Local Color

I lived in Manteo for eleven years from 1995-2006. Lisa and I operated the toy stores in Manteo and later in Kitty Hawk, eventually closing the Manteo location because we had accidentally gone into competition with ourselves and Kitty Hawk did better than Manteo.

When we moved here Alice was in fifth grade at Manteo Elementary and Max in seventh grade at Manteo Middle school. Getting my kids out of Durham Public Schools and into a good public school system was a prime factor in our decision to move to Manteo. It was our ten year plan – live on the Outer Banks while the kids made their way through school; operate a retail business to support ourselves.

A couple of years after Alice, the youngest, had graduated and gone off to college Lisa and I realized that our plan had expired, we were going on momentum alone and not really enjoying it.

So we sold out. We sold the one store in Kitty Hawk to an employee. Our little cracker box of a house on one-third acre in Manteo had absurdly tripled in price. This was at the height of the housing bubble. We priced it to sell and sell it did for what seemed to us an unbelievable amount. The Catch 22 of selling your house at that time was that you couldn’t afford to buy anything else if you were looking to upgrade. Too expensive.

So we bade farewell to Manteo. My sister and her family had lived for many years in Moore County NC and we had visited numerous times. We did some house hunting and snagged a place in the country near Carthage which is the county seat of Moore County north of Pinehurst. It was a bigger nicer house and five acres of land, much of it landscaped. For what we got for the toy store and Manteo house we were able to buy the Moore County property free and clear with no mortgage. There was local theater for me to dabble in and Raleigh and Fayetteville and their theater scene were in striking distance.

For three years we visited Manteo once a year but it wasn’t a big deal and we were happy to go home to Carthage. Then one time I went to visit Manteo by myself and suddenly it felt like going home. So I visited again and made some reconnections with old friends.

Meanwhile Alice had not only finished college but had completed two years of graduate school and bagged her Master’s degree. She moved back in with us in Carthage for a few months but no jobs in her field (or any other field for that matter – the economy crashed) were available and she had no friends there. So she decided to move back to the outer banks where she had been offered a job in retail.

I sensed my chance to get back to Manteo and helped Alice house hunt. We found a very nice condo in Pirate’s Cove that we couldn’t really afford but we leased it anyway. Alice went to work and enjoyed life at the beach with her friends. I spent all of last summer commuting once a week, half the week in Carthage, the other half in Manteo. I did nothing at all except visit the beach everyday and hang out in downtown Manteo with my friends. And while doing that I constantly was running into people I knew when I lived here and many others who were just visiting, many of them former Colonists.

(Don’t think I always live such a wastrel life of ease. The past two theater seasons, September – May, I have worked six shows each, sometimes producing, sometimes directing, sometimes acting, and frequently all three. But summers are dead in the theater world mid-state which accounts for me having the summer to play.)

Over the course of last winter Alice and I decided that we needed a cheaper place to live and I frankly needed to have some income during the summer to pay my share.

So here I am in Manteo, and really in the town, not out on the causeway. I’m doing the Colony for enough money to pay my rent here. True, I can’t spend but one night a week lounging in downtown, but doing the Colony is its own reward.

I had not intended to get all autobiographical here. I am required to spend at least an hour a day writing and sometimes when I sit down I have no idea what BLAH will spill from my brain.

My little house backs up to a church. One night about ten days ago I was sitting at my kitchen table tippy-tapping on the computer writing a journal entry at 2 am when I heard some noise outside. I stepped out on my tiny back porch to see what was going on. A terrifically drunken man was lurching his way loudly through the church parking lot. He went to the door of the church, knelt down touching the door, and loudly asked for forgiveness. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” he slurred over and over. Then he puked and staggered away.

Every few years this hot issue comes up for a vote in the town of Manteo: Whether to allow liquor-by-the-drink to be sold in restaurants. It has never passed – the last time around it lost by only a few votes. This is strictly a local option matter, you can drive over the bridge and order a cocktail but not in Manteo, beer and wine only. You have to live in the town limits of vote. It is coming around again. I’m thinking of reregistering so I can vote this time. But which way would I vote? Both sides of the issue are well known. On the one side NO – we want Manteo to stay the small family-oriented village and don’t want it given over to bellowing drunks. On the other side YES – the restaurant business is mostly seasonal and the huge extra income would assist then in making it through the off season and besides, people already get bellowing drunk on beer and wine.

Over the past fall and winter my trips to Manteo to hang out became few and far between as I was heavily involved in the mid-state show business but I did manage to make it at least once a month. Finding an open restaurant was sometimes difficult and you can fire a cannon down the main street of Manteo with no danger in February.

Last Friday I went out to run some errands and was startled to fine the roads jam packed with cars creeping along. What was going on? Of course it dawned on me that it was the Friday of the Memorial Day weekend and the tourists were flocking to the beach, bicycles, cargo carriers and surfboards strapped to the tops of their cars and minivans.

Last night was my first night off after getting the Colony open. I went downtown and hung out on the patio of the Full Moon Café with friends and greeting others as they passed by. There were two weddings in town last evening. Weddings are big business in Manteo. We were treated to not one but two freshly married couples making their way to the waterfront for photos. The brides were radiant. Brides always are.

Home again.

There were bellowing drunks.