Down the River, To the Sea Where science meets the spirit
Story and Photographs by John Wolfe
T
he unseen tug of our distant moon pulls the waters of the Cape Fear River to their highest crest, but only for a moment. Soon, the moon’s synchronous dance will irresistibly bid the river to return seaward, back to the source of all water. I intend to join on this journey. There is some other force, unknowable, that pulls my spirit to wild places; it whispers to me, get out there — go beyond what you know. We all hear this call, but too often it goes unanswered. Too often we sink deeper into the stillness of calcified circumstance. Yet to be idle, as Gibran wrote, is to become a stranger to the seasons. So onward I go, following an ancestral human urge to explore which refuses to be silenced. In the low morning sunlight of late winter, I cast off the lines of the sturdy little ketch I have christened Maia, after the brightest star in the Pleiades. Under the roaring span of the Memorial Bridge we sail, passing 48
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patient tugboats, broad-shouldered and burgundy, waiting for their work. Along the port’s bleached concrete wharves, tall blue dinosaur cranes stack boxes high on towering steel ships. Here in the harbor these giants may sleep, but I’ve seen them awaken on vast voyages across the deep — skyscrapers moving at school-zone speed limits. Wise sailors know to avoid them. Yet out there, even these gargantuans become tiny against the yawning void. Past the power lines the river widens, her tea-brown waters interrupted only by low islands of tangled trees and honey-blond sand. Under Maia’s white wings I spy Campbell Island, then Keg Island, the vanguard of an inshore archipelago that has been here since Capt. William Hilton sailed upriver to trade with the Cape Fear tribe in 1662. I wonder what the captain would think, were he transported aboard today. Would he recognize my modern river, with its navigational buoys and dredged-out depths, its brackish water and big ship traffic? Would the serious man crack a knowing smile at the THE ART & SOUL OF WILMINGTON
