shops filled with replicas of black- 

 heads and yellowlegs and juniper 

 shavings, never poke through the 

 boatyards, never hear a Harkers 

 Islander describe loon stew. 



I have three days to spend along 

 these three dozen miles and will wish 

 I had three times that number. On the 

 westernmost edge of 

 Down East, I roll up 

 the windows, pull 

 back to the blacktop 

 and accelerate into 

 the rising wind. My 

 first stop is Harkers 

 Island. 



Some 4 1/2 

 miles long, on the 

 map the island looks 

 like a short, stubby 

 tobacco pipe. A 

 bridge connects the 

 bowl of the pipe to 

 the mainland; a 

 private "conces- 

 sion" ferry runs 

 from the stem to 

 Cape Lookout, 

 across the sound at 

 the southern tip of 

 South Core Banks. 

 In 1730, Ebenezer Harker — Ben 

 Franklin's first cousin and soon-to-be 

 Carteret County sheriff — bought the 

 island for 400 pounds and a 20-foot 

 skiff. His grave lies in tangled woods 

 near Knuckle's Point — what locals 

 call the "west'ard" end of the island. 



Sunlight on the sound winks 

 through live oaks as I skirt the shore to 

 a trim ranch house with a wide 

 wraparound porch. This is the tempo- 

 rary home of the Core Sound Water- 

 fowl Museum, grown from a guild of 

 seven decoy carvers in 1988 to a 300- 

 member organization in 1995. A 

 clearinghouse for Harkers Island and 

 Down East culture, the museum also 

 serves as a sort of visitors center for 



Harkers Islander Madge Guthrie 

 gazes across a sunlit sound toward 

 Core Banks. Guthrie 's ties 

 to the island are strong. 

 Her family moved here in the 

 early 1900s from Core Banks 

 and Cape Lookout. She remembers 

 when the mailboat was the cape 's 

 only connection to the mainland and 

 when Harkers Island roads 

 were paved with shells. 



the whole of Down East. 



This morning the front porch 

 rockers are manned by volunteer 

 Madge Guthrie, dressed in a bright 

 floral print skirt and a museum T- 

 shirt, and founding guild member Curt 

 Salter, a brawny man who is gently 

 sanding the beak of a curlew decoy. I 

 have walked into a spirited discussion 

 about the local custom of eating loons. 

 Harkers Islanders, it seems, are 

 singularly renowned for their stewed 

 loon — or at least the early inhabitants 

 were; the birds have been protected 

 from hunting since 1918. Nancy 

 Davis, the museum's quick-smiling 

 secretary, joins the discussion and tells 

 me that old-timers stewed loon with 



fat-meat grease, rutabagas and dump- 

 lings. Guthrie declares she's deter- 

 mined to have one more taste before 

 she dies. 



From here the conversation moves 

 to the proper cleaning of a mullet and 

 whether the current rising of wind 

 might turn into a bona fide "mullet 

 blow," one that 

 brings the migrating 

 fish close to shore. 

 Wandering through 

 the building, I lend 

 my ears to the 

 colorful conversa- 

 tion but my eyes 

 stray to the small 

 rooms stocked with 

 local history books, 

 historic photo- 

 graphs, artwork, and 

 scores of decoys old 

 and new. Back on 

 the porch, I pull up a 

 rocker and strike up 

 a conversation with 

 Guthrie. 



Like many 

 Down East families, 

 hers moved to 

 Harkers Island in the 

 early 1 900s from Core Banks and Cape 

 Lookout, clearly visible across the 

 sound. Throughout the 18th and 19th 

 centuries, those thin strips of low dune 

 and marsh were home to thriving 

 communities of "Ca'e Bankers" (the 

 local pronunciation of "Cape Bank- 

 ers"). Fishermen from the barrier island 

 towns of Diamond City, Wade's Shore 

 and Portsmouth harvested mullet and 

 even whale from the ocean waters 

 (whale lookout posts speckled the 

 dunes in those days). But hurricanes in 

 1 896 and 1 899 proved too much for the 

 Bankers, and many dismantled their 

 houses, loaded them on skiffs and 

 sailed across Core Sound to begin a 

 new life. 



4 MARCH/APRIL 1996 



