570 refuges and 30 wetland management districts on more than 150 million acres entrusted to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services and enjoyed by 69 million visitors.

Bryant is rooting for not just survival of the struggling refuge system, but its revival.

“I think we’ll recover,” he said. “I’m optimistic about that. But we’ll be deeply scarred.”

The striped bass fishing season in the Roanoke River has been suspended in what state wildlife officials say is a necessary move because the population has not improved despite previous harvest reductions.

The striped bass hook-and-line harvest season in the Roanoke River Management Area, which runs March 1 to April 30, includes the river, its tributaries from Roanoke Rapids Dam to the Albemarle Sound, and the Cashie, Middle and Eastmost rivers.

Reductions have been made in the Roanoke River’s striped bass harvest over the past three years, but the “population has shown little improvement,” according to a North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission release.

“In 2024, NCWRC biologists observed a continuance of the declining trend in abundance of striped bass during the spawning grounds survey,” the release states. “Low abundance and the impacts of high mortality have resulted in poor spawning success over the past seven years, even when Roanoke River conditions were considered optimal for spawning.”

The agency is working with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries to address the declines of striped bass stock in the Roanoke River and the Albemarle Sound.

Striped bass caught in inland and joint waters of the Roanoke River Management Area must be immediately returned to the waters where taken.

Striped bass in the river upstream of U.S. Highway 258 bridge near Scotland Neck in Halifax County may be fished using only a single barbless circle hook with the use of live or natural bait or a single barbless hook, either no barb or the barb is bent downward, with the use of tackle between April 1 to June 30.

Ben Ricks, the commission’s coastal region fishery supervisor said the striped bass population reductions in the Roanoke River are concerning.

“We are working to understand the mechanisms that have led to the decline in the striped bass populations in the Roanoke River and Albemarle Sound,” Ricks said in a release. “We will also continue to stock striped bass this year in the lower Roanoke River and Albemarle Sound in cooperation with the DMF. We will assess stocking efficacy as striped bass return to the spawning grounds over the next three-to-five years.”

Wildlife officials will assess the next striped bass harvest season before the March 1, 2026 opening. Additional information is available on commission’s striped bass species web page.

Two lifesaving Weldon “River Rats” and two eastern North Carolina fisheries experts will tell tales of the Roanoke River’s past glory days and share about the river’s stable present and bright future during the third Weldon Heritage Speaker Series.

The event, being held at no charge, is from 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 16, at Halifax Community College, 100 College Drive, Weldon, in the school’s Advanced Manufacturing and Corporate Training Center, room 825. 

Included will be details about the recently initiated three-year effort to restock the river and Albemarle Sound with more than 2 million striped bass, also known as rockfish. 

Formed in 2021, the nonprofit event sponsor Weldon In Action is a coalition of current and former Weldon residents seeking to revitalize the historic small town on Interstate 95 near Roanoke Rapids.

“To those living near its source in western Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, to those near its mouth in eastern North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound — and all points in between — we invite all lovers of the 410-mile Roanoke River to join this unique celebration right here in the ‘Rockfish Capital of the World,’” organizer Francis Kyle said in a release.

“This is the first of what Weldon In Action is planning to be an annual or biennial celebration of the Roanoke River,” Kyle said, adding that there will be future events, with a Weldon and Halifax County emphasis, with a focus on the river’s human history, a program on the Roanoke River National Wildlife Refuge in Bertie County, the nearly 140-mile Roanoke River State Trail that runs from Weldon to the Albemarle Sound, and the river’s economic value.

River Rats

Featured “River Rats” include Halifax County natives and retirees such as Leemond “Boots” Branch, 94, of Weldon, and his son Robert “Bob” Branch of Cary. 

The still-active fisherman father saved two strangers from drowning in the Roanoke River on January 15, 2010, after the men’s boat had capsized. The younger Branch was interviewed on the podcast “Better Fishing with 2 Bald Biologists,” the official podcast of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. Archived and accessible online, the 67-minute episode is titled “Roanoke River Striped Bass: River Rats and Hairy Worms.”

