I must look confused.

"We love our peanuts boiled here," the young woman behind the counter suggests, opening her vowels up wide. She's wearing a sirenred sweatshirt from the University of Georgia, Athens.

"Can I try one?"

"Sure thing," she says and dips a solitary peanut out of the steaming vat. It's white, like a fat maggot, a steamy slug. "It's a bit messy," she says apologetically.

The peanut tastes like any boiled bean, a little mushy, but sharply salted from the boiling brine.

We buy a bag each, plus some apples. If we get storm-stayed, we won't starve.

A van of Mexicans pa.s.ses us, young men wearing T-shirts and feed-store ball caps. Catholics travelling north to convert the Baptists?

Environmental refugees from the California citrus freeze, heading east to pick peanuts? We'll never know.

We stop outside a Hampton Inn. I open my computer and, yes, there's a wireless signal.

"Do you mind if we use your Wi-Fi?" I ask the woman behind the desk.

"Why sure, c'mon in. Here's the pa.s.sword. Y'all can sit in the breakfast room, if you like."

Wayne settles at one of the small round tables and sets to work. I get him a m.u.f.fin and a coffee, then sit mesmerized by the flat-screen television that takes up one wall of the room. It has been almost five months since I've watched TV, and I stare at it like a toddler, struck dumb.

The screen is tuned to the weather channel. It's snowing in Dallas. Roads are closed, travellers stranded. The high-pitched drama in the announcer's voice reminds me of Albuquerque. There's a weather advisory for Shreveport, Jackson-all the places we've just left. Lubbock, Texas, is shut down altogether. The cold and wet are pluming north and east. Freezing rain predicted for Charlotte and Raleigh. The Shenandoah Valley is coloured bright pink on the weatherman's map. Who, I wonder, chose such a cheap and cheerful colour to denote treacherous weather? Only the Atlantic seaboard is still a benign blue line that defines the eastern edge of the continent.

The Doomsday Clock, the announcer tells us, has been moved one minute closer to midnight, in recognition of the threat climate change poses to the survival of humankind. Soon we'll all be environmental refugees.

"Looks like we made the right decision, for now anyway," I say to Wayne. "We'd better stick to that thin blue line."

IT'S LONG past the time when we should have stopped for the night. We're both hungry and cranky. Darkness has descended when we finally reach Washington, North Carolina. We look for a nice mom-and-pop motel, but they all seem uniformly rundown, paint peeling, windows like cellblock slits, the parking lots deserted or spotted with wrecks. We give up and go to a Days Inn, where the young woman at the desk gives us a room right beside the only other guest in the place, a fellow with a medium-sized moving van.

It is eight o'clock at night. Normally, we'd be looking in the phone book for a decent restaurant or nibbling on duck pate and smoked salmon as we play gin or read amicably in our room. But tonight we order pizza and turn on the television, indications of how low our spirits have sunk. We're no longer travellers, we're a dumpy middle-aged couple wanting only comfort food and a mindless evening watching American Idol.

"You look like a distinguished gentleman," the pizza delivery man says when Wayne answers the door. Wayne eyes him suspiciously.

"I mean it as a compliment," the man says, smiling broadly. He's about Wayne's age, has a greying beard, and is wearing a thin black jacket that is soaked at the shoulders. Water drips from the peak of his baseball cap, but he doesn't seem to notice. He nods at me, lying rumpled on the bed. His smile is infectious.

I sit up. "Looks pretty bad out there," I say.

"Nothing that won't blow over," he says brightly. "Sun's supposed to shine tomorrow."

Wayne takes the pizza and sets it on the bed, then peels off a couple of bills. They all look the same here in the States, but I can see the numbers. He hands the money to the man and closes the door.

"That was a big tip," I say, no disapproval in my voice. The man delivered more than pizza: he brought a bit of South Carolina into the room.

Wayne is searching through our kitchen things. When he finds the red plates, he lifts a slice of pizza onto one and offers it to me, like a gentleman.

"He earned it," he says, a smile softening his face. "There's a storm out there."

13 / THE OUTER BANKS.

MELISSA, the night clerk, promised us there would be decaf in the breakfast room in the morning, but there isn't. I press the new man at the desk into making a pot. When the carafe is three-quarters full, I say, "Do you mind if I stop it now? I like my coffee strong."

