Essay
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by Marcie Cohen Ferris
“Discovering the North Carolina coast has felt like coming home, and its food and the fishing community who make it possible are at the heart of that homecoming.” We’re going coastal in this issue. Coastal food politics, cultures, and economies have always been a complicated mélange of people competing to utilize changing lands, waters, plants, »
Food
Apalachicola Ecology
by Diane Roberts
I walk into Boss Oyster Bar in Apalachicola, the little port town at the bottom of the famous river. Boss cuts to the chase, dispensing with ruffles and flourishes, a seafood shack of the old school, a bit scruffy, wind-whipped, with some young salt sitting there with a bushel of bivalves shucking as though the »
Interview
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Documenting Life Along Florida's Matanzas River
by Anna Hamilton
“‘Dealing directly with nature is a very chancy proposition. She’s a sort of a jealous thing.’” My Florida childhood was muddy, awash in alligators, salt spray, and briny oysters. I grew up on—and in—northeast Florida’s Matanzas River, a marshy estuary snaking from St. Augustine in St. Johns County southward into Flagler County. Layers of history »
Food
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The Impact of Coastal Erosion and Restoration on Louisiana's Oyster Industry
by Rebecca Bond Costa
“The problem of balancing the public interest against the interests of individuals remains an ongoing challenge in the management of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands.” In December 2000, a jury in Plaquemines Parish awarded $48 million to five Louisiana oyster fishers. By filing suit against the state, Albert J. Avenal, Kenneth Fox, Clarence Duplessis, Nick Skansi, and »
Food
Documenting the Louisiana Shrimp and Petroleum Festival
by Emily Roehl,
Jeannette Vaught
Traveling down to the Gulf in Louisiana is like watching intricate sand patterns dissolve in the tide, land slowly giving way to water. Water is everywhere: along the side of the road, under the overpass, hanging in the sky. Three of us were together in a car hurtling by this watery landscape. Emily Roehl, an »
Photo Essay
by André Gallant
Georgia’s coastline is roughly a hundred miles long, pegged at the north by the Savannah River and to the south by the St. Mary’s. A series of barrier and coastal islands marks its length and protects an essential and pristine estuary from Atlantic waves. Between mainland bluffs and barrier islands is a salt marsh, the »
Photo Essay
by Vennie Deas Moore
McClellanville, a seaside fishing village, was founded in the early 1850s by rice planters from the Santee Delta. The little village became the summer home of these wealthy planters, who left their plantations for a few months each year to escape illnesses like malaria. The village contained modest “shotgun” houses and some very fine, large »
Photo Essay
Perspectives of Change on the North Carolina Coast
by Baxter Miller,
Ryan Stancil,
Barbara Garrity-Blake
Over sixty years ago, my grandfather was offered a sizable piece of waterfront property at the northern entrance of Buxton Village on Hatteras Island for $3,000 by his aunt, the famed village postmistress, Maude White. At the time, the parcel—no more than a half-mile wide from sound to sea—was like other parts of what is »
Food
by Georgann Eubanks
Murray Bridges, the proprietor of Endurance Seafood, was in his sock feet. He was sitting on a burgundy recliner in the den of his brick ranch house in Colington, North Carolina, near Kill Devil Hills on the Outer Banks. Bridges, now in his mid-eighties, specializes in soft-shell crabs, but he wasn’t working on the water »
Food
by Bill Smith
This will probably be the last time that I hold forth at length about corned hams. This treasure of eastern North Carolina culture has been a cause of mine since I discovered that no one had ever heard of it outside of the three or four counties around where I grew up—New Bern in Craven »
Food
Ocracoke Fig Cake
by Andrea Weigl
I have had a longtime love affair with Ocracoke Island—a sixteen-mile stretch of land on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. I eloped there, returned for my honeymoon, and try to go back every year for a family vacation. My tryst with Ocracoke fig cake is almost as long. I encountered my first slice at Ocracoke Seafood »
Food
Oyster Shuckers in Eastern Virginia
by Sara Wood
Deborah Pratt and her younger sister Clementine Boyd are stabbers. For almost forty years, stabbing has supported them and their families, brought them fame, and taken them around the world. Stabbing is a method of shucking oysters that winds through generations of African American families in the Chesapeake Bay region. It’s done like this: you »
Food
by Bernard L. Herman
Sweet potatoes flourish in sandy soil. Strawberries announce the advent of spring. Figs sweeten the landscape in August. Canada geese flock to harvest cornfields in winter. Oysters, drum fish, mullet, clams, and spot add a signature dimension to coastal tables, but so, too, do local preparations for stewed pork and pumpkin, black duck and dumplings, »
Poetry
by Maurice Manning
Some people plant their collards in rowsfor a neat, predictable arrangement.Others, however—and this is reallythe old-fashioned method—planttheir collards in a jumble. They loosena little patch of ground and slingthe seed in a blur all over creation.All over creation—allowing the mindto contemplate a vastness is pleasing.And who would argue with creation?The result of the old-fashioned wayputs »
