Living at Opposite Ends of the State

Boone and Ocracoke. One in the northwest corner of North Carolina and the other, part of the Outer Banks on the coast. You can get further west if you are in the southern part of the state, but Boone is just a few miles from Tennessee. And Ocracoke… well, part of Hatteras Island is a little further east but it’s still on an island and one can easily walk to the Atlantic Ocean in a matter of minutes. Mountains and coast.

Sounds like two completely different worlds and lifestyles. And in many ways, that is true. But in the nearly two years that I have lived here on Ocracoke Island, in the Village of Ocracoke, I have thought often of the many ways my those two worlds of mine are alike. (Not my only two worlds, of course; there is Lewisville, in the Piedmont where my family and I have lived for  more than 25 years.)

Boone has changed a lot since I grew up there in the ’50s and ’60s; so has Ocracoke in those 60-some years. But there are parallels to life in Boone when I was a child (and some of those things persist) to life in Ocracoke, even now.

I’ll start with the weather. Oh, the weather! People everywhere are dependent on the weather, of course. It determines what we wear, whether or how we travel, even some occupations. But in Boone, even now but much more so 60 years ago, the weather was a big deal, a big concern, especially in the winter months.

Snow. Oh, the sweet anticipation for children at least. And fear/dread, I am certain, for the adults. Until I was ten years old, we lived in a house with a coal furnace. the only access to this furnace was around back of the house. So on the coldest nights Daddy would have to go out in the snow to put more coal in the furnace. Fun? I doubt it. Especially that infamous winter of 1960 when Watauga County had record snowfall, with drifts well over 6 feet. And then there were the tire chains. I remember seeing both my parents out in the blowing snow struggling to get the chains on the tires. Literal metal chains. the tires had to be lined up just right with the chains, back and forth, until they could be looped over and locked.

And yet, bless Daddy’s heart, he would come in from a long day of work and the three of us would run to greet him with the questions: “Do you think we’ll have school tomorrow?” How much do you think we’ll get?” And all he wanted was to come in, take off his boots, and get warm. Until he died in 2012, I would still call him whenever snow was expected to ask him those same questions, laughing. But still a bit serious!

Here, the biggest fear is hurricanes or tropical storms (and Nor’easters can strike too, as I learned firsthand this year!) Three weeks after I arrived on the island, TS Hermine struck. Some folks left but I stayed around. The worst of this one was the storm surge afterwards. I watched from my deck as the water continued to rise the day after the wind and driving rain shook the house all night. There was some water damage from the flooding, but nothing significant.

And then a couple of weeks later, Hurricane Matthew came in, bigger and stronger. I left the island for a few days but came back to flooded roads, water in my storage room, and more delays in school. I parked the car over a mile from the house and walked back and forth to get things back to the house.

Just as with impending snow storms in the mountains, the anticipation of hurricanes is frightening and yet exciting. so many people are dependent on the ocean for their livelihood. Many fishermen had just put out their nets for what should have been an extended period of time. They had to decide whether to pull in the nets and know they would lose income or to leave them out and risk losing even the nets. And of course there was the potential for damage to property– boats, vehicles, homes.

Related to the subject of weather is the strong tourist impact on both Boone and Ocracoke. Each fall thousands of people flock to the North Carolina mountains to see the leaf show. And so the weather is again the focus: Has it been too wet/dry? hot/cool? Will it rain just before the peak and take off all the leaves. And so on. And since the mid-60s until the present, the same sort of questions arise with regard to ski season. Is it too warm? Will it snow early? Or– gasp!– not at all? Will the cold continue late into the winter months? All these questions- and the answers– determine a lot of the local economy. Restaurants, hotels, ski slopes, Tweetsie Railroad (that blast from my past!), Horn in the West (rain? no show!)– so many people depending the elements for their livelihood.

It is the same on Ocracoke. Many of the year-round restaurants make the majority of their year’s earnings between Memorial Day and mid-October, give or take a week or two. Something like Hurricane Matthew can be catastrophic. Reservations are cancelled. Shops and restaurants close. Worse, access to the island is suspended.

How can I compare Boone and Ocracoke without talking about school? It is sort of what I do and have done since 1958. Whoa. That looks serious when I actually put it out there. But, as they say, it is what it is. Truth.

Every discussion about Ocracoke school includes talk about how our students are together from pre-K through graduation, with the exception of a small percentage who move in or out. We have one class of each grade level through elementary school. Sometimes middle school and high school classes are split into two groups because of (still small) numbers. But even so, most students have most of their classes together all the way through the 14 grades. Everyone in the school has lunch at the same time. In high school almost everyone plays soccer and basketball just so we can have a team. Many of them are related and even those who aren’t might as well be, because they have known each other so long so well. Many of the teachers are relatives if not actually the students’ parent. (My own children went to the high school where I taught, so they know that feeling!)  Their parents all know each other, even if they aren’t related. They see each other and the teachers at the post office, the Variety Store, church, on the street, everywhere.