"I don't know," he says, waddling over with a worried look. His toupee is a peculiar shade of brown. "You might burn yourself."

"I'll be careful," I say, sliding the carafe aside and slipping a cup under the drip. He looks dubious. I'm Canadian, I want to say, I'm not going to sue you, but after all these weeks such easy distinctions no longer seem fair. I nod my thanks and take two polystyrene cups and the carafe to our table in the lobby's breakfast nook.

I've forgotten my notebook. When I go back to the room, the swipe card doesn't work. The manager is summoned, but his card doesn't work either. It is agreed: no cards work. Whatever happened to keys? I stand huddled in the rain, imagining us stuck here for days while they look for some computer nerd to come and open our room. I contemplate the cost of a broken window.

At last, a congenial cleaner produces a gizmo from his trolley that somehow opens the door. "No close," he warns me sternly, shaking his finger in my face.

I nod vigorously. No close. Not on your life.

It is all too much, too early, especially today, when travel has lost its l.u.s.tre and I just want to be in my own kitchen with my own coffee pot, my own favourite br.i.m.m.i.n.g mug, not this plastic at my lips.

We eat the comes-with breakfast in the motel lobby: plastic tubes filled with garish Froot Loops and other puffed and sugared grains, cook-your-own waffles that smell of neoprene smothered with fake maple syrup, uniform slabs of white bread that move desultorily through the conveyor-belt toaster, plastic packets of sickly jam and b.u.t.ter and peanut b.u.t.ter. It all tastes the same.

"Let's not do that again," I say as we get back into the car.

"It's quick," Wayne says.

"But deadly."

"Okay, tomorrow we'll find you some great hash browns."

We're aiming for the coast, where the names of the towns-Kill Devil Hills, Nags Head-suit our mood. I look out through the rain-smeared window at houses flanked by palms and tall shrubs flowering pink and white against bare branches-hibiscus? magnolia? The slight rousing of my curiosity lifts my spirits a little, too.

The landscape is as flat as settled earth can get-ocean-bottom flat. We've left Route 17 for US 264, which takes us out onto a protuberance of North Carolina that extends farther into the Atlantic than Miami. Only Long Island, Rhode Island, and a bulge of Maine are farther east on the continental United States. On the map, the coastline here looks nibbled by mice.

"Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge," I say, reading a huge billboard. Wayne's mother used to do this: read every sign she pa.s.sed- McMann's Dry Goods. Pedestrian Crosswalk. No Turns Between 3 and 6 pm-a running commentary that used to drive him crazy. It still does. I try to keep my roadside reading to myself, except for times like this, when we could use a break, a diversion, a way back into our travelling selves.

"Birds," I say, leaning forward to squint up at a fan of white waterfowl flapping low overhead. "Swans! Could this be that swan wintering ground Rachel Carson wrote about?"

Wayne pulls over to the side of the road.

Rachel Carson was the first to sound the environmental alarm with Silent Spring in 1962, but I've always felt a kinship with her, too, as a fellow fan of the novels of Gene Stratton-Porter, the author of Freckles and A Girl of the Limberlost, books that led both of us as children into nature. Carson started out writing pamphlets for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. In 1947, she produced one on the Mattamuskeet, at the time one of the wildest places on the Atlantic coast, with dense woods of pine, cypress, and gum and wide expanses of marsh gra.s.s crawling with alligators and trembling with birds, hundreds of thousands of them. It has been a wildlife refuge for more than seventy years: fifty thousand acres that take in Mattamuskeet Lake, a long, shallow indentation less than three feet deep. In the fall, ducks, geese, and swans swoop down the skyways from above the Arctic Circle to winter here on this mild nub of wild land sticking out into the Atlantic.

I have a bleak thought. We're not only travelling against the flow of American settlement, we're travelling north against the wisdom of the world's waterfowl, too.

We drive down a side road, and sure enough, tens of thousands of sh.o.r.ebirds are milling on the lakeside, warbling to each other, suddenly breaking into flight, as if they've had enough, they're going home-but no, they circle round and glide back to where the others continue to scrabble and squawk.

"Tundra swans," Wayne says.