Fisheries discussion

Fisheries biologists Charlton H. Godwin and Chad D. Thomas are also set to speak.

Thomas will moderate the opening discussion with the Branches and the question-and-answer segment, then briefly share about the new fisheries-based nonprofit he leads. Godwin will follow with his autobiographical and scientific data-driven presentation on the Roanoke River’s past, present and future regarding its fish and oftentimes colorful “River Rats.” 

Bertie County native Godwin is the biologist supervisor for the Elizabeth City-based Northern District Office of the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. A biologist since 2004 with the division, he has tagged over 50,000 striped bass on the spawning grounds near Weldon. He grew up exploring the Roanoke River, Chowan River and western Albemarle Sound.

A North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission retiree and graduate of North Carolina State University and Tennessee Technological University, Thomas was named the 2021 Fisheries Biologist of the Year by the Southeast Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies. Thomas is the executive director of the North Carolina Marine and Estuary Foundation. Formed in 2017, the mission of the Raleigh-based nonprofit is “to build world-class fisheries and thriving coastal communities” and its vision is “to see North Carolina become the country’s premier fishing destination.”

Godwin and Thomas are both longtime members of the American Fisheries Society. Considered the world’s oldest and largest professional fisheries association, AFS formed in 1870 in New York City and is now headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. On March 2, 2009, Weldon was officially recognized by the North Carolina General Assembly as the “Rockfish Capital of the World.”

For more information about WIA and its third Weldon Heritage Speaker Series event, contact admin@weldoninaction.com. Or visit weldoninaction.com or its social media pages. 

The following essay is published as a guest commentary.

Two trees rise out of the Albemarle Sound, battered straight by the wind. A black gum and a cypress reach together, sharing the sun, the black water, and the wisps of Spanish moss weighing down their thin branches. They lift up more than out, brittle and slender, not wide or imposing like the ancient magnolia in the church graveyard growing out of nameless bodies. 

These trees are native to the brackish waters of the sound. Generations of them have grown here, but sea level rise brings salty tides to drown their roots, knees and knots. Salt sneaks into their veins and travels up toward their fingers, slowing photosynthesis and transpiration. It suffocates them. In the lab, black gum and cypress are capable of withstanding moderate salt events, but don’t fully recover until the salt is washed off of each leaf.

The lifeblood of the Roanoke River is its sweet, black water. It forms from tannin, a brass-orange chemical that turns the water acidic and dark, antimicrobial and transparent. Tannic acid, also found in wine and tea, can stop bleeding and treat rashes in human bodies. In wetland water, it filters decaying vegetation and decomposing leaves, draining blood from the black gum and the cypress. It’s a chemical, spit up by the ground and only a bit poisonous to the body. It looks a lot like sweet tea.

When English settlers first stumbled up the Roanoke River in 1585, they found a town, which already had a people and a name.

Moratuc.

Land of the dangerous river. 

The Moratuc believed in “montoac,” the plurality of gods and spirits. They drank the dark water that flowed from the fingers of one of many gods. Little of their knowledge remains in documentation, but it is believed that they told the settlers of the spirits living everywhere, in the grasses and the swamp, the heron and the trout, the black gum and the cypress.

I sprawled out on the bow of our university-commissioned boat and surveyed the sky. The black gum and the cypress leaned into each other, their canopies winking out the sun only sometimes. Their broken branches and dying leaves drifting by in the too-salty water beneath us. These trees have stood guard over the mouth of the Roanoke for hundreds of years. They have seen Indigenous canoes, Revolutionary six-masted ships, Civil War submarines, and glossy blue kayaks break into the river from the Albemarle Sound. As glaciers melt and temperatures rise and things lift and sink to where they shouldn’t be, the black gum and the cypress have begun to wither. Some will finally surrender.

I joined a group of University of North Carolina students to visit towns on the river’s edge and at its mercy. Our muse was the Roanoke, which begins in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and meets the mouth of the Albemarle Sound 410 miles later in Plymouth. The river drains an agricultural coastal plain from the Appalachian Mountains in the west all the way to the Atlantic, bringing with it the blood of millions of dying black gum and cypress, a tide of sweet black tea.

