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7 Nearly 200 miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, at the confluence where the Deep and Haw Rivers come together in the North Carolina Piedmont—literally, the foot of the mountains —lies a small wedge of beach called Mermaid Point. For more than a hundred years now it’s been submerged by a hydroelectric dam just downstream, but the sandy bottom is still there. In the 1700s, when only a handful of white settlers made their home in the vast Cape Fear basin, travelers reported hearing beautiful, ghostly singing emanating from this beach. A legend grew up that this was the place where mermaids would gather under a full moon.They had swum up the river till it was cleansed of salt and clarified of the tea-stain of tannin leaching from the cypress swamps in the lower river, to this beach where the mountain-cold water ran purified by fifty miles of fall and drip and seep through a watershed spider-webbing out north, east, and west. Here they would lounge, washing and combing one another’s long hair, all the while keening their siren song in a lovely, mesmerizing language no human ear could comprehend. I like to imagine them there, creatures of the sea, far up the long reach of the Cape Fear.The mermaids carry the legacy of the first European explorers who paddled their way up from the low coast to this hilly, wild green country more than three centuries ago in search of their fortunes. It was those settlers, after all, who first heard the beguiling song and created a fanciful legend to explain its mystery. Unlike so much country lore—cautionary tales intended to scare listeners into staying close to their campfires—this tale of sweet-singing mermaids carries an invitation to venture out and look, to discover the enchanting truth at the core of the mystery. And the mermaids carry, too, the future of the river, the promise of the millions of gallons of water per day that flow past the Point and downriver, drained from more than 6,000 miles of tributaries above their submerged beach, with names like Persimmon Creek, Rocky River, Stinking Creek, Alamance Creek, and Nursery Branch. The waters roll from Mermaid Point over the fall line to refresh the estuary far downriver . 1 8 The Uppe r R e ache s The legend doesn’t say how the mermaids got back down to the sea, any more than it describes their initial journey up that long, stubborn current. But I imagine them slipping into the cold water like river otters, gliding supplely among the foaming rapids of the upper reaches, stretching out now in the deeper water, tails working with a steady rhythm, riding the current past the bluffs at Raven Rock, sliding through the sluices and chutes of the rock gardens and little falls above Fayetteville, coasting around the long bends of the middle river, then swimming again down the slow, loopy meanders of the lower reaches, the river at last opening like a story into the broad estuary. In my imagination, I see them porpoising past the long S-­ turn at Southport , where the channel narrows against the bulkheads of the town front and the pilot boats are tied up at the wharf under the steel lookout tower. I watch them head out to sea past Battery Island on the left and the slim upright cylinder of the Oak Island Light on the right, with the misty silhouette of Bald Head Island in the offing, Old Baldy light glinting from the squat white tower, as they dive into deep water again—clean, invigorated, now singing a different song, equally enchanting, far out to sea. That’s the journey we’re going to take, from the confluence to the sea, finishing at the Cape of Fear that lends its name to the river. But this journey, like these pages, will not be a fast, straight, rushing line from here to a distant objective. A river basin is an organism.The tributaries threading through the landscape are capillaries to the main artery that is the river.The wetlands and swamps spreading out around the live water are the lungs, full of vegetation through which the land breathes. To really know the river, to understand its essential nature and place in our lives, we need to know these. So we will venture off the mainstem from time to time, exploring literal backwaters of geography and the more figurative...

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