Wilmington

It is my last week end in North Carolina. I drive to Wilmington, south, to the coast. It is only 120 miles from Raleigh but the trees are all hung with Spanish Moss. I haven't seen that before here. There is moisture in the air and yet the humidity is quite tolerable. Perhaps I have become accustomed, though I did not believe that I did could.

This trip is to see places that I will not see again. Wilmington sits on the Cape Fear river and the city wraps itself around a wide glut. The USS North Carolina is berthed on the river and I decide to visit this vast cold war bemoth. There are alligators in the river and the banks are lined with low concrete walls to keep them there. There is a stiff breeze and I feel much more comfortable than this climate usually allows. The ship bristles with armaments designed to kill its kin. Toward the bow you can see where the threat of the Japanese in the Pacific was addressed. Hurried, desperate four man anti - aircraft placements sit like ugly grey firecrackers. A crude symbiosis, gall like, there effectiveness is attested to by the survival of their host.

I step inside a sixteen inch gun emplacement - it is like stepping into a bread oven. The breeze has no effect on the glare of hot sun on 20mm steel. A man sits inside sipping water from a large bottle. He tells me that 12 men worked to feed this gun, with 8 more below to feed them. No one knows how they trained to fit and work like demons with greek fire surrounding them. Few now are left who care. I know that in this tiny, hell-hot prison they were more than the sum of their parts and that each of them defined themselves by the work they done there 'till the day they died.

I leave the ship with its traditions and its sense of how it fitted into a world that no longer exists and I make my way into the city to eat. The food is familiar to me know, shrimp and grits, biscuit and Queso Blanco. Peach crisp to follow. I leave to drive back to Raleigh through thunderstorms and heavy rain. I have learned to welcome the rain in this land. It is not the cold bone rotting ever present visitation that I suffer in my native land. Here it nourishes the land and is held by the trees against the time when it will not fall.

It is midnight when I make it back to the hotel, but I am glad that I went to Wilmington and I do not believe that I will not travel that road ever again.