RON AND DONNA’S TRIP
TO CEDAR ISLAND, N.C.

Story and sketches by Ron Lupton

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: Was it interesting? Kind of depends on who you are. I could start it out by claiming it not to be another tedious vacation letter, but that would be deceptive. It interested me, most of the time, and more than I’d forecast. And at the more unexpected times. I can tell you that here are incidents of:

- A very real ghostly presence.
-A close call with the Graveyard of the Atlantic.
-A bed and breakfast anyone would remember for its charm.
-Fascinating Sneedvile, Tenn.
-And lots and lots of attacks by eagles, of all things.

Some of this is true, some only sorta.

I recommend you read the entire thing only if you are:

1) A relative curious as to whether your name is mentioned (no important accomplishment, if so!)

2) Bored Beyond Belief and Better Judgment

3) Interested in delving into the inner workings of an obsessive-compulsive mind. I mean, who else would WRITE something like this?

Otherwise, scan it briefly, if you must, or better yet, move on to the next activity.]

We left Colorado Springs Aug.3, generally taking secondary roads to avoid interstates and Big Cities. After all, the Chicago and St. Louis Pizza Huts cannot be very different from those in New York. We’d barely entered Kansas with this idea in mind when I looked at the town ahead on the map: Olathe. I’d been here some forty years before! Had, in fact, stayed and played for a friend’s wedding in the little map-dot town of Marienthal, back in The Day. Called him when I got back home. They’d survived, the marriage hadn’t. Still wonderful to hear his voice again. Thus the waves of nostalgia had already begun.

Medicine Lodge, Kansas, is where Donna walked into a museum and found an elegant ‘redwork’ quilt made by generations-past Axtells, her family name. A transplanted 1800’s log cabin adjacent, however, was replete with something more than just antiques and a self-guided tour. As we walked in the doorway, something filled her with such creepy feelings that she passed on the tour, telling me not to let her unease slow ME down. Well, it didn’t. I left just as fast as she did. This kind of feeling is rare for her, but when it occurs, she’s generally RIGHT! The Carrie Nation House nearby was no place to toast our good luck, either. Dodge City and Coffeyville (the Daltons’ downfall) were stops and overnights for us, too. From time to time, I’m a student of the old outlaws.

Nothing in Branson at this time to tempt us, so we skirted Joplin, MO, and continued on our beautiful, leisurely southern route. We had KILLER barbecue in Paducah, KY, at an unassuming little strip-mall place and saw outstanding quilt work at the Quilt Museum there. Donna was our guide for this leg, as she’d been to the quilters’ annual gathering before.

Kentucky is a long, LONG state! As long as Kansas, and so is Virginia! (Check a map.) Doomed by traffic just outside Corbin (KFC: the Colonel’s hangout), we took SECONDARY secondaries all the way down south through the Cumberland Gap Tunnel. No, I don’t believe it was there when the pioneers were heading westward. To add to my distraction, a Cumberland Gap eagle darted at my windshield a few times, making us totally miss an easterly turnoff into Virginia. No probs. Little spot on the map name o’ Sneedville, Tennessee, just to the northeast. We’d hop on over there diagonally, rather than retrace and lose a half hour.

Dumb Move. The “This Route NOT RECOMMENDED For Vehicles Longer Than 35 Feet” should have been fair warning. Shades of the film “Deliverance”. Colorado switchbacks in an Appalachian maze! We finally found that wide spot in the road called Sneedville and promised never to go there again. 3 hours gone… but who’s counting?

Done with side roads AND Tennessee, we took I 64/81 up to Wytheville, VA. (Pronounced like “wistful”, with a lisp.) There we met some young sheriff’s deputies at dinner, took their advice, and interstated on across to Norfolk, VA. We picked up my sister, Betty Jean, and her family and found our motel on the west bank of the Elizabeth River. Right there in our hometown of Portsmouth, Virginia.

