Gratitude

We have visited Beaufort three times since we arrived.  It is one of our favorite little towns and is only a short 20-minute drive.  I usually take the same photos:  the vintage-looking sign on the side of a building on Turner Street, the marina on Taylor’s Creek where there are always some beautiful boats quietly anchored, and the Old  Burying Ground, ca. 1731, where you can find graves dating back to both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.

Our first visit to Beaufort this year was nine days ago, when we attended a lecture at the N. C. Maritime Museum, a wonderful little museum containing artifacts from the 18^th century ship Queen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of Edward Teach - better known by his nickname Blackbeard.  Also on display, suspended high above the other exhibits, is the skeleton of Echo, a 33-foot sperm whale that came ashore on Cape Lookout in 2004, as well as its preserved heart - a unique experience, touching a whale's heart!  The lecture was a sad story, based on his diaries,  about an unlucky farmer who lived just after the Civil War and attempted to eke out a living farming not far from Beaufort, but was not very successful at the endeavor. 

We had lunch afterward and spent some time walking around Beaufort, and that’s when I found myself once again visiting the Old Burying Ground a couple of blocks away on Ann Street.  It is a beautiful place, quiet and shady beneath huge live oak trees, and among the graves are that of a British soldier from the 1700s buried standing up (at attention for his King) and the mass grave of several victims of the shipwreck of the Crissie Wright in 1886, still remembered in the local expression, “cold as the night the Crissie Wright came ashore,” when they say Bogue Sound froze over solid.

A poem I wrote two years ago, when we had an ice-storm here in January, was inspired by the story and was a semi-finalist in the James Applewhite Poetry Competition.

 The Crissie Wright

An ice storm at this beach is as rare
As snow on daffodils:  a sudden stroke,
The spikes of the yuccas sheathed,
Fixed in scabbards of clear ice,
The heavy pampas grass bowing low,
The red cedars bright with ice-knots.

Rain overnight stopped in its tracks
With a shudder, like that night in 1886 –
Single digits, so cold that Bogue Sound
Froze over in deadlocked denial –
The night the Crissie Wright came ashore,
All hands lost save one, a ship’s cook.

And why did he alone deserve to live?
Trembling in his bright icy salvation
While his shipmates, one by one, were
Lowered into a common grave in the
Old Burying Ground under the live oaks,
Slipping and sliding on frozen ground.

This lowly cook from below deck –
Could he ever forget the dazzling ice
Clinging to broken spars, dangling rigging,
Or those swept overboard and lost forever
In the cold waters just off Beaufort?
Could he ever stop shivering?

A local favorite is the grave of the girl buried in a barrel of rum.  The young girl begged her parents to travel with her father to London, and her mother gave her permission only on condition that her daughter would be returned to their home in Beaufort.  Alas, she died on the voyage, and rather than commit her body to a burial at sea, he persuaded the captain to put her body in a barrel of rum and returned to Beaufort for burial.  Visitors to this day leave stuffed animals and other toys as gifts on her grave in memory for her and for good luck.  

As one especially spooky local account adds:

There are those who say that the figure of a young girl can be seen running and playing between the graves in the Old Burying Grounds at night. They say that the tributes left on the young girl’s grave are often moved about the graveyard at night, often found sitting balanced on top of other gravestones or in places they couldn’t have moved to by just the wind.

I suppose every graveyard has a ghost or two, and the Old Burying Ground does seem especially spooky on a gray, overcast day.  I would not want to spend the night there.

The next night, we returned to Beaufort for another event we have attended for many years, the annual Clam Chowder Cook-off, a fund-raiser for the museum.  Four guest clam chowder cooks and four cornbread bakers compete in the event at the Watercraft Center, a ship-building workshop across from the museum.  As usual, the chowders were delicious, and once again the event was sold out.

This week, we attended another lecture at the museum, this time one of the more interesting ones we have ever heard presented by a man who was a knowledgeable and passionate expert on whales.  I learned more about whales than I had ever known before.  We were saddened to learn about whales that had been killed, and were washed up on area beaches, because they had ingested balloons and plastic buckets.  After the program, we had a delicious lunch two blocks away at the Beaufort Grocery Company, a place we had been meaning to try for lunch - we had attended wine tasting dinners there over the years but never lunch. 

And so our Sabbatical continues.  The pile of books we brought with us has grown after a visit to the Carteret County Library in Beaufort.  The weather has gotten warmer this week, and my own running has gone well, with interval training and increasing weekly mileage, and I think I am ready for the Cocoa 5-K next Saturday.  Martha has started back running, too, and both of us continue to practice Yoga, once a week for me and twice a week for Martha.  We have seen three movies and a play, and are going to New Bern tomorrow to see another play – The Color Purple.   And of course, there is seafood, local seafood like the perfect pan-seared scallops sourced from Blue Ocean seafood market that Martha prepared this week.

And there is always the continuous presence of the ocean, and the sunrise and the sunset, with their elemental power and beauty.  Yesterday morning during Tai Chi I took a time lapse of the glorious sunrise breaking free from morning clouds and ascending into the sky to the east.  At the same time, the full moon was setting to the west, and high tide was roaring in front of me to the south.   

Our Yoga teacher Ann-Marie talked to us today in her practice not only about Sun Salutations (which I knew about) but also Moon Salutations and Sea Salutations.  I felt that I had saluted all three through my Tai Chi yesterday.  She also talked to us about gratitude, and that is the single word I wrote on our kitchen whiteboard when we returned.

Gratitude.  Life is good!