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161 I’ve taken the journeydownriver in stages, and the later stages include layovers, chances to explore the landscape and history surrounding the river and to reflect on what it’s all adding up to. For me, the river presents a kind of palimpsest: All the events of history are overlaid onto the present. The colorful ship’s captains and explorers and engineers and Indians and planters, the bold escaping slaves and hardscrabble farmers, the shad fishermen and steamboat pilots, the desperate victims of the coup of 1898, and the actors on James Sprunt’s riverside lawn—all are still alive on the river, their faces as vivid and their voices as clear as if they were paddling along beside me. It’s a pleasure to fall into history that way, beyond the dead drydates and names in textbooks, so that the people and their voices and deeds stay alive. My own experience on the river feels that way, too: This one trip—beginning with a brace of canoes and continued in a johnboat and soon to finish in a larger V-hulled vessel— contains all the trips I’ve made over the years on the Cape Fear and its tributaries. So for me this trip is a journey of decades , start to finish. Since arriving at Wilmington by johnboat, I’ve waited out a week of rainy days, sometimes starting clear but developing into violent drenching thunderstorms that have dumped more than five inches of rain on the lower basin. Even yesterday the south wind was so ferocious it drove me and my little Boston Whaler runabout back into harbor after only an hour of hard pounding on two-foot breaking swells inside the Intracoastal Waterway. So here I am on a bright morning in early June at a quarter to nine at Creekside Marina on Bradley Creek, waiting for Frank Chapman, man of many talents and one of my favorite people to go exploring with. Frank did his graduate work on birds and is a consummate boat handler, diver, fisherman, and all-around waterman. Once on a collecting tour to Central America, he wound up in the middle of a revolution and had to talk his way onto a tramp steamer to escape home. We’ll take Frank’s boat, which is built for a pounding, south on the Intracoastal Waterway and back through Snow’s Cut, then 10 162 The E stuar y thread our way through the southbound channel back into the main river channel, reconnecting with our river journey. We’ll backtrack somewhat—the mile or so through Snow’s Cut—but that’s okay. We have about five miles to the cut. Once we’re through, it’s about fifteen more miles downriver to where river meets sea. “Snow’s Cut” was the unofficial local name for this canal for at least a dozen years before it was officially so named. Major William A. Snow was Wilmington district engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1926 to 1930. He was handsome, young—just thirty-­twowhen hewas promoted—and had a demonstrated talent for accomplishing big projects on time and under budget. One of his secrets was simple: People liked him. It’s amazing how often we overlook the power of simple charm in accomplishing great things. Major Snow could get a roomful of people to agree on a course of action, then motivate others to carry it through. It was his job to extend the Intracoastal Waterway south from Beaufort to the Cape Fear River. Dredging the coastal portion was fairly routine, except that the dredgers ran into more stumps and roots than they had bargained for. But getting across the solid ground of the lower peninsula at Seagate presented a special challenge.The tidal surge on the river was not in synch with the tidal flow coming directly into the Intracoastal Waterway through the various inlets, so water levels could vary dramatically and unpredictably. Many feared that connecting the river with the sea via a canal might create violent currents that would make such a cut dangerous to navigate, creating a kind of tidal vortex. A tidal lock might be required to ease the transition, and that would be expensive, on the order of half a million dollars. Major Snow pushed on through anyway. His machines moved 1.6 million cubic yards of mud, sand, tree stumps, and rock, and water soon flowed between Seagate and the Cape Fear River...

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