book excerpt
Into the Sound Country
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by Bland Simpson with photography by Ann Cary Simpson Enjoy this excerpt from Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's Coastal Plain, by Bland Simpson, with photography by Ann Cary Simpson. Novelist Pat Conroy has said "I love reading this book," and we think you will want to read it too, once you've read this passage. Copyright (c) Bland Simpson and Ann Cary Simpson. Reproduction or distribution is prohibited without the express permission of the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. |
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The Sound Country The Sound Country starts at the base of a scuppernong vine in the Great Dismal Swamp, runs south for two hundred amazing miles, taking in much of eastern America's greatest and broadest inland waters, and ends in a wet sheen J-hook point of sand at Cape Fear, where Onslow Bay and Long Bay meet in riptide over Frying Pan Shoals and form the Atlantic Ocean. This is the wet and water-loving land of eastern Carolina's coastal plain, where rivers go sliding off into swamps and gliding by grand bluffs, a ncient forests drown slowly in the rotting shred of peat in baylands and pocosins, new grasses green up each spring in marshes both saltwater and fresh. It is the land of greater sounds--Currituck, Albemarle, Pamlico, Core, and Bogue--and lesser--Croatan, Roanoke, Back, Stump, Topsail, Middle, Greenville, Masonboro, Myrtle Grove, and Shallotte. Below them is only low country, sea islands, and Florida. From my early years living in Pasquotank County, on a blackwater river in a town at most twelve feet above the sea, from as early as anything I can recall, I have heard and known and loved this word sound. The small fishing boats that appeared at our Water Street wharves in the afternoons, their holds full of the fruits of the sea, were said to have had a good day "down the Sound." My father, coming home at breakfast time with a brace of ducks from his first-light Currituck hunts, had shot his lim it, our evening meal, from a blind "out on the Sound." All rivers feed the sea, true, but in our world they all but one first feed the sounds.
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