Early Saturday morning, I slipped on my running shoes and passed a group of women in aprons and head coverings with their elbows linked. They smiled at me as I passed. These were the only faces I saw until I returned to the hotel lobby waffle machine. 

The Quality Inn sits at a highway intersection, eager to catch the traffic of passersby because few tend to stay. I ran toward the Piggly Wiggly out back where I thought I might find people. The sun lit up the sleepy storefronts in an orange haze, and the bolted windows reflected it back at me. I passed graffiti-covered brick and rotting roofs with missing shingles. I picked up my pace across the train tracks, warily eyeing the empty train cars and broken glass bottles strewn around the gravel. The main street looked like a sepia newspaper cover – founded in 1779 and since unchanged, flat storefronts with dark green awnings facing half-manicured green trees and broken glass windows. Out front of a decommissioned movie theater, a single red Honda melted to the pavement with a white rag closed into its back window. I surrender.

The namesake of the town of Williamston is debated, but attributed to one of two men – Col. William Williams, a wealthy and distinguished plantation owner prior to the Revolutionary War, or Dick Williams, a settler in the 18th century who arrived with 75 cents in his pocket and built a fortune with hard work and extreme thrift. 

Williamston was originally settled as a hub of Roanoke River transport, and fell into disuse when railroads and highways became more practical than water traffic, the fate of many east coast small towns that have since become overgrown by weeds and hidden beneath fallen trees. Many people have fled the decaying economy and rising flood risk, leaving behind battered family homes, soggy historic land, and a mess of half-forgotten stories. Now, Williamston advertises as one of the top 10 best places in North Carolina to retire.

Come to surrender. 

Our commute for the day led us to the water’s edge in Plymouth. We took out two boats and spent the morning in the ancient current, testing flow rates with lemons and water dispersion with Cheez-Its. Our laughter bounced off the sunny surface into the woods beyond, tangles of cypress and black gum branches criss-crossing over the roof of a tiny blue cabin whose porch seemed to exhale between its stilts, threatening to fall into the waves.

180 million years ago, during the Jurassic Period, North Carolina consisted of a rocky coastline west of modern day I-95. During periods of low sea level, the western and central portions eroded, and North Carolina built up the sediment into land that is known today as the coastal plain. Change has always been hiding beneath the water and the earth. This region was historically flooded by ancient seas, and is still no stranger to high water, though for some reason, we’re surprised each time. 

As we motored upriver, we passed the Domtar manufacturing site. Smoke stacks littered the property, the majority active and spewing something thick and gray into the sky. Domtar, pronounced by a local artist “dum – tar,” is the paper mill that looms over the sweet black current, west of the sound.

The factory has remained the largest employer of the town of Plymouth since 2007, when the company bought out previous owners. In this merger, Domtar announced its new plan to produce fluff pulp alone, a type of soft paper that would result in a one third reduction in the workforce, a loss of around 360 employees. According to Artist and her cousin, the mill no longer makes copy paper because they are lazy. 

Paper pulp production: 

1. Chop down tree
2. Mechanically or chemically separate cellulose fibers from wood
3. Mix with water and other chemical additives 
4. Produce fluff paper
5. Fill diapers

The Domtar paper mill sucks freshwater from the Roanoke and spins trees into diapers, creating sanitary products for the beginning and end of life, and pumping the leftover water into the sky chemically woven with things you do not want to inhale. The rest floats down the sweet black water towards the Atlantic.

The factory advertises longevity and benefits, but there are fewer people to receive them.

“Still, those few left got a job for life,” said Artist, “old ladies are always gonna need Depends.” 

“Babies, too,” laughed Cousin. 

The morning stretched until we arrived at Cypress Cathedral, a new wooden platform built to attract kayakers and their tents to spend a night in the cypress-gum swamp. We stuck a Russian peat corer into the mud beneath the dock and pulled up soil from thousands of years ago, packed down so tightly and so starved of oxygen that spidery, hair-thin plant roots from 0 AD may have inhaled the breath of the paper mill for the first time. 

