By Bland Simpson
Four of us — friends David and Heidi Perry, my wife, Ann, and I — met up with rough-and-ready naturalist Tom Earnhardt (of UNC TV’s “Exploring North Carolina”), and his 17-foot Jones Brothers bateau in Williamston one late March weekend a decade ago. We were all staying at the late Lucia Peel’s small inn, an early 20th-century pile called Haughton Hall, and after going out for a guaranteed oyster and shrimp feast at the venerable Sunny Side Oyster Bar only a couple of miles from Lucia’s, we had returned and settled in to watch a Tar Heels basketball game.
Lucia Peel was an attorney (as were our fathers, good friends too), and she also had deep conservation interests: She was a founding member and longtime board president of Roanoke River Partners, the group that notably saved a nearby Rosenwald school and that also envisioned and constructed a host of tent-camping platforms in the depths of the mighty lower Roanoke’s deep swamps. At 3 to 5 miles wide, they are among the broadest freshwater river bottomlands in the country. People come from all over to see and stay in this natural wonder.
She was practical and inspired — and a mite superstitious, too, retreating to her kitchen and her special large rocking chair with her retriever, so they could watch the ballgame and from that lucky vantage point bring good fortune to the Tar Heels as she and the dog looked up at the television atop the refrigerator, while we watched from a parlor on the other side of the house.
As soon as the Tar Heels won that tournament game running away, Lucia was at our sides again, and she cheered us on, speaking with enthusiasm about the downriver jaunt we had planned for the next day.
“You’re going to have great weather!” she kept saying.
And so we did.
After a gracious Haughton Hall breakfast next morning, we made our way down to the wildlife landing just upstream of the Roanoke River bridge and former site of an old gargantuan, higgledy-piggledy red riverside warehouse, a favorite childhood icon of mine, which burned long ago.
Sunlight came to us diffusely, and as the day’s predicted weather would bring us only a mid-50s high, we all layered up considerably and set out. Moved out, more like it: Knowing he would often be out on open eastern Carolina waters, where storms and squalls blow up quickly, Tom had the bateau fitted out with a 70-horse motor, so he could outrun most anything Mother Nature might sling and fling at him of a day. As the great Carolina journalist and boatman Jack Betts would say, Tom’s bateau was indeed “a go-fast.”
Only a few other boats were on the river this early this cool March morning, and the Perrys, Ann and I as Tom’s crew had only to look out for dead-head logs ahead as we cruised on, wind in our faces, swiftly downriver, enjoying the ever-so-slight hint of green on the riverside’s bordering trees, the maples leaning out too and showing their first blush of red. If the hints were modest, they were still there for real, and all the way down 15 miles of river we said the word “spring!” over and over again, as if by incantation we could fully bring it on.
A line had already formed when we reached the Cypress Grill, that small, tin-roofed, board-and-batten cabin-like restaurant just a few yards up the Jamesville riverbank, where we tied up the bateau and took our places. The Grill had stood forth, famously, for decades as the open-six-weeks-only-at-Eastertide spot to be for fresh fried herring (cooked lightly, heavily or cremated). We ordered up and ate up while standing around outside, with unanimous finest kind judgment, and after only a half an hour or so, full of herring and sweet iced tea, we reboarded the bateau and headed slowly back up the river’s edge, sun and patches of blue now over all.
Into Devil’s Gut, a prime Roanoke backwater, Tom turned the boat, into the realm of the tent-camping platforms, up Lower Deadwater Creek, a slender stream to the north off the gut, coming to a slow stop at the tent-platform of Barred Owl Roost, where we lingered awhile, listening out and talking about this profoundly deep swamp and all the warblers, bright yellow prothonotaries and so many others, which would soon be mating and nesting here.
Then we headed west again, slowly up the gut, till we burst back out onto the big river, which revealed to us a miracle. By now there had been just enough sun, more than we expected, warming the day up into the low 60s, bringing enough heat and force to change dramatically the Roanoke’s riverside complexion during the few scant hours while we had lunched at the Cypress Grill and then rummaged on through Devil’s Gut.
Millions of leaves had unfurled and opened up!
The Roanoke, in this short stretch of time, this small piece of day, had turned a seasonal bend in time and greened up gloriously. Our little liturgy, our incantations on the way downriver, had worked. We were simply exultant, and we laughed as we sped the rest of the way on back toward the Williamston landing, surprised and in good-hearted disbelief at the power and magic that anyone out on the river just then could so readily have seen:
The grand green cloak of spring!
Cap’n Tom pushed the throttle down, and our speed encouraged me to keep a tight grip on the stainless steel pipe near the pilot, so I held on hard and fast for 30 or 40 more minutes till we eased under the Williamston bridge and reached the wildlife ramp there. Everywhere we looked, the Great Painter had put a bright, fresh coat of evanescent light green upon the woods, and the difference from early morning to late afternoon was stunning indeed.
We thanked Tom Earnhardt and bade him farewell at the landing and drove back to Haughton Hall to reunite David and Heidi Perry with their car. Lucia Peel was sitting on the back steps while her retriever happily roamed around the inn’s back yard, a blithe moment for this true daughter of Rachel Carson. Lucia’s works honor the great eastern riverswamps we had just traversed and we are all in her debt, certainly including those of us who, to our surprise and delight, had gotten in on the very day of that spring’s greening up all along North Carolina’s lower Roanoke River.