Harkers Island

We have not strayed very far from the condo since our arrival, but today we decided to pack a picnic and drive to Harkers Island.  It's a pleasant drive through typical "Down East" country, first across the Newport River to Beaufort on that new, soaring, appropriately-named Beaufort Highrise Bridge, and then on narrow two-lane roads along marshes across the North River, through Otway and Straits, and finally across the drawbridge to Harkers Island.  I always take a picture of this gloriously decaying abandoned store just outside Beaufort, slowly falling apart from equal parts of neglect and hurricanes.

The main attraction for us on Harkers Island is the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center, a testament to the hard work of local historians striving to preserve their heritage.  

Volunteers were at work decorating for the holidays, which featured the biggest crab-pot Christmas tree we have seen thus far.  It's a nice place to have a picnic, under tall live-oak trees at a quiet picnic table which we discovered a year or two ago after attempting to picnic at the Shell Point Picnic Area on the shores of Back Sound and being pestered so much by throngs of gulls that it brought to mind Hitchcock's The Birds.

The Museum was not scheduled to open until 2:00 p.m., so we settled down to lunch, trying to decide whether to walk around the grounds for two hours or return on another day.  After lunch, we occupied ourselves looking at the decorations, including plenty of crab-pot trees and a wonderful garden by local Master Gardeners which included some local plants with which we were unfamiliar.

Walking back to our car, a woman who had been decorating the grounds came by and said, "Do you want to come inside and look around?"  She later introduced herself as Karen Willis Amspacher, the Executive Director.  "Just give me two minutes!" and she went around to the back of the building.

Karen is a woman of boundless energy and unreserved friendliness.  "I won't turn on the lights," she said, "Until you can look around at the trees."  The first floor was filled with magically decorated trees, an exhibit called "Gallery of Trees:  Telling our Story," decorated by twenty or so community organizations, such as the Core Sound Quilt Crew, the Bring Back the Lights Committee, the Fishermen's Association, and local veterans.  They were dazzling in the dim light of the museum, which we soon realized we had all to ourselves except for Karen, two hours before it was scheduled to open.

The Museum had been badly damaged by Hurricane Florence in September of 2018, and was not open the last two years we were here.  That hurricane did extensive damage in the area, making hundreds homeless and causing millions of dollars in damage.  Some folks have only recently returned to their homes after two years.  All of the floors, the roof, and most of the sheetrock had to be replaced, and all of the exhibits in the 22,000 SF museum were moved out while restoration took place.  Remarkably, one of the walls that remained had the three words on it left over from an exhibit called "Harm's Way" that had opened in the summer:  RESPONSE.  RECOVERY.  RESILIENCE.  Karen gave us a book that described in great detail the work that had been done before the building finally opened this year.  We discovered with pleasure that our own names were listed in the back since we were donors through our membership.

We had purchased a DVD on the so-called Carolina Brogue three years ago, the distinct dialect that residents here speak, sometimes sounding almost like a cockney accent.  "I hear from your accent that you're local," I told Karen at one point.  "Yes, I'm from 'On'," she replied.  "We're from 'Off''!" I said.  "Yes, your Dingbatters," she laughed.  These are all local expressions we have learned from attending some programs on the brogue over the years.  

We Dingbatters happily wandered through the museum, marveling at how well the restoration had been done.  The library has always been a particular favorite of mine.  What a wonderful place to spend a rainy afternoon, browsing through the  books on local history, settling down into a comfortable chair.

At the end of a long corridor was the community room, where quilt-making, exhibits, and other events were held.  There was a little stage and Martha spotted a piano, not just any piano but a fine Baldwin grand piano perfectly in-tune, which along with everything else had been damaged and restored.  After obtaining permission from Karen I played for awhile, a couple of Bach pieces I have committed (mostly) to memory.

Last year I found that even two months away from a piano had made me rusty, so this year just before we left I found a full-sized keyboard at our local thrift store to take with us, which I have been playing here in the condo.  So it was nice to play on a real piano in this big room with wonderful acoustics.

Apart from the Gathering Room, the many models of ships, and of course the decoys on display, there is a wonderful local history display upstairs.  All of the local communities are represented as one wanders past unique displays of tools, quilts, memorabilia, photographs, and other exhibits put together by volunteers from all of the tiny surrounding communities:  Atlantic, Davis Shore, Williston, Bettie, Gloucester, Salter Path, and of course Harkers Island. 

On one wall was displayed half a dozen inductees to the Carteret County Sports Hall of Fame, and we realized that we knew one of them:  Mindy Ballou Fitzpatrick.

A talented basketball player who had played professionally, and also an award-winning surfer, Mindy and her husband Matt own Friendly Market, opened in 2008 and one of the most successful new businesses in Morehead City (see post of November 25), the source for our Thanksgiving Dinner last week.  They are very hands-on, and we often see them both there, tall athletic Mindy invariably wearing basketball shorts as if she might be getting ready for a pickup game after work.  Martha recalls asking her before she realized who she was, "Are you getting ready to go for a run?" and she had replied, "Maybe!"  

We were still all by ourselves in the museum, and after finding Karen doing something energetic in a storage room, we thanked her and said we would be back again.  We will, and soon.  All along the road in Harkers Island we had seen houses decorated for Christmas, preparing for the annual Bring Back the Lights parade.  The most popular decoration is this unique anchor, which we saw at nearly every house we passed. We'll make a point of driving down this road just after dark sometime before Christmas.

When we returned to the condo, it was just past low tide so we walked to Oceanana Pier and back.  I noticed that Martha was picking up shells all along the way, not just pieces of sand dollars or whelks or other collectibles, but ordinary-looking shells.  I thought little about it until I discovered later that she had woven the shells into a little wreath with a star fish in the center.