"Whistling swans," I say, still feeling querulous. I seem to remember that the windpipe of a whistling swan has an extra loop, which causes it to emit a high note, something like an oboe or a clarinet. I listen intently while Wayne searches for identifying marks, on the birds and in the bird book.

"Same bird, two different names," he says, looking pleased. "We're both right."

According to the sign, as many as thirty-five thousand tundra/ whistling swans congregate here, down significantly from the hundred thousand that Carson estimated in 1947. With a wingspan of close to seven feet, whistling swans are the second-largest waterfowl in North America. There are smaller birds, too: snow geese, osprey, bald eagles, some twenty-two species of ducks. We identify blue-winged teals, mallards, black ducks. Alligators still swim lazily in the ca.n.a.l, thankfully out of sight. Canada geese circle overhead, honking at us to carry on.

Go home, the sound says to me. Go on home.

WALTER Raleigh dedicated his unfinished epic, "The Ocean to Cynthia," to Elizabeth I. In it, he styled himself the Ocean and Elizabeth as Cynthia, the Moon. It was a nice conceit, erotic but not lese-majeste. Raleigh was the vast, unpredictable, moody sea, but he was ultimately controlled by Elizabeth's unanswerable lunar sway. They may have been lovers-the poem hints at it-but no one will ever know. She claimed not, but her excuse was an abnormal v.a.g.i.n.a- queens talked like that then, apparently-an unusual and inhibiting disposition of bones and flesh, rather than disinclination. She was, however, pleased with Raleigh's tribute. She liked the idea of an unsullied English monarch ruling the oceans.

We are crossing onto Roanoke Island, where Raleigh sent a boatload of explorers, in 1585. The island is in North Carolina now, part of the Outer Banks, but Raleigh called this land Virginia, another homage to his virgin queen. Carolina was for Charles, who would come later.

After a year of reconnoitring, the group, led by John White, returned to England to prepare a larger party of settlers, a hundred men, women, and children, to build a permanent colony in the New World. They arrived on Roanoke Island in 1587 and proceeded to build houses and fortifications, plant crops, and generally prepare for winter. The first European born on American soil was born here, a girl named Virginia Dare. White returned to England, promising to come back in the spring.

For various reasons-not least the attempted invasion of England by the Spanish Armada in 1588-White didn't make it back for three years, by which time the colonists had vanished. He found the letters "CRO" carved into a tree, indicating that they might have gone to the native village of Croatoan to join the friendly chief Manteo, but White was unable to travel the fifty miles to the village to check. He returned to England.

None of the original settlers were ever heard of again. They may have been killed by unfriendly natives, they may have a.s.similated into Manteo's clan, or they may have tried to make their way north to Chesapeake Bay. It is known that a hurricane swept through the area in 1589, which may account for the missing buildings, but the fate of America's first European settlers is also America's first mystery.

Roanoke seems, to us at least, a remarkably good choice for a colony site. Thin but fertile soil, an excellent climate, a strategic location that commands the narrow run of ocean that separates the Outer Banks from the mainland. The town of Manteo still has a comfortable feel to it. It's the first place we've been where there is universal free Wi-Fi. There is also a good bookstore, where I buy a copy of The Lost Colonists, by David Beers Quinn, and Muriel Rukeyser's biography of Thomas Heriot, the mathematician Raleigh sent to Roanoke, on the theory that every successful colony needs a great mathematician, to make maps, calculate tides and full moons, and generally astrologize and geomance.

I am in my element: I wrote my master's thesis on Walter Raleigh, and although I never finished it, I've never lost my fascination with the man or his time.

The parking lot at Fort Raleigh-a reconstruction of the palisade constructed by the missing settlers-is big enough to accommodate a dozen tour buses, but this is January and the island is as deserted as it was when White returned. There is a slight drizzle. The light in the surrounding woods is grey and shadowless. We try the door to the small stockade and find it locked for the season, on its porch a faded map under a sheet of Plexiglas. The signage tells little about Raleigh's lost settlers and a lot about the Freedmen's Colony that replaced it during the Civil War.