I reached over and raked my fingers through the peat. Thick, black, organic mud. We could see rings of light red material between black and brown discs. A change in land use? A flood event? An English colonist with two feet tangled in the swamp and no camping platform to rescue her? 

I wonder if her spirit lives in one of the trees. I have no doubt some explorers perished, declared Bland Simpson (Kenan Distinguished Professor of English & Creative Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill).

My body is also made of this.

I tried to absorb the wisdom of the dirt with the methane bubbles that squeeze their way to the surface. 

How do we fix what we have done?

The water moves slowly here, winding between the tangled swampy knees of the cypress and the fallen leaves of the black gum. Back beneath the Cypress Cathedral, the river leaves more than it takes, depositing dirt that is compressed and compressed and compressed until there isn’t enough oxygen to break down the dead plants and the lives they trap. 

Peat forms when plant material does not fully decay. Because carbon dioxide is naturally released during decomposition, peatland plants capture it. It takes thousands of years for peatlands to develop reserves 1.5 to 2.3 meters deep, which would store around 415 gigatonnes of carbon. Globally, peat sequesters up to 42% of soil carbon, which exceeds the amount hiding in the world’s forests. I wondered if we warmed the atmosphere with the bubbles that escaped from our 3-foot slab. 

Later that afternoon, we docked and scattered around town before lunch. I wandered into the only four Main Street buildings open after 2 p.m. on a Saturday. Artist and Cousin showed me around their new shop and recounted the changes they’ve seen over the decades. 

“The town relies on the factory. The factory relies on the river. We do too, but there is some nasty shit in there.”

The Parisian woman in her ice cream shop across the street cited the Black Bear Festival in June and her bistro’s escargot dish as her motivations for moving from the global fashion capital to a town with 4,000 people. 

“The town is on the up and up,” She smiled like she knew something we didn’t, “We have the largest black bear population in the world!”

Bewildered, I asked many, many clarifying questions. 

“We have the BIGGEST population,” she said, “Like, the bears are quite large. They eat very much.”

I wandered into the street hoping to see the twin cubs they all swore were playing in the parking lot just that morning. The eco-tourism in the area seems promising – the biggest black bears, treehouses for rent and camping platforms with a view of “North Carolina’s Amazon.” Plymouth, and other towns like it, spent the first dawn of their success shuttling shipping containers up river and tearing apart tree fibers to fill diapers. Those that are left look forward, investing in their next sunrise by emphasizing the wonder of the remaining natural wonders – the black bears and the blacker water. 

At Grace Episcopal Church down the street, the Minister gave us a tour and told us stories of the town during the Civil War. Due to its position controlling the Albemarle Sound and the upper Roanoke River, Plymouth was the access point for goods shipped to Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy at the time. The Union Army fought hard for a blockade, forcing the town to surrender. During the war, Plymouth was burned twice, once by each side. During the Battle of Plymouth, the church was used as a hospital.

I could almost picture the chaotic triage inside the walls. 

Tell us what you know, I urged the fading wood panels. 

Legend has it, the holy building even gave up its pews to build coffins for the fallen.

After the battle destroyed all the other holy sites in the town, Grace Episcopal became the sole place of worship, and people of all beliefs flocked. I wonder if they could smell blood over the scent of the sweet black water. 

As I wandered between stained glass windows and tried to keep my muddy river shoes off the plush red carpet, I saw a marble slab with two handles wedged into the floor. I asked Minister, and he promptly lifted the stone to show us its contents. 

Stale air burst from the cavern, revealing dozens of green and red canisters, blue tin cans and silver metal boxes, even a red Prince Albert pipe tobacco jar. 

“Ashes,” he told us, passing a gold container around our circle of uneasy smiles and trembling fingers. 

“So they are just…in there?”  someone asked.

He chuckled at our fear and unscrewed the cap, tugging out one corner of a dusty plastic bag. 

“The identification is either in the bag tag or on the bottom. I don’t see…” he turned the container, spilling some human into the floor. “I don’t see a name on this one.”

My body is also made of this.

I tried to absorb the knowledge of an anonymous life as it mixed with the dusty church air. 