(My elementary school and a group of teachers from AES, including Mrs. Ennis Davis, front row, second from right, mentioned below. Photos from digitalwatauga.org)

Going to Appalachian Elementary School in Boone was similar. We had two or three classes of each grade level but those of us who lived in “town” also went to church an Scouts together. So if we happened not to be in the class for one grade or another, we still saw each other often. One friend, Tanya, and I had the same teacher every single year at Appalachian Elementary School– even in third grade when Mrs. Davis had to suffer through having a combination 3-4 class! And then at Watauga high School, we were still in many of the same classes. And THEN we both went to Appalachian State University and, I’ll be darned if we didn’t end up on the same hall in the same dorm our freshman year! Still friends this day! (I hope this sort of friendship continues for our Ocracoke kids.) (Last day of third grade. Tanya is on the far left. And me? I guess you can find me!)

And speaking of school… another similarity between Ocracoke and Boone: Many of our teachers were parents of our friends and classmates. We saw them at church. We played at their homes. The same is true here, of course. And there is some of that everywhere, but in small places like these one can count on it!  For the most part, in Boone, they were able to avoid putting a child in his or her own parent’s class because there were always at least two options. At Ocracoke School, almost every teacher who has a child will eventually teach that child in the classroom! (My own daughter was in pre-calculus class with me– my sons were not as fortunate!– and although we have always gotten along well, she did not like that situation at all!)

Christmas in Ocracoke reminds me of Boone in my childhood. Outdoor decorations were a big deal then and they are a big deal here now. I know people everywhere decorate in various degrees, from a simple wreath on the door to full-out light shows, but in “old” Boone and in Ocracoke, there were/are judges who drive around and vote on best displays. I love looking at what residents do here. And I still recall the simple (canvas? paper? not sure) Nativity Scene my mother put up for several years in the first house I lived in. Most memorable was the year that my beloved yellow cat Alfalfa curled up in front of the manger, thus ensuring first place in religious outdoor scenes. Here on the island, many of the scenes take a nautical turn. One of my favorites has swans pulling Santa’s sleigh. 

Speaking of Santa, the Variety Store has a friendly waving Santa in their upstairs window. That evokes memories of the life-size, velvet-clad Santa who waved to us each December from the wind of Belk Department Store in downtown Boone! And wait! It gets better: Santa makes a live appearance at the Variety Store one afternoon in mid-December, just as he showed up at the Sears-Roebuck Catalog store without fail when I was a child. (That Santa looked strangely like Mr. Petrey, my friend Douglas’s dad who was also my seventh grade math teacher and a member of my church! I sure wish I had a picture of that Santa!)

Ocracoke is famous for its Fig Cake (I make a pretty good one myself, I might add!) The story goes that the fig cake was “invented” by a local woman who used what she had– and that happened to be fig preserves. In the mountains, folks are fond of apple cakes, whether with fresh apples or with apple butter. On both ends of the state, and countless towns in between, cooks are using whatever is plentiful!

A couple of other rather light-hearted comparisons: here on Ocracoke we have the Variety Store, which does indeed have a great variety of things but not always a great selection within categories, and so for serious grocery shopping most people take the ferry to Hatteras Island and drive about 20 minutes to the Food Lion in Avon. Things were never quite like that in Boone but there was a period of time when the Winn Dixie has burned down and many of us drove to Lenoir, about an hour away, to buy our groceries. That time brings back a sweet memory for me. Not only was my family together for a few hours but those trips down the mountain were the first time I recall smelling honeysuckle (what we called honeysuckle vine; “real” honeysuckle to us was what is now called flame azalea). To this day, that smell reminds me of those grocery trips.

And one more: washing dishes! I have been fortunate to have a wonderful little house to live in here. It isn’t fancy but it is perfect for me. Except it doesn’t have a dishwasher. Not a deal breaker, obviously, but I admit I have missed having one. A dishwasher is particularly convenient when there aren’t many dishes at a time, so they can be stashed out of sight! And so I frequently stand at the kitchen sink, washing dishes and looking out the window…. just as I did while growing up in Boone. My parents bought their first dishwasher after I went away to college!

One of the most notable things about Ocracoke is how remote it is. We all know it is accessible only by ferry, and getting anywhere else involves hours of travel. If one takes the shorter ferry, about an hour in length, there is then a long, slow drive up several other barrier islands until one gets to the mainland via a couple of bridges. Or one can take the longer ferries (2:45 or 2:30 in length) but still have to drive at least an hour to get pretty much anywhere. It is a three hour drive to the state capital after one takes the long ferry, for example.

Boone, of course, is quite landlocked so no ferries are involved in getting there. Highways 321 South towards Charlotte and 421 South (officials south but it runs mostly east-west in the western part of the state) are the main arteries leading to Boone. Both are four lanes these days but it was not that way  during my childhood. Trips to Shelby to see my father’s family took us down the very curvy 321, driving perilously close (it still sort of scares me!) to steep drop-offs in the mountains. And driving east to Winston-Salem or Raleigh was no better; not only were there the same narrow, jury lanes on 421 but there was also the dreaded Wade Harris Bridge in Wilkes County, site of frequent wrecks as the road narrowed even more to cross the Lewis Fork Creek and gorge.

(My picture of a bridge similar to what we drove under on our way to Shelby; we called it Papaw’s Bridge! and Postcard showing the dangerous Wade Harris Bridge, from digitalwatauga.org)

I have been surprised how much living in Ocracoke has reminded me of my past. The long walks in the mountains and the long walks in the beach. The beauty of nature all around me in both places. The love and loyalty that people in both areas have for their homelands. Most of all, I loved living in Boone and I have loved living in Ocracoke!

Home, sweet, homes.