“You’re sitting out on a screened porch, in a rocking chair, looking out over the moonlit Pamlico. Or maybe you’re not old enough for a chair, you’re just sitting on the steps, listening to your great-grandparents chatting.”
Thus David Poyer, a prolific sea story novelist, invites us to listen to voices of real – not fictional – people he recorded over several years on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, voices that, like the shifting shores of the thin barrier islands, are highly perishable.
In “Happier than this Day and Time,” Poyer introduces us to eight people, most of them born around the turn of the last century on the Outer Banks when roads and cars and bridges were scarce, when electricity and telephones were non-existent and isolation from the rest of America almost complete.
In an odd way, their voices speak in a cutting-edge dimension. Unlike the writer’s thirty-plus other books, this one is an e-book. I suppose that has to do with the cost of printing real books and the rather small market for an oral history of that once-remote place.
But the voices ring with authenticity.
Take Maggie Mae Twiford, “a little barefooted girl,” who was, when Poyer interviewed her, in a nursing home at Nags Head. As he describes the scene, “Her tiny hands lie softly together in the colorful afghan that covers her lap, except when they twist at the plastic band at her wrist. Outside in the corridor there is the hiss of wheelchairs on the tile….”
“We had ball games. We had a game we called fifty-oh. [Like hide and seek] And ring around the roses. You’d be surprised at the silly things we had in them days. …And on Sunday we’d go to this big hill north of Duck. It wasn’t as big as Jockey’s Ridge, but it didn’t lack much. And we’d run up and down it and play until we were so tired we couldn’t hardly get back.”
Or Captain Ernal Foster, whose father used to take him fishing in waters near Hatteras Village. While they spoke, “the only sound is the soft voice, and from outside the endless crash of the surf.”
“So I went to Norfolk, got in the Coast Guard. The Hooligan Navy. I knew I would. I’d been fishing for a year with this commander. I went in as a first class petty officer. Eighty-four dollars a month. I married Hazel here in ’42. She’s one of those Midgetts, they say the first one washed ashore in a whiskey barrel. Her grandfather you might have heard of. He saved a lot of people.”
Or Marilyn Daniels, also in a Nags Head nursing home, smoking steadily in a wheelchair, smiling even when occasional tears come to her eyes.
“My best time was in high school. You didn’t have as many worries, you was out jitterbuggin’ and dancing. All night. … We’d go somewhere Saturday night to a party, or that time they were having big bands over to the Casino, which was a big dance place in Nags Head. And I consider them were the happiest days when I was in high school.”
Finally, Inez Gaimal Beacham, sitting on her carefully scrubbed porch in Kitty Hawk Village.
“Well, the first thing I remember – I was born in 1901. And I don’t know how old I was, but I remember my daddy and the other men sittin’ on the edge of the porch talkin’. … And they tellin’ about this fella that was going to make a flying machine, they called it. They said, ‘Does he think people’s going to fly, in the air? And they were really laughing about that, how silly he was.”
In his introduction Poyer writes about how time rushes by, “isolating us like a hurricane-driven tide, the rising sea cutting us off from those who went before.” He hopes the book might be a bridge back to those people .
Thus David Poyer, a prolific sea story novelist, invites us to listen to voices of real – not fictional – people he recorded over several years on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, voices that, like the shifting shores of the thin barrier islands, are highly perishable.
In “Happier than this Day and Time,” Poyer introduces us to eight people, most of them born around the turn of the last century on the Outer Banks when roads and cars and bridges were scarce, when electricity and telephones were non-existent and isolation from the rest of America almost complete.
In an odd way, their voices speak in a cutting-edge dimension. Unlike the writer’s thirty-plus other books, this one is an e-book. I suppose that has to do with the cost of printing real books and the rather small market for an oral history of that once-remote place.
But the voices ring with authenticity.
Take Maggie Mae Twiford, “a little barefooted girl,” who was, when Poyer interviewed her, in a nursing home at Nags Head. As he describes the scene, “Her tiny hands lie softly together in the colorful afghan that covers her lap, except when they twist at the plastic band at her wrist. Outside in the corridor there is the hiss of wheelchairs on the tile….”
“We had ball games. We had a game we called fifty-oh. [Like hide and seek] And ring around the roses. You’d be surprised at the silly things we had in them days. …And on Sunday we’d go to this big hill north of Duck. It wasn’t as big as Jockey’s Ridge, but it didn’t lack much. And we’d run up and down it and play until we were so tired we couldn’t hardly get back.”
Or Captain Ernal Foster, whose father used to take him fishing in waters near Hatteras Village. While they spoke, “the only sound is the soft voice, and from outside the endless crash of the surf.”
“So I went to Norfolk, got in the Coast Guard. The Hooligan Navy. I knew I would. I’d been fishing for a year with this commander. I went in as a first class petty officer. Eighty-four dollars a month. I married Hazel here in ’42. She’s one of those Midgetts, they say the first one washed ashore in a whiskey barrel. Her grandfather you might have heard of. He saved a lot of people.”
Or Marilyn Daniels, also in a Nags Head nursing home, smoking steadily in a wheelchair, smiling even when occasional tears come to her eyes.
“My best time was in high school. You didn’t have as many worries, you was out jitterbuggin’ and dancing. All night. … We’d go somewhere Saturday night to a party, or that time they were having big bands over to the Casino, which was a big dance place in Nags Head. And I consider them were the happiest days when I was in high school.”
Finally, Inez Gaimal Beacham, sitting on her carefully scrubbed porch in Kitty Hawk Village.
“Well, the first thing I remember – I was born in 1901. And I don’t know how old I was, but I remember my daddy and the other men sittin’ on the edge of the porch talkin’. … And they tellin’ about this fella that was going to make a flying machine, they called it. They said, ‘Does he think people’s going to fly, in the air? And they were really laughing about that, how silly he was.”
In his introduction Poyer writes about how time rushes by, “isolating us like a hurricane-driven tide, the rising sea cutting us off from those who went before.” He hopes the book might be a bridge back to those people .
