File:Coast watch (1979) (20472133650).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_12 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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anywhere, in any quantity, seems to draw the offbeat and the oddball. Add the transient nature of the waterway's denizens and the remoteness of the region it travels in North Carolina, and you have a fertile brew for oddity. Which helps explain the Belhaven Memorial Museum. I have heard about the museum for years, or I should say, I have heard about its most famous exhibit: a pair of fleas, dressed like bride and 'Do you want this?'" explains museum president Peg McKnight, "she never said no." But Way said "yes" plenty, and she wound up with a world of weird stuff. It's all housed in the second-floor museum: 30,000 buttons, jars of rocks and arrowheads, stacks of old North Carolina license plates, a watch fob made from the first trans-Atlantic cable, a collection of three dozen rattles from canebrake
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Buttons — 30,000 of them — are a joy to Peg McKnightof the Belhaven Memorial Museum groom and visible through a magnifying glass. After breakfast I climb the creaky wooden stairs of the brick Belhaven City Hall with no small amount of anticipation — and no small bit of snickering from Bellamy and Taylor. For most of her 92 years, Belhaven resident Eva Blount Way collected the flotsam of everyday life. Buttons, old coins, shells, kitchen implements, her own shoes — what began as a packrat's passion turned into a collection of curiosities from around the world. "If anybody ever came to her house and said, rattlesnakes she killed herself, the head of a pronghorn antelope. We wander through the mazelike exhibits, wonder- struck one moment, cackling the next. I finally find my finely dressed fleas, and through the magnifying glass I can even pick out the bride's parasol. But when I see a hand-lettered sign marked "Kitchen Artifacts," I realize that there is more to this collection than just the whimsy of an elderly lady. On ramshackle shelves I find rows of pickled okra and corn-on-the-cob, "put up" chicken fat and a sealed jar of unidentifi- able contents with a strip of masking tape lettered "Possum and Tatoes." It's as much a historical document as any president's letters, for that jar of opossum meat and (I'll bet) sweet potatoes speaks of a time that has passed as surely as the days of oyster tonging in the Pamlico River. Right there on the banks of the waterway, I am swept back through the years, for with one glance at the collection of bleached pig carcasses and coiled snakes I am suddenly back in Mrs. Lomax's sixth-grade biology class, with my desk situated next to a hundred-foot-tall (at the least) bookcase chockablock with pickle jars in which reside all manner of beasts floating forever in formaldehyde. My love of natural history was bom with my face pushed up to those glass doors. I'll argue forever in favor of the historical value of an eight-legged pig in a bottle of alcohol. I've come to expect such little epiphanies while traveling the Intracoastal Waterway. A trip down this commer- cial and cultural conidor is nothing if not an excuse to shed light on dusty comers of coastal-plain history, whether you find them along tangled blackwater rivers or once-prosperous waterfront communities. Like any route that traverses place, the waterway crosses time as well. I've learned to watch for where they intersect. Keep your eyes ever on the channel markers, and you'll miss the best of the waterway. From Belhaven we head down the wide Pungo River and into the Pamlico, slaloming through crab pots. A shrimp trawler pulls nets through lightly swelling seas while an orange-bibbed waterman 10 WINTER 1999

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