I was raised in a culture in which nostalgia is a part of life. There is a monument to “Our Confederate Dead” downtown, larger by far than the entrance to the U.S. Courthouse doorway, for example. I remembered so much so well: sights and smells of marshes, beaches, swamps, awning-shaded neighborhoods groomed with crepe myrtle and mimosa trees… It suddenly came to me that MY son’s first son is now older than I was when I moved to Colorado!

The now 10(!) of us visited dozens of friends and family at a local teen hangout of yesteryear, The Circle Restaurant. It was fascinating to watch my “younger-older” sister, Gayle, who still lives in Virginia, when she and my “elder-older” sister got together. Their interaction was hilarious and amazing. I felt like little brother all over again, a small kid watching from a distance and they were back in their teens, yammering away as if all those intervening years hadn’t, and as if some animated conversation from back then had suddenly, instantly resumed.

There were Chubby and Connie (she’s now a NUN, ready to take her final vows! Nobody tell the Mom Superior she’s really a BAPTIST…), children of my dad’s brother (whom I physically resemble!), Genevieve and Josie, newly-re-found cousins via the internet, Elbert Gibbs, Wesley Knight and his mom, my niece, Terrie… Babs and Pete, and Billie and Jerry, and all those folks everybody loves, and… on and on. Just an amazing thing. Later, many of us would indulge in a pilgrimage to tour most of the childhood homes we’d known in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s. Some homeowners even graciously invited us inside!

Lawyer Barkley Tutthill has lovingly restored the little two-story waterfront gingerbread house I remember most, and gave us the grand tour. His son had met us outside in the gathering twilight, and I felt I was at home again, just as surely as this little boy, in the same spot, some 60 years distant! Remarkable! Something about young Barkley’s manner gave me to know we were very much kindred spirits who shared a common heritage and mutual magic, growing up in the same spot.

At Westhaven Baptist Church (huge!) in the study were a few framed old black and whites of long ago men’s and women’s Sunday school classes. There were my mother and dad, staring out at us from far away and long gone times. How strange that their photos were among the very few on view. On this day. At this time. My mother was a startlingly beautiful young person, I noticed. Guess that can skip a generation now and again… I wouldn’t know, of course!

Speaking of churches, the downtown spires and steeples, and some of the statues seem to have been recently painted by a madman with endless gallons of pastel teal paint! Someone (Betty’s husband, Don?) finally decided these steeples were made of copper and were now in the process of oxidizing and corroding! This blue-green verdigris ran down from pillar to post literally, in some cases.

Flowering, towering magnolias (a ‘trash-tree’ for some locals) with their citrus-scented massive blooms of pure white; crepe myrtle’s magenta blossoms encrusting its twigs; sweet gum and its giant maple leaves; strange, kneed and primitive cypress: all such surroundings so familiar in my childhood, but rare as Real Barbecue in Colorado! The twin threats of intolerable heat and humidity never materialized. Offshore breezes were pleasant, and our skins wondered what kind of moist heaven this was.

Portsmouth is a water town. Despite the graceful sailboat regatta I watched and photographed, my town’s ‘sleepy little harbor’ is now packed beyond absurd with the yachts of the affluent. From what I saw along the Outer Banks at Kitty Hawk, there is no room left to build even a tool shed unless you stack it vertically, Miami Beach-style. Those who live there pay outrageous prices for such hurricane dice-toss properties, too. National Geographic got it right in a recent issue. We ARE loving our coasts to death, and North Carolina’s is one of the cleanest ones left.

We ten next headed south in a two-vehicle convoy toward New Bern, N.C. and the Lupton Family 50th. Reunion to be held on Cedar Island, on the Pamlico Sound. Unfortunately, as I was leading the group, a Great Dismal Swamp eagle darted at my windshield twice on the trip, distracting me and again causing me to miss turns. We were a bit late. Shirley Edwards, in charge of the event, met us outside New Bern with our costumes and a side trip to her waterfront property (she calls it a ‘fishing camp’) on the Neuse River. (Quick note to the rest of my flatlander buddies: rivers aren’t really rivers in this country unless there is at least one segment too wide to see land on the other side.) (No kidding.) My nephew-by-marriage, Jim Smith, got right to work talking with Shirley’s son about the local fishing. Jim just loves to fish. More on this later…

We had to take a ferry across one of these wiiiiide waterways to continue to Cedar Island. Turns out it’s a free service of the state, but my nephew Bill Wine didn’t know that. I assumed a nervous demeanor and told him the cost was $200 per group, making his share $20, cash only, and my pockets were getting empty! He hastened to produce the money until his parents, my sister, Betty Jean, and Don, started to giggle. Darn!