In the first year of that war, Roanoke Island was captured by the Union army in an attempt to block the South's ability to ship cotton to Europe. Without its primary export, the Confederate army would starve, they reasoned, and a hungry army makes mistakes. Under Union control, the island became an unexpected haven for runaway slaves from North Carolina and Virginia. By 1862, there were 1,000 blacks living around the fort, 3,500 at the colony's peak, all of whom depended on the government for support. Some of the men formed the First and Second North Carolina Colored Volunteers and fought against the South at the battles of Ol.u.s.tee, New Market Heights, Jackson's Creek, and Petersburg-it might have been one of their bullets that killed William S. Grady. But when the war ended, the government broke up the Freedmen's Colony, and although some families pet.i.tioned to stay on the island without support, most of them returned to the mainland to work for their former owners, "going back to semi-slavery for the present," wrote one of the missionary-teachers on the island, "but hoping for better times in the future."

Their actual buildings and gravesites were neglected and lost until 2001, when anthropologists used satellite imagery to locate traces of foundations and cemeteries among the trees. Following the map's directions, we drive along Airport Road to the new aquarium, where, nestled between two modern buildings, we find a small, treed triangle with three grave markers carefully set in concrete. One says: Rachel Dough, born Jan 15, 1815, died July 20, 1895, 'For I know my Redeemer liveth.'

In "Report of Transportation Furnished to Freedmen, January 1866," an Amie Doe is listed as having been shipped off the island to Plymouth, Virginia. I had a cousin in Windsor whose last name was Doe. It's a slender thread, I know, but sometimes the finest tapestries are made with the thinnest of threads.

MY mind turns constantly to home. Wayne, too, has a bad case of the Channels, he tells me over lunch at the Full Moon Cafe in Manteo. Small and intimate, it reminds us a little of our favourite cafe back home, where we courted in our early days together and still often contrive to share a meal.

"Channel fever," he explains, though I know what it means; he's told me before. But that's what couples do for each other: listen to their stories. "When British ships entered the English Channel, the crews could think of nothing but getting back to their families. Along the way, if the vessel had to stop at an English port for some reason, they'd jump ship and head off on foot; they were that anxious to get home."

I've been away from our house for almost half a year. I'm keen to be back, but I'm a little worried, too. I've been spoiled-no cooking or cleaning, and now I haven't made my own bed for more than a month. How will I manage a household again? I don't look forward to all the work, or the cold, though I yearn to be home. Maybe we should move. Go to Jefferson. Or Selma. Or Manteo.

Wayne leaves for the bookstore. I stay at the Full Moon, nursing my coffee. The only other patrons are three women who look to be in their seventies. All through lunch they've been chatting about kids and grandkids and clothes. Now, their talk turns to politics.

"Did you catch Larry King last night?"

"No, what did he say?"

I miss a few sentences, then pick up the thread when I hear Condoleezza Rice's name.

"Well, she sure knows how to wave getting off a plane, I'll give her that."

"You know what they call her, don't you?"

Their heads bend together. I have to strain to hear.

"Bush's little black puppet."

They move from dissing Rice to dissing Bush, glancing at me now and then to see if I'm taking it in, and if I am, how I respond. I give them a wan smile, trying for disapproving approval. They giggle.

I find Wayne in the Manteo Booksellers. He's jubilant.

"The best bookstore I've seen in a month." Maybe that's all we really need: a book fix. I buy a few novels: John Updike's Terrorist, The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford, Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad. At the checkout, I give Wayne a present, a ball cap with "Can't Live Without Books" embroidered across the front.

We're getting back into the groove. I ask Wayne if we couldn't please find a real mom-and-pop motel for tonight.

"Our last night."

"OmiG.o.d! It is, isn't it?"

"Right," he says. "No more chains."

Tomorrow we'll be in Princeton, with friends, a short day's drive from home. The trip is barrelling toward its conclusion. Suddenly, I want to slow it down. See every sight. Talk to every local. Eat real food. A fish fry. Carolina barbecue. And in the morning, for once I want real hash browns.

At one time, the Outer Banks, this skinny, two-hundred-mile band of islands protecting Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds from the Atlantic Ocean, was nothing but a ridge of high, shifting dunes. Nags Head (Americans have given up on apostrophes, too, it seems) was inhabited by pirates like Blackbeard, who lured merchant ships aground by tying lanterns to nags' heads. There are so many shipwrecks along this stretch that it's known as the graveyard of the Atlantic. Feral horses, they say, gallop across the dunes, descendants of the Spanish mustangs that swam ash.o.r.e from wrecks. This is where humans first took flight: in 1903, the Wright brothers lifted off from Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk in the world's first powered heavier-than-air vehicle.

