Day 4:    The Lost Boys Meet the Lost Colony

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With the dreadful events from the day before now out of their heads, as well as enjoying a very rare night of no serious alcohol, the boys rose early, refreshed and ready for more alcohol abuse as well as zany adventures ..... .  

 

Mike and Bone crowin' about knowin' about Croatoan !!!

The first stop on the day's journey was a visit to the first place the English tried to bring their "party" to the new world, Roanoke Island !  

 

Wally Raleigh's Folly

Despite what all the children think they learn on Thanksgiving about the Pilgrims being the first English Colonists, Jamestown (in Virginia) was the first permanent English Colony in North America. The first English Colony was Sir Walter (Wally) Raleigh's folly, the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island. Sir Walter Raleigh was a courtier in Queen Elizabeth's court in the 1580's, he is famous for:

 

Imagine 100 skilled artisans taken to a new world to start a new colony. The ships bringing the colonist across were aiming for the James River and the safe harbor of Virginia. Instead the boats were blown south to the Outer Banks. Dropping off the colonist the ships sailed off with promises of re-supply in six months. But since Sir. Mr. Responsible Raleigh decided to abandon the colony, hence the colonists, the re-supply ships were never sent back. Finally the Governor of the Colony, John Dare jumped on a pirate ship and returned to England to plead for supplies. Raleigh refused to even see Dare (who had left his family in Roanoke) and left Dare a broken man. Finally three years later, Dare was able to jump on a ship heading for Bermuda with the promise to be dropped off in Roanoke. Once the landing party arrived at the site of the Colony, Dare was anxious about having to tell his fellow colonist and family of their abandonment by Raleigh, only to find that the colonist had disappeared, leaving only a cryptic message on a tree "CROATOAN." After three days of searching they abandoned all hope and sailed away. None of the colonists, their bodies, and most strangely their materials (tons of metal working and foundry equipment) were never found !!!

 

Well these kind of mysteries are big fun for Mike and Bone. They went to the Roanoke Island National Park, where the foundations of the Lost Colonists Fort have been discovered. There they wandered the grounds checking out the archeological dig sites, and speculated as to what happened. They went to a one hour presentation on the possibilities of what happened, facilitated by a park ranger. After the presentation, with their curiosities further piqued, the boys cornered the ranger to ask follow-up questions, for the next fifteen minutes the park ranger gave the boys standard National Park answers as to probably what happened. Then, when the boys wouldn't go away, the Park Ranger got a gleam in his eye, and for the next two hours the boys had a enthusiastic and spirited discussion with the Ranger on the Lost Colony. Having their appetite for mystery sated for the afternoon, the boys went on to slake their thirst for beer at a local bar on the Pamlico Sound side of Hatteras Island.

 

Ye olde Roanoke Forte Foundations

After lunch (and more than a few beers!!!), the Boys fueled up (the car with gas, and the cooler with beer!), and decided to drive down to check out the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

 

Checkin' out the scenario, while emptyin' the Hall of Shame !!

 

Heading South from Nags Head, towards Hatteras over Oregon Inlets

One of the cool spots in the Outer Banks is the bridge over Oregon Inlet, which has a very interesting history in how it formed. Remember that the Outer Banks is nothing more than barrier islands in the Atlantic, or better still a very narrow spit of sand drifting into the Gulf Stream, that are constantly changing due to storms, currents, and waves. For a moment just imagine you are a fisherman in the Outer Banks back in the 1860's, with no TV, telephones, nor electricity, just living on an island with your wife and baby daughter. The way you survive is to catch fish in order to feed your family. Now imagine that you set out one afternoon in late November on horseback to go fishing, little do you know that a huge Nor'easter (essentially a winter hurricane) is blowing into the Outer Banks. As the swells on the Ocean rise with the gale-force winds into the late afternoon you decide that it is getting too dangerous to try to catch your family's dinner and try to start back on horseback. The problem is that the winds are now over a 100 miles-an-hour and the winds and the sands in the winds are making it not only difficult to move, but also to breathe. You and your horse struggle within a 100 yards of your home, and just as you reach the crest of a sandy hill looking down to your house, the eye of the storm strikes. No longer able to fight the wind your horse is knocked over on top of you, unable to breathe due to the storm and your horse, you pass out. As everything fades to black, you see your house and think, '"f I only could have made the final 100 yards".

 

Now imagine it is the next morning, you are still alive, its cold but sunny. As you regain your bearings and senses,

you look down to your house to see .......... nothing..........but...........water ..........