Cedar Island Motel

Jim, of course, wasted no time in trying his luck at sound fishing from the shore that night. He did well, too, as I recall. After all, he’d stopped for bait fifteen miles too soon (just in case… I don’t blame him…) and now he was doing what he loves to do. This is a quiet (between storms) and sandy subtropical fisherman’s heaven. Right at land’s end, on a shallow sound with no surf. Caught two or three small perch, drums, and a couple of blue crabs. Stayed at it a long time, too, despite the semi-sewer smell of the beach and the sound.

Next day, relatives from near and far congregated at the Cedar Island Freewill Baptist Church for the reunion, about 150 strong. I played the part of Christopher Lupton IV, the common Lupton ancestor of all the North Carolina Luptons (including me!) who shipwrecked here in the late 1700’s. Died in 1820 and is buried in the adjacent cemetery. His wife, Elizabeth, was ably played by my sister, Betty Jean Wine. The ceremonies began with a Minister Lupton’s sermon and some special gospel music.

We were on next. Had fun. My idiot sister in her bonnet and ruffles, and me in my tricorn hat and coatee! Real Kodak moment. I could barely stand to look at her, nor she at me, or I know we both would have erupted in splutters of nasal laughter! I told a few jokes, learned a few facts (the Lupton clan is diminishing! Down to only one family still living on Cedar Island proper!) and introduced lots of speakers to tell how their particular wings of the family had fared. Early along I told the crowd I’d practiced as Christopher using a Scottish brogue, still plain to hear in the local dialect. Apparently THAT accent was introduced elsewhere, as Christopher was a third-generation NEW YORKER! I gave them a sample of that twang, too, and was quickly remanded to the Scot’s accent by public acclaim. Betty Jean got the best laugh when, at the end of our bit, she said that being a Yankee was my only (but considerable!) flaw. The fish fry and country barbecue at the fire station later was excellent.

Shirley Edwards and Gladys Holton are THE family tree chroniclers, and are very accurate and serious about all this stuff. Someone has to be. They also seem to possess a sense of humor, and since I wasn’t about to learn the hundreds of names and relationships for my spiel, that was a very, VERY good thing. My sister and I were honored to be ‘the chosen’, in fact, although we knew that really no one else wanted to do it.

On our return trip to the Tidewater area we passed through my Dad’s little hometown of Columbia, N.C. My recollections of time and place involve luscious meals prepared by real country relatives, every one of whom wanted to give you a hug, and the all-encompassing, foreboding, savagely beautiful Dismal Swamp. Childhood excursions there were mostly with my Dad on the canals in some relative’s borrowed motor boat, exploring fingers of each stream until we found a lake or snag too big to go on, all the while shooting snakes from overhanging foliage with .22’s. This was the real, true, Big Woods, and I was doing an early ‘guy thing’, gun at the ready.

Dad’s voice comes back readily as he’d point in virtually any compass direction with his pipestem: “Dismal. Dismal. 30 miles!” he’d gravely state, to stress the vastness of this lush, dangerous wilderness. But check a map. It’s going away. Plowed fields, then urban sprawl encroach as more and more people find they are unable to live directly on the oceanfront. They are retreating inland, with a frantic pace!

Thankfully, perhaps, I’d brought my own sons and daughter here, some twenty years prior, to let them experience this singular place. They remember it well, to this day. In a way I’m relieved they didn’t join us this time, to see the fully-paved Frying Pan Landing Road and the encroaching Pizza Hut Paradise.