Minister told us that Plymouth is home to four Superfund sites, two of which are still active. Four areas so full of waste that the United States government deemed them hazardous enough to mandate legal postings on homeowners’ informational websites. We used factory chemicals on this land, and now they grow into the grass there, mixing with the Algonquian spirits in the sweet black water and seeping into the drinking reserves. 

We poison the land until we can’t live here anymore, and nothing else can either. 

Outside in the church yard, a few dozen headstones leaned, surrendering to the rich black soil. 

“There are more bodies here than anyone can know”, said Minister, passing under a large magnolia. I imagined its roots spreading deep, cracking into the old church pews buried beneath their younger sisters and feeding on the fallen. I wonder if the trees know which bodies poisoned the sweet black water. 

I took a detour up a trail away from a beautifully manicured green field that I thought was a golf course before I realized it was a public parking lot. Nothing is built there, maybe due to seasonal flooding or historical parking shortages in the town’s prime. I watched the ground closely to distinguish snakes from sticks and almost tripped over the edge of a platform, a pier built out to the river’s edge. 

As glaciers melt and temperatures rise and things lift or sink to where they shouldn’t be, the black gum and the cypress dropped their leaves into my hands. We unbury the bubbles in the peat just to fill the holes with chemicals and bodies and are surprised that the bubbles are angry at what they find at the surface. They warm the air, the ice melts, the water rises, flooding homes with waste and turning rivers from lifelines to monsters. 

Moratuc. Dangerous River. We are driving ourselves out.

The change is seeping in from the Atlantic, sea salt invading drinking wells and paper pulp factories, clogging machines and tree arteries. It mixes and spreads with the factory chemicals we’ve buried in the peat and the red-black tannins that the river gives to heal us. Rising water licks the doorsteps of tiny blue river houses on stilts and steals boats from docks with missing planks. 

Many of the people are gone. They have surrendered, fled from the Superfund sites and the old movie theaters; they’ve been swept out to sea, sequestered in the peat with the rest of our carbon, or stuffed into a Prince Albert can below the church floorboards. Those that remain, though, can hear the cogs slow in the paper mill and look elsewhere to find life. They have begun to listen to the spirits in the grasses. The knowledge is here, how to live with this land. It is buried in the peat along the banks of a sweet black dangerous river.

 The trees are dying, but they will grow back, perhaps upriver where the salt can’t reach. The people will eventually be gone from this land. It will be soon, if we continue to lay the land to waste. If we want to last a bit longer, alongside the black bears and the Great Blue Heron, we can seek out a dusty car melted to Main Street, pull a white rag from the back window, and begin to wash the salt off the leaves of the black gum and cypress until they are healed, one by one. 

References

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/tannin#:~:text=Tannic%20acid%20is%20moderately%20toxic,abdominal%20pain%2C%20and%20liver%20damage.
2.  https://www.nps.gov/articles/carolinaalgonquian.htm
3.  https://www.nature.org/en-us/get-involved/how-to-help/places-we-protect/roanoke-river-region
4.  http://www.townofwilliamston.com/visitors/about_williamston/index.php
5. https://www.witn.com/2021/09/17/study-williamston-ranks-among-top-10-best-places-state-retire/#:~:text=MARTIN%20COUNTY%2C%20N.C.%20(WITN),10%2C%20coming%20at%20number%207.
6. https://www.domtar.com/en/what-we-make/pulp/papergrade-pulp#:~:text=Domtar’s%20northern%20softwood%20grades%20include,white%20spruce%20and%20Douglas%20fir.
7.  https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/plymouth-nc-population
8. https://peatlands.org/peat/peat/#:~:text=Peat%20is%20the%20surface%20organic,high%20acidity%20and%20nutrient%20deficiency.
9. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2014/08/28/the-very-essence-of-nightmare-the-battle-of-plymouth-nc-and-the-destruction-of-the-css-albemarle/
10.  https://graceplymouth.ecdio.org/

This year’s striped bass harvest season in the Roanoke River Management Area opens this Saturday.

