The book I didn’t expect to write
The Book I Didn’t Expect to Write
A few months ago I hit SEND on a new manuscript. It’s not the book I thought I’d be writing about at this stage in my life, but it’s a manuscript full of history and family lore — and a lot of sand— sent to a great publisher whose mission is to preserve the history of the Tar Heel State.
I’ve written before that I’d be working on an update to my first book, Nags Headers, the story of the families who planted North Carolina’s first vacation cottages on the oceanfront, before and just after the Civil War. It was actually the first vacation community in the South, so that’s worth noting.
Nine of those original structures still stand, despite hurricanes and northeasters (no, it’s not ‘noreaster’ in North Carolina) and discovery by the hundreds of thousands who now choose the Outer Banks for their vacations each summer. And fall. And winter.
Nags Headers had been out of print for more than 10 years when I contacted the publisher to find out just how many copies I’d sold back in 2001, when the book came out. Close to 10,000 they said. Not bad for a regional history. That conversation led to another about reissuing the title. I own the copyright — the publisher, who has since been bought — decided to take out off their backlist some years ago and didn’t even keep a copy on their shelves. When the new publisher asked me if I’d consider an update, I had to send her a copy to read!
I turn 69 next week. This wasn’t the story I thought I’d be writing about this year. I thought I’d told it in full and had moved on to novel writing, my lifelong dream. But after a few calls, I learned new facets of this century-and-a-half-old story that needed to be explored.
Truth, Fiction and The Waiting Game
In a lot of ways, it’s easier to write non-fiction. The Truth is there in interviews, stories laid out by real people along a timeline, in this case, marked by tides. All the writer has to do is put it together. And in the case of Nags Headers, it practically told itself.
I’m about half-way through a new draft of a novel I started in college but never finished. (It seems I am the Queen of Procrastination without a deadline.)I put it aside to complete this new chapter of Nags Headers, and I’m pleased with it.
And it felt good to change the scenery.
A New Chapter for North Carolina’s ‘Shabby Chic’
This new chapter unfolds as Nags Headers are on the brink of change. These stalwart cottages of now four and five generations of families stand fast against the tides for now, but for how long? There hasn’t been a major hurricane to directly hit this part of the Outer Banks since 1933 (that story remains in the original book), but cottagers of my generation, the Baby Boomers who now own these storied places with siblings and cousins, nieces and nephews, still point to The Ash Wednesday Storm of 1962 as the worst.
In the new chapter, I write of a family whose beloved cottage might have been destroyed after fire, but their devotion to the cottage built for their grandparents in 1930 proved motivation enough to restore it to the glory they remember as children. Other Nags Headers recall the history of their cottages gleaned from time in the rocking chair. And still others wonder what will happen as developers continue to scavenge for valuable oceanfront properties to build homes today’s vacationers covet.
In the first book, I told the history of the Nags Head Historic Cottage Row District from its beginnings in the mid-19th century using the tides as markers for more than a century of development. The first Nags Headers, other than the indigenous peoples who inhabited Roanoke Island, were Bankers who had shipwrecked there. The second wave came when Planters in northeastern North Carolina ‘vacated’ their inland homes to seek refuge from malaria, in the constant winds coming from the beach. They built shacks on the oceanfront that they expanded as their families grew.
They established an Episcopal Church on the Soundside of Nags Head, which would be dismantled during the Civil War to house freed slaves in Manteo. After the war, they founded a new church between the Roanoke Sound and the ocean, and that chapel, with its giant clam shell baptismal font scavenged from the sand, welcomes worshippers today.
And about that sand. Jockey’s Ridge State Park, the largest living sand dune on the east coast of the United States, survives because of a group of locals bent on keeping development off their beloved dune. In the new Nags Headers, I visit her again, and share how leaders of this centerpiece state park work with ecologists and others to ensure the 4,000-year-old dune system will live for generations to come.
Why These Cottages Matter
When I was writing the first book in 2000, I read a story that American vacationers want to escape the mundane of their inland homes for lavish houses with oceanfront views. Pools and gourmet kitchens, pool tables and movie theaters.
You won’t find any of those along Nags Head’s historic Cottage Row. Some of the cottages in the historic district don’t even have heat.
But what they do have is something much more rare.
Generational history.
For more than 150 years, the same families return summer after summer, propping open their shutters and nailing back wayward shingles. They rock in their porch rockers and spin tales as the sea breaks close by.
The grandchildren are now grandparents, the grandparents now gone, but the house remains to hold them, as one generation folds into the next.
And that’s a story worth telling for any writer.
