The End.

Morning.
Gulls loop through the sunrise. I try not to think about hiding out in the shower house last night, avoiding the Ranger’s rounds. It was probably only 20 minutes, but I felt fairly pathetic. Not enough to pay for a few hours of windy sleep, though. Pelicans skim the waves, and my feet appear to be wearing bright white socks in the cold surf.

The Good Life Gourmet.
Sitting at a high café table, trying to articulate the last 6 weeks, waiting. A couple at the far end of the room plans the catering for their upcoming wedding.
“Kate!” It’s Jess, and Emy follows. I fall into their excited hugs. We don’t stop talking, even when a nearby older couple moves to a table further away.

Looking for UPS.
It’s raining. People hustle down the Baltimore streets in shades of black and gray. When I run down the sidewalk, they raise their umbrellas to let me pass, their heads still turned toward their conversations.

The 2:45 to Union Station.
I walk down the aisle and find a seat. Highlighted texts, iPods, cell phones, text messaging, reading, talking, listening. Everyone faces forward, staring at the seatbacks in front of them.
I turn my head and look out the window at the rain. Suburban DC clacks by. I close my eyes. I’m sitting in the humid heat outside a crossroads gas station in Bolton, NC. A tow truck operator with a tiny gold cross cemented onto his front tooth smiles at me and shakes his head. “You got nerve, girl.”

Rita Dove at the Folger.
A couple seats away, she smiles at us, almost tentatively, shy. The former poet laureate of the United States. Later, in the spotlight, she reads from her new book about George Bridgetower, the 1700s mulatto violin prodigy adopted by the King of England:

The Undressing

First the sash, peacock blue.
Silk unfurling, round and round, until
I'm the India ink dotting a cold British eye.
Now I can bend to peel off my shoes,
try to hook the tasseled tips
into the emerald sails
of my satin pantaloons. Farewell,

Sir Monkey Jacket, monkey-red;
adieu shirt, tart and bright
as the lemons the Prince once
let me touch. Good-bye,
lakeside meadow, good-bye
hummingbird throat—
no more games.

I am to become a proper British
gentleman: cuffed and buckled
with breeches and a fine cravat.
But how? My tossed bed glows,
while I—I am a smudge,
a quenched wick,
a twig shrouded in snow.

Columbia Heights.
“So when are you going to stop flitting about the country?” Matt asks me.
I sit down on the couch and tell him I’m going to California for the summer. And then I’m moving to Washington state.

Spring.
The New Hampshire leaves are newly small and the lilacs are budding. I open the door and walk into the mudroom. My shoes are where I left them the last time I was home.