Harvest dates will be Friday to April 16 in the lower river zone, which is downstream of the U.S. 258 bridge at Scotland Neck to the mouth at Albemarle Sound, and April 24–30 in the upper river zone, which is upstream of the U.S. 258 bridge at Scotland Neck to the base of Roanoke Rapids Dam, North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission officials said Wednesday.

During the two separate harvest periods, the minimum length limit is 18 inches, and no striped bass between 22 and 27 inches — the protective slot — may be possessed at any time. The daily creel limit is two fish, only one of which may be larger than 27 inches.

Although the harvest season is limited this year, the separate weeks selected in each zone coincide with the highest average weekly harvest totals observed by Wildlife Commission fisheries staff over the last nine years, according to officials. Anglers can continue to catch and release striped bass throughout the spring.

To reduce handling stress on fish that are released, the Commission recommends anglers use a single barbless hook or a lure with a single barbless hook, a requirement from April 1 through June 30 when fishing in the upper Roanoke River zone above the U.S. 258 bridge near Scotland Neck.

“We knew that significant reductions were necessary, but we still wanted to select days which would maximize harvest opportunities for our anglers. As season options were considered, we identified the days where harvest was historically the highest in each area of the river. Although the timing of fish migration into the river is different each spring, daily harvest during the two weekly periods selected averaged between 700 and 1,300 pounds of striped bass per day,” said Commission Coastal Fisheries Supervisor Chad Thomas in a statement.

Commission officials issued a reminder that a proclamation outlining significant changes to the season was issued by the commission in January. Modifications to the framework became necessary when the harvest quota in the Roanoke River was reduced from 68,750 pounds to 12,800 pounds. The reduction was deemed a necessary conservation action intended to rebuild the striped bass population.

Results from a 2020 stock assessment of the Roanoke River/Albemarle Sound conducted by the state Division of Marine Fisheries, with assistance from the Wildlife Commission, indicated that the stock was overfished and overfishing was occurring.

“The striped bass population on the Roanoke River is currently in a period of decline as the estimated number of spawning females has dropped below our conservation targets,” said Thomas. “This situation has been made worse as natural reproduction has been poor for the last several years. Reductions in the harvest of spawning fish is intended to increase the number of viable eggs in the river and help promote good numbers of juvenile striped bass.”

The North Carolina Estuarine Striped Bass Fishery Management Plan is in the process of being amended, and additional management strategies to aid with stock recovery on the Roanoke River will be identified and presented to the public for input in late 2021.

Signage will be posted at boating access areas, or BAAs, along the Roanoke River to notify anglers of the changes to the open harvest dates. More information about boating access areas on the Roanoke River can be found using the agency’s online BAA locator.

Mike Lee, right, fishes his pound net for striped bass that researchers will tag. Photo: Ladd Bayliss

Julie Harris and Tyler Moore implant a tag in a striped bass. Photo: Ladd Bayliss

Things are a little different this morning for Mike Lee, a lifelong commercial fisherman who works the inshore waters of our northeastern coast. His wooden skiff slices through the tannic waters of the Roanoke River. White perch are languidly squirming along his boat’s worn deck looking for an escape, and  double-crested cormorants are waiting patiently for whatever leftovers can be scavenged from the pound netter’s harvest.

But today, there are other rummagers alongside – and they’re not looking for leftovers.

Julie Harris is following Lee, looking for striped bass. A researcher at N.C. State University, she wants to implant them with sonic tracking tags. One of the principal investigators  in this three-year study, Harris hopes  to better understand the migration patterns and mortality rates of the iconic striped bass of Albermarle Sound and the Roanoke River.

Known colloquially as “rockfish,” striped bass (Morone saxatilis) are “anandromous,” meaning that they spend most of their lives in saltwater but migrate up freshwater rivers to spawn. The Roanoke River is one of the most important breeding waters for the bass, along with the Chesapeake Bay and the Hudson and Delaware rivers.

It’s hard to imagine such a powerful, ocean-minded fish  weaving through the bends of the tea-colored Roanoke, but, nevertheless, they make the journey every year.  Harris wants to know more about those  migrations, while better understanding mortality rates.