The eye of the storm cut through Hatteras Island like butter, digging a deep channel through a once solid mass of land. Your house, your wife, and your daughter, are gone, swept out to sea, never to be see alive or dead. The storm blew your house away so completely, that there isn't even debris floating.

 

Oregon Inlet from the Shore

That is the strange, sad, origin of Oregon Inlet. Why Oregon Inlet? The name came from the first commercial boat, the Oregon, that sailed through the new channel. But that is still not the full story, as mentioned earlier the Outer Banks are constantly shifting, due to the currents, each year the North end of the Channel builds a new 6 inches, while the south end erodes another 6 inches, in other words the very expensive bridge over the Inlet needs to be reviewed and rebuilt in order to keep up with the dynamic of the Outer Banks. And to what happened to the fisherman's wife and daughter, that just yet another mystery of the Outer Banks.  

 

The Bodie Light House in the Cape Hatteras National Park

The Outer Banks, and in particular Hatteras Island is known as the "Grave Yard of the Atlantic", in the mid 19th century, the US Coast Guard began to build a string on Lighthouses in an attempt to save shipping losses.

Interestingly enough, the residents of the Outer Banks back in those days proved they were "chips off the old blokes" and that they were the descendants of pirates by riding up and down on the beaches in the evening waving torches and trying to lure ships into the shoals and scavenge the wreckage!

The first of those lighthouses in the Outer Banks the boys stumbled across on the way down is the modest Bodie Light House, but the big one, the one that everybody uses as their vision of what a light house is, the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. The boys planned to drive down the two-lane road from Nags Head, through the Cape Hatteras National Seashore into the Village of Hatteras, check out the Light House, continue down to spend the rest of the day on Ocracoke Island, the legendary home of Blackbeard the Pirate!

 

Hatteras ??? Denied !!!! 

As the boys started the trip down from the Bodie Light House through the Cape Hatteras Seashore, they drove through a bucolic scene of sand dune and blue, blue water on both sides. The boys could easily to see how the Outer Banks and separate and merge into land masses because in many spots the land is less that 100 yards wide and all sand. They could see why people have been so attracted to this area of the country, unfortunately as they approached the first major town of Avon on Hatteras Island, they could also see the devastation left from the Hurricane. The Hurricane's eye wall passed over the town of Hatteras and caused significant damage, as the boys reached the town of Buxton (two towns away from the Village of Hatteras and the Light House), the damage to the commercial buildings, the homes, and even the road was major. Just as they were passing through the end of Buxton, the boys came across a road block, where the State Police turned the boys around stating the rest of the Island was still of limits to tourist and locals alike until enough repairs to infrastructure were made. They stated that the boys could try again in a few days, unfortunately they were heading back the next day.

 

Disappointed, disillusioned, disgusted and for the first time in all their adventures, denied, the boys pouted to the nearby drive-thru Beer Store in Buxton to re-fuel the Hall of Shame, wash away their denial, and plan great acts of silly futility!

 

Mike and Bone's Beach Party

In the eternally funny movie Animal House, when Dean Wormer places the Delta House Fraternity on probation, their response was TOGA ! TOGA !! TOGA !!!, and threw a Toga Party. When the North Carolina State Police turned the boys away from Cape Hatteras, Mike and Bone yelled BEACH PARTY! BEACH PARTY!! BEACH PARTY!!!! Loading up the Hall of Shame with a lot of Labatt Blues and Corona's, the boys headed back up towards Nags Head to find a Beach to "party" at !

 

I SEE SOMETHIN' !!!!!   I SEE SOMETHIN' !!!!!   I SEE SOMETHIN' !!!!! I SEE ......... THE MOON !!!!!!

Finding an abandoned beach by the Bodie Light House in the Hatteras National Seashore, Mike and Bone brought the Hall-Of-Shame Cooler and the Bone's new boom box to the beach. As the day faded the contents of the cooler diminished and the philosophical questions grew as the sound of the Sex Pistols and Ramones ricocheted off of the sand dunes. As Night fell across the Outer Banks and stiff breeze rose, and another strange phenomenon arose, or was it ??

Bone !!! Bone !!! What is it Bone !!!?!!!  As the boys enjoyed the tunes and beers, while talking about spooky things like ghosts and UFO's a strangle glow emerged over the ocean's horizon. As it slowly, eeriely, rose Mike became quite excited and start screaming to Bone, "Bone what is ?!?! what is it ?!?!". Bone calmly replied "ah Mike?, its just the moon."

 Having solved that night's supernatural mystery, the boys decided that as the midnight hour had already long past that it was time to put this very interesting day as well as themselves to bed.