Migration
Chugging along on the ICW
“Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
I lived in South Florida for 15 years. During those years I would spend the summers not in steamy Florida, but in Gloucester, Massachusetts at my family home. To get there over the years we tried flying or taking the auto-train, but more often than not, I’d pack up the kids and the dog and climb the I-95 on-ramp. After driving those 1400 miles twice a year, they became familiar, our spot on the route a known quantity. One year my daughter Emma transcribed each and every one of the signs anticipating South of the Border. We tried boiled peanuts. We checked out the pirate-themed restaurant in Savannah, the botanical garden in Richmond, went tubing and horseback riding in West Virginia and Maryland, we left the main road for a deep dive into Colonial Williamsburg. We knew which motels accepted dogs, and that when you cross the Georgia/Florida line you can stop for free orange juice and a good look at alligator-paw bottle openers.
On the Little Choptank, Chesapeake Bay
Back in the present era, Tim and I departed Annapolis as the frost was arriving, and sailed down the Chesapeake Bay toward Virginia, bundled up and shivering. As we headed South, we saw one pelican, then five, then ten. One morning three dolphins accompanied us out of our anchorage. The trees grew less bare, more green mixed in with the red and orange. Unstuck in time, indeed. By the time we took a right to head to Norfolk, we had shed most of our layers.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Norfolk itself struck an ominous chord before we even landed, lining the banks of the river a visual reminder of the vast chunk of our taxpayer dollars spent on military equipment. We passed aircraft carrier upon aircraft carrier, destroyer upon destroyer. Once docked, we went out to eat and overheard another patron, a defense contractor, brag about his many homes and his trips to Italy. We fled Norfolk pretty quickly. And that’s where we began our intracoastal trip, mile marker zero. We were most certainly not alone. We were with a cluster of migrating snowbirds in a frenzy. We had to go under 11 drawbridges and one lock within the first 15 miles. Sometimes the bridges open when you radio the tender, sometimes they open on the hour and/or half-hour. Stop and go traffic. There are also fixed bridges – on the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) they’re supposed to have 65 feet of clearance. Our mast is (57’) but each and every time it looks like you’ll never make it through and your mast is going to snap off or at least the antenna up there will catch but no, that doesn’t happen (knock on wood).
One of the many drawbridges on the Intracoastal Waterway
Our colleagues on the intracoastal, of which there were many, demonstrate varying levels of sense and seamanship. They are sailboats and powerboats. Some are astonishingly rude, some Ned Flanders-like in their chattiness. Everyone’s boat has a boat name and a home port written on it and visible to all. We, for example are Billy Pilgrim, Gloucester, Massachusetts. The home port may be where their boat truly started its trip: Oyster Bay or Nantucket, or even Ohio (through the Erie Canal). It may be where the owner pays taxes, or pretends to live so he doesn’t have to pay taxes, or it could even be where they wish they were from: Valhalla or Shangri-la. And then, of course, there’s the issue of boat names.
The puns: Reel Fun, Vitamin Sea
The lovelies: Antares, Quetzal, Moonlight, Bel Canto
The douchebaggery: Hooter Patrol, Stocks and Blondes
But imagine: you’re on I-95. You have a license plate, maybe a bumper sticker or two. But no-one on I-95 knows I call my car Rhonda the Honda, they don’t know what town I’m from. I drive my car in relative anonymity, despite my dashboard shrine. I might irritate someone or they me, and they honk or give me the finger, I use some colorful language, end of story. But driving on I-95 I am easily capable of making up an entire back story about the white-haired lady in the gold sedan with the I-heart-my-grand-dog bumper sticker, or the pick-up truck steered by a cigar-smoking-someone who can’t let go of his losing political candidate. And then one of us takes an exit and disappears into the crowd. But on the ICW there aren’t infinite exits, and although it feels there are a lot of boats heading south in November, it’s not really that much of a crowd.
As we continue on down the intracoastal, the water turns from brackish industrial creek to water the color of over-steeped tea. After we passed through the lock, an engineering feat that defies my comprehension, we got out of synch with our neighbors, which meant that they weren’t all directly around us. The landscape of the intracoastal is kind of similar to a rails-to-trails bike path in that you’re kind of travelling through peoples’ back yards. There are guys sitting on 5-gallon buckets fishing on the side of the canal, homeowners have chairs set up on their docks to watch the parade go by. The whole idea of the intracoastal was dreamed up by George Washington, perhaps to make a bad real estate investment good, but in any case, the waterway provides safe passage for people taking their boat up or down the coast who don’t want to be on the ocean for one reason or another. It’s a great tool. You can get from Norfolk to Miami without being in open ocean, but it can feel like a bit of a forced march. It’s slow going, and if you don’t time things right, you could end up stuck someplace you’d rather not be.
Somewhere on the ICW in Virginia.
Our path led us through rivers, canals, and sounds, never in much more than 20 feet of water, sometimes in very narrow stretches with the threat of shallow water on both sides, the terror of possible tree stumps or floating logs running into us or vice versa. We didn’t see any black bears swimming, which apparently is a possibility, but we did see eight Bald Eagles as we chugged along from dawn to dusk. When the sun set we anchored out on the side of the “road”, and each night the moon was a little larger.
Eventually we made our way to mile 205, Beaufort (BO-fort), North Carolina (not to be confused with the other Beaufort (BUE-fort), South Carolina, farther down the track). The water started getting clearer and greener, less tannic. Happy to have taken the exit ramp from the ICW, to be back in the world of tides, we exhaled at the dock and went to play a little pool and eat some shrimp and grits. We’d refill our tanks, physical and metaphysical, and then head back out to the ocean where there would be a little more room to stretch out.
When you start seeing the shrimp boats coming it, the salt water can’t be too far.