From Columbia we headed down back roads to ancestral home sites. The old Dennis and Viva Weatherly place at Frying Pan is still there, thanks to Babs, the daughter, and Pete Foster, whom we love dearly, but not a trace remains of my dad’s boyhood home over in nearby Burtonshell. The swamp is ravenous and quick to devour even grand old farmhouses and barns if they become abandoned. A turkey buzzard flapped from atop a forgotten silo into the surrounding dark forest as we parked at the old homesite.

Long minutes of looking. No sign of even a foundation of that long ago haven and lovely, proud country home. Sudden and unusual tears in my sister’s eyes… a knot in my throat. All gone.

All of it.

The bloodthirsty yellow flies are alive and well, however, as Joshua Smith’s wife, Tina, found to her dismay. We retreated back to town to eat lunch in what we found to be a modernized, rearranged Columbia, where Genevieve Litchfield’s granddaughter, Chelsea, spotted us and remembered us from The Circle Restaurant get-together in Portsmouth, several days prior! Grandma Genevieve was soon on her cell phone, offering us lodging, if we needed it. Naturally. She’s a Lupton relative, and we’re all pretty fond of each other!

However, thanks to Keith and Gail Weatherly we had already made arrangements. The modern four-lanes which zoomed us in and out of this formerly near-inaccessible morass saddened me. In the old days the long waits and the drawbridges and the endless bumpy country roads made the anticipation of arrival part of the fun of the trip. Yet (as of last month, at least) you could still look out of a car window in the Roanoke Wildlife Preserve along the highway and see terrapins sunning themselves on snags in the coffee-colored waters of the swamps.

We were to spend the night in Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks. As we approached the ocean at Nag’s Head it seemed everyone on earth had gathered there to build layered apartments, tacky tourist traps and filthy T-shirt shops. I remembered a sere and scattered handful of sunbleached beach-houses amid the dunes, but what I now found was more reminiscent of Las Vegas.

Betty Jean and Don stayed with Donna and me that night at a bed and breakfast at Kitty Hawk, in the veritable shadow of the Wright Brothers Monument. This stay, at Colington Creek, was easily the best of the trip. The place is newly opened and wonderfully appointed, out of the way on the back bay of the island area. Whistle-clean and inviting, the building adjoined the Albemarle Sound via various inlets. Great views, super ambience, screened balcony patios… The owner took us on an afternoon boat ride, wherein we saw ACTUAL bald eagles (they’ve come back!) and discovered that the enormous sounds of North Carolina are remarkably shallow: 6 or 8 feet or so, but as vast as small seas. We loved this place, tucked away along the waterfront and seemingly from the madding crowd, too. It was a place to reflect, and watch a blood-red sun-wafer tip down behind the long leaf pines. Here I made a most satisfying sketch of the nearby docks and got to have a long chat with Don Wine, my “big brother”.

Next morning, we dry-landers took to the Atlantic surf at Kill Devil. Betty Jean and I took hold of hands and waded tentatively into the waves we used to dare to turn us upside-down. No good rides today. High tide and a steep dropoff at surfline. But we played and remembered. Sherry Harrelson, my niece (and our trip documentarian) took pictures and videos of my sister and me frolicking in our ocean. Lord above. How we enjoyed every moment of it!

I have another niece, Bill and Sherry’s sister and Jim’s wife, Leslie Smith. Her one-liners and instant responses are easily the quickest and funniest in the family. She helped fill us all in on Jim (the avid fisherman, remember?) and his last night at the Atlantic. He’d by now bought more bait AND the new pole AND a portable folding chair, AND a new box of cigars AND about four cans of beer, and was off to try his luck at OCEAN fishing. Surf casting. He couldn’t wait.

Yes, you can already see where this is going, right?

So, he set up the chair well beyond the breaking surf, anchored it with his beer and bait, and began to prepare his tackle for an evening’s fishing delight.

Big wave.

Snuck up on him.

Colington Creek Cove

Outer Banks: Graveyard of the Atlantic. Neutral buoyancy will float away bait, surf chairs, cigars, even full beer cans, and at night these things are hard to find again.

He did get to keep his rod, however. Gave it to me before they flew back. In my garage, but I don’t fish.