“You wanna bike an’ talk or just get bikin’?” -Soddy, Cedar Island, NC

Sweet Bay scallops.
“You wanna bike an’ talk or just get bikin’?” I look at the man holding my bicycle. His eyes are inscrutable behind his reflective sunglasses, his face impassive. The afternoon sun is hot. Years of working on the water have creased his tan skin. He assures me he doesn’t have a rigid schedule. He’s retired.
I’d met Soddy half an hour earlier when he pedaled an old 10-speed onto the road ahead of me. He was biking in flip-flops and faded cargo shorts. When I eventually moved to pass him, we started talking bikes. I said his seat looked more comfy than mine, he said he kept sliding off, I asked if he’d adjusted the angle, he pulled on the brakes and told me to try it. He held my bike while I wobbled in a circle around him. It was hard to stay on.
We keep biking up the road. Soddy was born on Cedar Island, a small coastal community at the southern tip of the Outer Banks. Growing up, he says, “We had enough boys around for a buhl team.” You had a bowling team? I ask. “Ball,” he enunciates. His accent sounds distantly British, and when he learns I biked up from New Orleans, he remarks, “That’s a right good ride.”
“You see, I’m legally blind,” Soddy tells me as we pedal along. A degenerative eye disease has slowly been destroying his vision. He can still see colors and shapes, though, and images aren’t fuzzy. “It’s like when you see a person far away walking toward you– you can make them out but you can’t see who they are.” He usually identifies folks by their walk, but he’s made a few mistakes. “I’ve gotten into some trouble before,” he admits.
We bike to the Ocracoke ferry terminal at the end of the road. “It’s too bad you’re leaving tonight,” he says. “You’re going to miss out on sweet Bay scallops.” Oh? I ask him if there’s a good local place to get them. They’re in my freezer, he tells me. Hmm. That sounds like a pretty good offer. I debate the ferry schedule and miles to meeting my friends in Kill Devil Hills. “Here, you wanna talk to the woman at the ticket counter?” he asks. “I know the woman who sells the tickets.”
Casey is his cousin, and she smiles into her chest when she sees us approach. “You got a young woman with you, Soddy.” It’s more a statement than a question. He tells her he’s tempted me to stay for a scallop dinner, “no strings attached.” She snorts her laughter, catches herself, then affirms that he’s a good man. “Now don’t you be gettin’ on the phone and callin’ anyone,” Soddy warns her. She leans out the booth window. “I’m gonna call Vince,” she smiles slyly. Vince is her uncle, and according to Soddy, “he likes to get shit started.” We pedal off. She’s on the phone already, he tells me when we’re not a hundred yards down the road. “You watch, someone’s gonna drive by an’ say something.”
We stop for lettuce and a cucumber on our way back. The grocery store is small, and the produce scant. He puts a case of Michelob Ultra on the counter. “You havin’ a party?” the cashier asks. A group of men in rubber boots and ball caps standing behind us snicker. Soddy says it’s for his dad. The cashier laughs out loud. The only person we pass on the way back to Soddy’s house is an old man in a red check shirt leaning on a cane. He stands at the edge of the road and as we bike by, Soddy yells out to him. The man doesn’t respond. “Did you see that old man standin’ by the side of the road?” Soddy asks me. “That’s my dad.” He’s 92. “Let’s put it this way,” Soddy explains. “When I ride by his house, I can hear the TV going.”
We pass a home hair salon, and I tell Soddy I’d been planning to get my hair cut that afternoon. “You don’t need a haircut,” he says. I ask him for directions to his house. Right on Lola Road, fourth trailer on the right. I’ll know it, he tells me, because it’s across from “a money house”– big, stone, permanent. “You aren’t gonna run off on me now, are you?”
It’s quiet when I walk my bike into Soddy’s front yard. He sits on the front porch his brother and nephew built him, drinking a beer. He still wears his sunglasses in the evening light. The radio plays inside. “If you don’t like country music, just tell me,” he says. I grab my panniers and climb onto the porch. He pauses at the door. “Now, you have to remember. I’m a bachelor.”
Inside, the trailer is spare and neat. A living room chair sits inches from a large television. Towels lay folded on the bathroom sink, and the smell of old cigarette smoke hangs in the extra bedroom air.
I’m his first guest here. He’s been living in this trailer since Hurricane Ophelia destroyed his last one 5 years ago. “I like to keep to myself,” he says. “I guess you just get set in your ways.”
I get a beer and sit down on the porch swing. The seat of Soddy’s rocking chair is a green fishnet. You can see Pamlico sound across the road– he has waterview property, he tells me. Soddy talks about the island, the concessions made for the “dingbatters,” or non-locals. “The way I grew up, this is not Lola Road.” He jerks his thumb left. “That’s up thuh bay, an’ this is down thuh bay.”
The sky turns golden. “Abilene, Abilene, prettiest town I’ve ever seen.” George Hamilton drifts out from the radio. The phone rings. He goes inside to answer it. “Hello? Well, hi, Kelly.” It’s his daughter calling from San Diego.
Soddy comes back out and reaches for the Marlboro pack on the floor. “That’s thuh one bad habit I got,” he says with a nod toward his cigarette. Casey’s silver sports car speeds by. The horn honks and an arm waves out the window. He looks over at me. “Yer gonna be thuh talk uh Cedar Island for weeks, ya know.”
While Soddy acknowledges the confinements of a small town, he chose to fight a war he didn’t believe in rather than move to Canada. He gets especially upset with folks who leave and then come back talking like outsiders. In his mind, that’s a betrayal of roots. “Yer heritage,” he says, “that’s the best part of yuh.”
“Is that a cat?” Soddy looks toward the road. I see a black cat run into the weeds. He can tell by the animal’s size and his memories of feline movement. In the beginning, he says, he used to try to prepare himself for blindness by closing his eyes. “You ever been aroun’ handicapped people, people losing their senses, and they’re full of bitterness.” He says he went through a period of 6 or 7 years, in and out of drinking bouts and bitter at the world. Then one morning he woke up and decided it was time to be happy. Now he just takes the blindness as it progresses. He doesn’t try to close his eyes anymore.
Soddy gets another beer, sits back down. “Okay, there’s something we gotta do. We gotta eat before nine o’clock. Cuz 'Gray’s Anatomy' comes on then and we can’t be interrupted.” One more beer, then it’ll be time to make dinner.
“You know one thing I’m really thankful for? Is Daddy.” Since he’s had to give up working and driving, Soddy’s become a lot closer to his dad. “Every Friday he calls me up an’ says, ‘You wanna go down to Atlantic?’” His dad drives. “Me an’ Daddy go shopping, an’ when I buy stuff, I gotta buy stuff for uh week. Like when I buy bananas, I buy 7.”
“C’mere, I wanna show you something.” Soddy gets up and I follow him inside. He points to a painting of Hogs Island, the gray horizon strip that faces us from the sound. He used to be out there in the mornings, on the boat when the sun rose. That spot had the most beautiful sunrises, he remembers. There’s a photo of two fishermen on a boat. “Big waves, huh?” he asks me. The bearded man is his son. Soddy stopped going out on the water when his eyesight started failing. People have tried to take him out, but after a couple tries, he decided he was done. “I just don’t see the beauty in it anymore,” he says.
Black and white photos sit under a lamp—Granddaddy, Grandmama, Daddy. He talks about his family. “You sure this is alright?” he pauses to ask. He continues. “I always use ta joke Daddy, ‘There musta been uh monkey in thuh wuhpile.’” I’m baffled. “You unerstan’ what I’m talkin’ ‘bout?” He’s incredulous I’ve never heard the expression. Soddy is 5’6”—he apparently didn’t get his father’s height genes. He says he’s rarely met a woman with whom he can keep pace, especially, he says, when they’re walking “in Wal-Mart.”
In the kitchen, Soddy puts me in charge of chopping the salad. He tells me to make sure to take off all the wilty outer leaves, at least half the head, he thinks. When I start to peel the cucumber like a carrot he takes over, shaking his head.
The kitchen is as neat as the rest of the house. Three boxes of Raisin Bran sit in the cupboard, the refrigerator shines clean and nearly empty-- a jar of pickles, a couple condiments, a carton of eggs, the Michelob. Soddy says he broils most of his dinners. He grew up watching his mother cook over a hot frying pan and vowed never to do that himself. He tears off a sheet of aluminum foil and lines the pan. He doesn’t like doing dishes. He bends down to slide the foil back into the cupboard, but he jams it into the stacked pots instead. He tries several times before he gets it in. “See you’ve got me feelin’ pressure now,” he says. He turns to the stove, brings his face close to the burner and squints at the flame while he adjusts the knob to simmer. “Now, the secret to cookin’ scallops, yuh see, is cookin’ ‘em real slow.” A steak is easy, he explains, 6 minutes on one side, 3 on the other. But scallops. He wants to get those just right.
Soddy rips off a paper towel and blots away the water leaching from the thawing scallops. He claims his other senses have not been heightened by his sight loss, but he says “a Brawny paper towel is thicker than a Bounty.”
Dinner’s ready right on time. Bowl of scallops, ribeye steak, salad, beer. He watches me eat the scallops. “I done good, didn’t I?” I tell him I’ll be sure to tell Casey. “Now you tell her you had scallops and rib eye. This wasn’t just sirloin.”
I eat, Soddy talks. “Now, I’m not gonna talk politics,” but— he’s a Vietnam vet, a Democrat, anti-Iraq war, anti-draft. “They’re just kids,” he says. He notes my empty bowl. “I done good with those scallops, huh? Steak is easy, but scallops, you can’t overcook those.”
We finish dinner just in time for Gray’s Anatomy. Soddy sits down in front of the TV, his nose almost touching the screen. From that distance, the images appear almost as clear to him as before. I sit back on the couch. A little girl comes to the hospital with her mother after shooting her abusive father, and when the show breaks to commercials, Soddy turns around. “An’ another thing I been thinkin’ ‘bout. Anyone who hurts a child should be shot.”
Soddy heads out to the porch after the show, the next show playing on the TV. Lying in bed, I hear the occasional sanctuary bird, the quiet of an empty rural road, the hiss, pop of a Michelob and the flick of a lighter.
The air is already warm and humid at 6:30 the next morning when I carry my panniers to my bike. Soddy steps out on the porch, coffee in hand, and sits down in the rocker. He faces the water and the faintly pink traces of sunrise. Hog’s Island gains definition in the distance. “Gray’s Anatomy was good last night, huh?” I finish packing up. It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful morning. “I done good with those scallops, didn’t I,” he says with a smile.

