Fair Bluff, North Carolina

A cool breeze off the ocean had created a fog that was so thick the ferry I had hoped to take across the Cape Fear River to Wilmington was curtailed when I arrived a few minutes before the 9:15 a.m. departure.  I waited two hours for it to lift, but the breeze persisted and showed no signs of abating, so I was forced to bike the long way of forty-five miles rather than twenty-five to reach Wilmington and my much-anticipated reunion with Rhonda and John, stalwarts of the Telluride Film Festival.  

John and I go back nearly three decades.  He is one of the many diehard cinephiles who return to the festival from all over the country year after year to lend their services.  His assignment has been welcoming attendees and answering questions at the Hospitality Desk in the Brigadoon.  We have shared lodging a few of those years and have shared many a movie and meal, making us virtual brothers.  And Rhonda after thirteen years also in Hospitality has become a sister of a sort, but more of a Jewish mother. I have been wanting to visit them for years, and was thrilled to be on the verge of it.

As eager as I was to see them, sitting and waiting for the fog to go away was no hardship.  It was early morning and this was going to be a semi-rest day for me.  It was a disappointment though to miss out on the ferry, as it cut into my time with my great friends and prevented me from biking past Wilmington’s signature beaches Kure, Wilmington and Carolina twenty miles south of the city.  The route I was forced to take north from the ferry in Southport took me through a thick forest for twenty miles that wasn’t bad cycling at all.

John lauded it as one of the better cycling routes in the area.  Helped by my example, John has become a committed cyclist and even more so of late, as he has had to curtail his chief passion of surfing due to rotator cup surgery on both of his shoulders, making it difficult to paddle through the waves.  He had been such a committed man of the waves that he went off on a six-month surfing safari through Latin America to El Salvador in the ‘70s before he went to medical school.  He maintains the surfer’s perpetual tan and smile and gentle demeanor and an Endless Summer poster in his garage that he passes several times a day.  He had to have had the ultimate bedside manner as a physician.  He is Mr. Affable, the only person in his cul-de-sac of thirteen homes that gets along with all the neighbors. All else have a grievance or feud going with a neighbor or two. He hosts all their gatherings and tries to be a peace maker.

When I arrived at their home, Rhonda greeted me with her usual exuberance and wanted to start feeding me immediately.  I had ridden hard for three hours from the ferry, so was glad to get some more food into me than what I had been nibbling.  I had stopped at a Dollar Store a few miles from their home eight miles from the heart of Wilmington hoping to pick up a half gallon of chocolate milk for some instant calories and to have some on standby for the next day, but all the milk had been sold.  Rhonda greatly commiserated with me for being denied the ferry, then chocolate milk.

Rhonda said I was lucky not to have arrived that morning, as she had been in great agony after cutting back on her pain medicine for a rotator cup surgery of her own.  By slightly increasing her dosage she was now fine.  Her recovery has been slow, so she doesn’t anticipate making it to Telluride this year, making my visit all the more meaningful.

After a piece of chicken and some fruit salad John and I went off for a ninety-minute ride around his affluent neighborhood of tightly-clustered, well-manicured homes with small, well-shaded lawns and not much grass.  We cut between homes here and there on tiny paths that John had only discovered after he started biking.  We rode on a boardwalk through a swamp that took us to the inlet that was scattered with harbors packed with boats.  Amidst the homes in an undeveloped patch of trees was a tiny slave cemetery overgrown with weeds.  John also led us past an arboretum.  There was no fog, but there was still a chilly breeze blowing in from the ocean.  The meandering ride was a good wind-down for the legs and a full immersion into North Carolina flora and above all a testament to the joy of friendship.

Dinner was hamburgers grilled on the outside barbecue and corn on the cob that Rhonda had picked up at the Lidl, a German chain and rival of Aldi that sponsors a Tour de France team and had recently come to Wilmington as it strives to gain a foothold in the US.  It had become her favorite place to shop cutting her food budget by thirty per cent. I set up my tent on the lone patch of grass in back beside a hammock.  It was the first time I hadn’t had to contend with mosquitoes, though John said they’d been a nuisance the day before forcing him to use repellent.

We took a walk after dinner to the inlet and sat under a gazebo and gave Janina a call.  We all  have had many a marathon conversation at Telluride over meals or stuffing goodie bags, and we all had another as dusk settled in as if we were all sitting around a picnic table in the film festival  Club Lot in no hurry to be elsewhere.  We could all glory in our gratitude to Telluride for bringing us together.  

I missed saying goodbye to Rhonda in the morning as she was off early on her weekly round of garage sales intent on being the first in line at the first estate sale of the day.  She had a list of several to get to.  She specializes in knives that she sells on eBay and finds other items of interest to sell as well.  One of her best was a Vitton key chain that she sold for over one hundred dollars.  She’s sold over 3,500 items and doesn’t have a single negative review.

North Carolina had been the beneficiary of sixteen Carnegies, but Wilmington was not one of the recipients.  Wilmington though had the only Statue of Liberty in the state donated by the Boy Scouts in 1950 in commemoration of its fortieth anniversary.  It resides downtown by Thalian Hall, a theater built in 1855 that John said was similar to the Opera House in Telluride. The statue is set back from the corner of two main streets in the center of the city and so shielded by trees that it had never caught the attention of John.  She made a fine farewell as I headed west out of town over the Cape Fear River once again towards South Carolina for six Carnegies inland from the coast with rain in the forecast for the first time since Day One of these travels.  

The sky was clear and the sun back to being intense.  After a couple of hours of the eighty degree heat I stopped for a cold drink at a service station mini-mart.  As I sat out front sipping and finishing off the yogurt and granola Rhonda sent me off with, the woman I had given a bunch of scuffed up coins I had scavenged along the road to pay for my drink came out with three boxes each with six chicken wings and said, “I see you’re biking.  Here’s some chicken wings for you.”  I’m not sure if it was the bike or those battered coins that spurred her generosity.

Ninety minutes before dark clouds moved in and shortly there was thunder and lightning in the distance.  I was hoping the storm might bypass me, but when a few scattered drops of rain began to fall, I started looking for an easy access into the forest.  I came upon a slightly overgrown path that led to an abandoned farmhouse, the first I had camped beside in these travels, setting up my tent having to only absorb a few drops of rain before it came down in earnest.  I still had some chicken wings to mix in with my ramen.