Time Travel

Tonight Ocracoke’s basketball teams are competing in playoff games. The Lady Dolphins were in line at 6:30 this morning to catch the ferry for their 6:00 PM game in Louisburg. That’s a long day by anyone’s measure. (The boys left at a more respectable 9:00 AM, but they walked on to the ferry and were being met by a bus on the other side of the sound. We have only one bus!)

Our girls came back from 15 points down to win by 4 points, 54-50, against a school that has more than 10 times as many students! What heart! Very proud of these girls and their coaches. Almost every away game requires them to miss at least one day of classes, and yet most of them keep up with a rigorous schedule and excel in the the classroom.

But for me, the best part of this game (besides the win, of course!) might just have been the local radio broadcast over WOVV (We’re Ocracoke’s Village Voice), with the game called tonight by our principal, Mr. Walt Padgett. When the game is broadcast over local radio by a decidedly partisan play-by-play,… well, let’s just say the commentary gets colorful– and loud! And there was, of course, the inevitable loss of feed just as the Dolphins came back to tie the game.

So why do I love this so much? Go back in time 50 years. Yes, half a century. Let’s own it. Boone. Mountains. Less than great roads and cars. Most of us did not travel to away games when the Watauga Pioneers were on the road. So we tuned in to WATA AM radio. Transistor radios more often than not. And yes, the commentary was not exactly non-partisan. And we listened. And we waited through the static and the occasional breaks in service.

And perhaps this is one reason I like living here on the island. When I came here, I knew that Ocracokers have a reverence for and loyalty to their home that is not unlike what we mountaineers have for ours. Not just loyalty to our teams, our businesses, our towns. Loyalty to our land, our forebears, our customs, our idiosyncrasies. Listening to tonight’s game, I was transported back to Boone, to the late 60s, to snowy winter nights as Watauga High’s Pioneers traveled to Morganton, West Jefferson, Newland, Wilkesboro. To simpler times. I was not an athlete. But I was part of the team. Just as those of us who listened to WOVV tonight were part of the Ocracoke Lady Dolphin’s team.

Go, Dolphins! Go, Pioneers!