A Kinship in Stone
The August sun was falling into the tops of the distant trees, and the last light bathed the fields in a warm glow. At the crest of the hill, I pulled off the dirt path, opened the car door, and stepped out of the artificial cool into ninety-degree heat. These rolling fields have not changed in the more than forty years I have known them. I have hunted quail here with a grandfather and father and, more recently, a son and daughter.
With no particular goal, I walked between the tall tobacco plants, kicking up grasshoppers that soared ahead toward a large field of corn that seemed to fold along the contours like some giant yellow quilt. Off to my right, a quarter of a mile beyond the path, I could see an abandoned house shrouded in vines, its dark windows overlooking a good stand of soybeans that rimmed a small pond. In every direction, the view was familiar. My grandfather, dead since 1968, could walk the same row today and see nothing different. I think that would please him.
As I turned back toward the car and paused for a last look, I noticed a triangular shape next to my foot. I reached down, half expecting it to be a clod of dry dirt. But no, it was a bit more substantial, an ancient spear point of carefully crafted stone, with delicate side notches and serrated edges that came to a sharp point. I thought I recognized its type as a Palmer or Kirk, but it was so nearly dark by then that in order to see the shape better, I held it between my thumb and forefinger and raised it to the dying light. It was an act I recognized immediately as being symbolic--as symbolic as it was accidental.
No doubt, I was the first human being to pick up this bit of stone in at least seven thousand years. For me, it was a moment of almost overpowering kinship between all humans who have visited, used, profited from, and perhaps loved this particular small plot of land. There seemed little difference between a grandfather dead nearly twenty years and an Indian dead thousands of years. Or me, or those who would follow. I also realized why it was important for me to walk into the familiarity of that field and take pleasure in such continuity wherever I might find it.
That short incident came to mind again over a month later in what at first seemed an unlikely place. I had traveled east to the town of Columbia, capitol of Tyrrell County. With a population of something like one thousand, it is the largest town in the county. (I think the second largest is Gum Neck.) I first saw Columbia when it had no paved streets, when the hotel there (now gone) got two dollars per night, and when to get there you passed a succession of junked cars marked "Eat at Carley's Cafe" for t wenty miles in either direction on US 64.
Columbia was my kind of town, and Tyrrell County was a sportsman's dream all the way from Fort Landing, the Frying Pan, and Gum Neck on the Alligator River west through the pocosin and swamps to the eastern shore of Phelps Lake. Even with the passage of years and the threats of superfarms, peat mining, and massive logging, the area still retains a lot of its wild appeal.
So as we sailed out of Columbia down the Scuppernong River into Albemarle Sound, I was pleased to see that the shoreline of this handsome blackwater river still looked like the kind of place where you'd want to watch your step. In the middle of the sound , the wind fell out completely, as it invariably does when I go sailing. Indeed, the entire sound as far as you could see in any direction was calm ("slick ca'm," as they still say in certain areas along the coast).
We turned loose the sheets, let the boat drift, and jumped over the side. Around us in the water were the tiny stingless jellyfish some people call phosphors. They brushed lightly against our legs as we drifted on boat cushions. What reminded me of the s pear point as I floated there was the sudden realization that I could not see exactly where sky met water in the distance. Indeed, unless I turned to look at the boat or my companions, I could not see anything man-made whatsoever. Here was one of the few places left in North Carolina where an Indian who had lived thousands of years ago might look around and see nothing unfamiliar.
For more than a month, I had thought of that spear point as a gift from the past, and a reminder that we are only temporary keepers of the land and water. Now, all at once, it also seemed like a warning.
Dogs That Point, Fish That Bite is available starting in September 1995 in hardcover ($19.95) at bookstores or from the University of North Carolina Press. Toll-free credit card orders: Phone 1-800-848-6224; fax 1-800-272-6817.