Her project is being paid for with money from the state’s recreational saltwater fishing license. Partnering with N.C. State on the project are the U.S. Geological Survey, the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries and the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission. Harris began work with Lee last year, in a mutually beneficial “fish for science” partnership.

Lee fishes with pound nets, an ancient fishing method that corrals fish through a maze of nets. They don’t  kill what they catch. For Harris, they’re perfect.

“This has been the most successful method we have found to collect in the Lower Roanoke,” she said.  “We need all of our fish to be alive and healthy, which is exactly what you get from a pound net-harvested fish.”

Although the coastal fish markets of the northeast coast rarely have dry floors, times have been tough for the estuary fishermen. Since 2000, the numbers of fish houses along the sound have taken a big hit because of development and fisheries regulations.

“I have nowhere local to take my fish,” Lee said., “If I want to make any money, I have to haul my catch to Wanchese – and that’s nearly 200 miles round trip. Having Dr. Harris here to buy our fish really helps us out during a tough time of year.”

Ever since the moratorium on the river herring in September 2007, fishermen like Lee have struggled. According to a historical analysis by Joe Hightower, the other principal N.C. State researcher on this project, the 1996 landings of river herrings ended up comprising only five percent of recorded landings between 1880 and 1970.

Mike Lee’s pound nets in the Roanoke River are perfect for collecting live specimens of striped bass for tagging. Photo: Ladd Bayliss

This serious decline only ensured that the colloquial fishery of the Roanoke would have to go on without the herring. “Once the herring fishery was taken away, we weren’t left with much else besides our rock, perch and catfish. The rest of the stuff in the river just isn’t worth handling,” said Lee.

Now, thanks to N.C. State, Lee is able to get premium market price for striped bass that he doesn’t have to bother transporting and selling in Wanchese.

A tagged striper. Photo: Ladd Bayliss

“Instead of selling striped bass around here for a lesser price, N.C. State will take my fish from my net for me for premium price,” said Lee.

Harris and Tyler Moore, a research technician, are waiting this morning for  Lee to lift his  net  from the water. Once the culling of fish in the net begins, the striped bass are transferred to live wells on N.C. State’s boat.

Moore and Harris perform the surgeries to implant the tags on the water underneath a cypress grove, working swiftly to ensure the fish are healthy upon release. “We’ve had very little mortality in the seasons I’ve been tagging,” said Harris.

They anesthetize the fish and implant them with three tags.

Used in all sorts of aquatic organisms, the sonic tag is a thing of beauty. By outfitting striped bass with this special tag, scientists can better gauge the  real-time movements of the fish. The signal that the tags emit are picked up by stationary receivers at specific inlets and estuarine or river locations that recognize the tag numbers. The tag emits a signal every 30-90 seconds up to a distance of 200-300 meters. If a receiver is within range, the tag number is recorded with a timestamp.

The researchers implants another type of tag that is picked up by hand-held scanners at  fish houses and boat ramps to quantify recreational and commercial catch mortality rates.. A third tag is one that most fishermen are accustomed to seeing – a plastic tube that protrudes from the fish’s body. Instead of the standard yellow state tag, Harris uses red ones. Anyone catching one of her tagged stripers is entitled to a $100  reward..

So far, researchers have implanted 150 sonic tags into Roanoke River striped bass. “We have had some really great data so far,” said Harris, “We have been able to learn a lot about the migration timing of these fish, and how it relates to temperature.”

Charlton Godwin, a biologist with the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries, said Harris’ study will be helpful in comparing historical striped bass migration data. Beginning in the 1950’s, William Hassler of N.C. State conducted several mark and recapture studies on the striped bass. “With Dr. Harris’ data, we will be able to compare Dr. Hassler’s data as well as our own computer modeling and stock assessments to get a better idea of the fish, its numbers and migration patterns,” said Godwin.

Aside from the invaluable scientific data that will be collected for such an economically-viable fish, Harris’ study bodes well for fostering a continued relationship between scientist and traditional fisherman. And for Lee, the partnership with NCSU is a match made in heaven. “We look forward to it every year,” said Lee, “NCSU has really helped us out.”

•  For more information about Roanoke River striped bass study, visit the Web site