Our last nights together as a family were spent at Ocean View, in Norfolk, close to the airport, and on the Chesapeake Bay. My sister, Gayle, and daughter, Terrie, had earlier arranged for us to see a movie at the old Commodore Theater in downtown Portsmouth. The old Saturday morning serials flick used to be full of screaming, Coke-spilling, popcorn-throwing kids. I know this to be true. It has lovingly been renovated into a dinner theater whose refurbishments are infinitely better than the food they now serve.

At any rate, now Terrie and Gayle arrived at our motel with carry-out barbecue and hush puppies. We ate and continued to swell up. Said our goodbyes, as Gayle is a nanny, off to help with new little folks, and Betty Jean and family all have jobs waiting in Tucson and California. Next day we parted company with all and again set our sights westward.

I knew it would be a long time before I’d return, but was also torn to get back home. We still took secondary roads and watched the tobacco and peanut fields give way to the less recognizable soy and cotton crops. We opted for a more northerly route. Our next goal was to locate the graves of some of Donna’s ancestors in south-central Nebraska.

We followed rain almost all the way back home.

In Indiana we stayed in Batesville, a casket and hospital bed manufacturing center, with a huge and lovely graveyard right outside our motel window. Amish country does mean horse and buggy stuff, but CAN also mean state-of-the-art handmade Martin DH Guitars in the back of a music shop in Arthur, Ill. My G.A.S. disorder (Guitar Acquisition Syndrome) almost got the best of me, but we settled for some quilt material and homemade jam.

The multimedia presentations in the Lincoln Musem in Springfield, Ill., are almost worth an air trip if you love Abe Lincoln as much as I do. In Hannibal, Missouri, a Mark Twain eagle darted at our windshield and put us off track (you can NOT get lost in Hannibal…). I swear, it was an EAGLE, not a failing sense of direction and navigation due to old age! EAGLE! At Hannibal, we got to experience a thunderfully beautiful relay-lightning storm which ended with the most brilliant coral sunset I have ever seen. We ate that night at the adjacent restaurant, and I am saddened to report that west of North Carolina and Virginia, barbecue, as a meal, becomes progressively ever more disappointing. Except at Paducah.

Plotting our course I realized our return trip would lead us through Don Wine’s old home-grounds of Brookfield and Chillicothe, Missouri. I’d asked him what was thereabout to see or do, and he quickly replied, “Nothing.” Turns out he was right.

We found the graves of some of Donna’s relatives in Carleton, Neb., and broke our necks to get from there to Clay Center, Kansas, before nightfall, in order to locate another grave. We thought from the looks of the map-dot, Clay Center would be a wide spot in the road with a single intersection and a yellow tractor-crossing hazard sign. What we found was a big city, replete with one or two high-rises and probably two Pizza Huts. The cemetery comprised about four city blocks. We found no name we sought in the grave registry, either. “I wonder,” Donna remarked to me as we slogged our way into Abilene through yet another rain, “if there might be a Clay Center NEBRASKA, too.”

Wonder no more. We had been within fifteen miles of it the prior evening as we drove frantically in the other direction. We will seek it out another time on a different route, when we feel up to a three day round trip.

Monument Rocks off Highway 83 near Oakley is a transplant of Utah formations, in my view. Absolutely startling, like abandoned factories rising out of this flat country, and desolate and lonely as they are surprising.

Home safe and sound, at last, to a house which IS still standing, thanks in part to the loving care of my own kids. It had rained. A lot. The yard made me want to pick up a corncob pipe and point gravely in any chosen direction and mutter: “Dismal. 30 miles!” Still, something tells me no descendant of mine will walk across plowed fields or swamps hereabouts in another 150 years with tear-streaked face, having found no trace of this house. I’m sure there will be no plowed fields here. Only pavement and new buildings. And I’m sure that, could I see into the future, my astonishment would be perhaps even greater than that of old Christopher Lupton, IV.

This Ron Lupton's fourth story for this web journal. He grew up in southside Virgina,
lives in Colorado, and has contributed several pieces in the THE POOR TOWN NEWS.

archives | home

Story and sketches, Copyright 2006 by Ron Lupton. All rights reserved