LEEWARD'S BOAT

Leeward’s boat has been there for as long as I can remember.

Sunken just a few inches beneath the surface, at low tide it rises skeletally out of the water like the bones of some great behemoth, forgotten but not gone.

As a child, I would dance along the bones when it emerged, sometimes squatting on the rotting boards with a fishing pole or crab trap in my hand, trying to get just a few feet further out, to where the sea thought it was safe.

When hurricanes or flooding struck, you could count on local news crews to include a shot of the boat, as if it was a casualty of the fury of the storm. The truth was that we barely noticed hurricanes, unless it was to tape the windows in case they cracked from some errant branch flying through them. Most windows in the coastal South, the Carolinas, have the remnants of duct tape forever stuck to them. No solvent has yet been found to safely remove the remains of duct tape from glass that won’t also remove a goodly portion of the skin on your fingers when you use it.

Leeward’s boat was a basic fourteen-foot fishing boat, with no windshield or steering wheel. Whatever a party boat was, this was the opposite. You maneuvered by way of a handle directly attached to the motor, a rusty Evin Rue, and reversed by turning the boat in a wide circle until you faced the direction you had been coming from. The seats were bare wooden boards that ran the width of the boat with cleats attached for securing lines. It was constructed of wood, fiberglass, plastic, and metal, and was an eyesore by anyone’s measure.

The ugly, sunken boat could be the mascot for the small village I grew up in. Sneads Ferry is a tiny township halfway between Wilmington and Jacksonville in coastal North Carolina. It rests at the back gate of the marine base, Camp Lejeune, and is the recipient of all of their toxic run-off from weapons plants, chemical storage, and sewage. The poisonous miasma causes diseases, birth defects, and cancers amongst both the population of the town and the sea life that comes in contact with it. The contaminated sea life is unable to be sold or eaten without dire consequences, and often spreads symptoms to creatures it comes in contact with. There’s no resident that hasn’t been touched in some way by these deadly pollutants.

Sneads Ferry barely survives off the commercial fishing trade; with fishermen both providing for their own tables off of it, and selling to local fish markets, who in turn sell to restaurants and the tourist trade. At high tide, you fish, dragging in your nets and trawls rich with the sea life pushed in from the ocean on the tide. At low tide, you anchor your boat and climb off the sides into oysters beds or clam follies to rake up a few bushels to sell before the tide runs up again. It is a meager living that provides just enough to scrape by. Children are put to work as soon as they are able, because another mouth to feed needs another set of hands to feed it.

As a small child I remember dangling off the side of our boat, sinking my feet into the soft muck of the bay’s mud bottom, feeling for clams with my toes. When I found one, I would flip upside down and dive, grabbing the clam with my fingers and adding it to the bushel basket on the deck of our boat. How proud I was of how I could clutch a clam with my feet, then dive straight down and grab it! I seldom ever missed.

My family runs the area’s commercial fishing supply business. We hand sew fishing nets, build trawl doors and crab pots, and retail innumerous imported goods to keep our local fishermen out on the water. I’ve been working there my entire life. From the time we could count to fifty, we were put to work loading floats and leads onto nylon rope to sew monofilament fishing nets to. We could sweep and mind the store, and gather up lead bits to melt into weights for fishing line. Sometimes we would get paid with a trip to the local bait shop to buy an ice cream push pop. I never knew that we were poor, living well below the poverty line, because so many in our small town had it so much worse.

Sneads Ferry was full of stories of misadventures, poverty, loss, and alcohol or substance abuse. Domestic violence, incest, and teenage pregnancy are common. Death rates are higher there than the national average, and the nearest medical facility is more than thirty miles away. Children run wild and barefoot after their chores are done. It’s a place where despair could easily be the flavor of the town, but mostly what I remember about growing up was how happy we all were, close to the land, and family, and God.

No one seems to know exactly why Leeward’s boat became a submarine. Leeward himself may have, but instead of sharing, he told tall tales of adventurous excursions and possible sabotage. The consensus seems to be that, one cold winter evening at about sundown, Leeward was heating up a can of beans on a portable burner, and fell asleep. Alcohol may not have been involved, but that seems unlikely given the reputation of the participant. While he slept, the burner fell over somehow, and burned a hole clear through the bottom of his boat. Leeward woke up in about four inches of water and frantically began bailing with a milk carton scoop, but it was to no avail. At dawn, when other fishermen came to begin their morning, Leeward’s boat was sitting snuggled in the mud and fish rot by the bottom of the pier. Leeward himself was nowhere to be found.

Leeward’s submerged boat remains long past its owner, who died in ’95 of cancer of the prostate. It remains through the failed gentrification attempts in 2016, and the real estate market crash of 2018. It has survived attempts to dredge it up, scrap it, light it on fire, and drag it out to sea. I have grown, graduated, gone off to college, returned, and left again, and still Leeward’s boat is there, just beneath the surface of Charles Creek, off North Carolina’s New River. It is a metaphor to the sheer will of Sneads Ferry to deny the invitation to disappear, long after more affluent neighborhoods have pronounced us dead. It is a symbol of the small town that has heard the death knells, and refuses to die.