Small town addendum.
I stop at the food mart to get orange juice before my 7:30am ferry crossing. “Last stop before the ferry,” the sign outside proclaims. I lean my bike against the railing. A truck pulls in and a large man eases himself out. A woman walks to the door, two boxes in her arms. “You’re early, honey,” he calls out. It’s unclear to whom he’s talking.
I stare at the drink cooler, its gas station selection uninspiring this early in the morning. The man walks up. “You from around here?” I tell him I’m just passing through. He asks if I spent last night in the area, exclaims over my lack of time on Cedar Island. I look up at him. One eye is staring at a point somewhere over my left shoulder, the other seemingly focused internally. I tell him I did have scallops last night. His face folds into a huge smile. “Who cooked you scallops?” he prods, his gaze distant. I laugh. “Who cooked you scallops? Was it a young man on a bike?” He laughs, nudges me with his elbow. “Was it a young man on a bike?” He tells me he’s a good one, that “young” man, he’s his age, “We went to school together.”
Casey’s sitting in the ticket booth when I roll up. I pay for my ticket. "Oh, and I'm supposed to tell you that Soddy cooked me both scallops and rib eye last night," I tell her. Casey snorts. “He doesn’t even do that for us, and we’re family.” I turn back before I pedal away. “So who’d you call, Casey?” I ask. She shakes her head and smiles. “I didn’t call nobody.”

The beginning of summer.
It’s hard to get a read on the Outer Banks. The community seems buried under the shifting weight of vacation rentals, souvenir shops, and out-of-state plates. Dunes blow across the highway and kiteboards skim across the waves. People pad around in flip-flops and tans. Sometimes you can smell pockets of sulphur.