We see none of this. No horses. No wild inventors. No dunes. Even the Atlantic is reduced to flashes of dismal grey between holiday houses that run chockablock along the sh.o.r.e. On either side of the road, fast-food joints and chain hotels wave billboards in our faces. We might as well be driving through any resort town in the coastal United States.

Then suddenly, a gap in the faux Cape Cod construction and there it is, the motel of our dreams, a low red building settled cozily into the sand with a white porch giving onto the sh.o.r.e. The room is panelled in knotty pine, with bedspreads our mothers might have bought.

The woman at the desk is chatting with a friend about her daughter. "She's graduating this year," the friend says. "The first person in our family to finish high school."

"Is that a fact?" the motel owner says. "If you want, I could do her hair."

We find a restaurant that isn't a chain. This is our last night in the South, and though we are on the sea and should be eating fish, we order barbecue, succulent pulled pork in a vinegary, peppery sauce. It is unbelievably delicious and deeply satisfying. I remember something I once read about the South, that the sole duty of a man was "to holler right, vote straight, and eat as much barbecue as any other man in the country."

After dinner, we walk along the beach under a brooding sky, kicking through the sand past a rhythm of wooden stairways that reach out to the moon-silvered sea, our senses heightened by the understanding that we will likely never be in this particular place again.

WE drive the next morning farther up the Outer Banks, past Kitty Hawk, then follow Highway 158 onto the North Carolina mainland. We're still on a spit of land jutting down into Albemarle Sound, the road running straight up the middle, so there is no good view of water. We pa.s.s through the towns of Mamie, Powells Point, and Jarvisburg without feeling the urge to stop: they are not really towns but "populated places," with populations in the low hundreds. The highway becomes the Camden Causeway and crosses a wide arm of Albemarle Sound at Elizabeth City before turning abruptly north again to skirt the Great Dismal Swamp.

John White's original plan had been to return to his colonists on Roanoke Island and establish a new settlement on Chesapeake Bay, where, he thought, the soil would be richer and the Chesapeake Indians friendlier. So when he finally made it back in 1590 and found the palisade deserted, he thought the settlers might have moved north, possibly up the Elizabeth River, which we are now following. What really became of them is anyone's guess.

Mine is that they disappeared into the Great Dismal Swamp.

The swamp, all 111,000 acres of it, is to our left, a vast expanse of sedges, bald cypress, tupelo, and pine. It is the migratory home of more than two hundred species of birds and is said to shelter black bears, bobcats, racc.o.o.ns, and seventy species of reptiles and amphibians. For a long time, from the seventeenth century until emanc.i.p.ation, it also sheltered a colony of runaway slaves.

The American definition of "slave" can be traced back to this part of the country. In 1675, Nathaniel Bacon, a white colonist, led an uprising against the Crown that was put down quickly by the colonial forces-twenty-three men were eventually hanged-but not before "Bacon's Army," as it was called, burned Jamestown and looted many nearby plantation estates. One of Bacon's demands was the total eradication of the local native population, for reasons of national security, and one of the odd results of the rebellion was that after the uprising, the colonial government pa.s.sed legislation defining what it meant by "slave." It identified three kinds: an indentured Christian servant from England, who was freed after serving four or five years; an "Indian" (i.e., native North American) servant, who served twelve years; and an African slave, who served for life. Plantation owners quickly realized that African slaves were cheaper, since they would never have to be paid for their work.

With the pa.s.sage of this law, which const.i.tuted a life sentence for blacks, many African slaves fled into the Great Dismal Swamp, where they mixed with the Tuscarora Indians, as well as with white pirates and vagabonds who had also set up camps in the swamp, forming a large, tight mestizo community. It isn't hard to imagine that descendants of the Roanoke Island settlers may have been there already, providing a base upon which this rebel group could grow and prosper.

As we cross the border into Virginia, I keep craning my neck for a glimpse of the flat, grey gra.s.slands of the distant swamp. Closer to the road, an endless strip of body shops, used-car lots, and every now and then mysterious low structures made of weathered plywood and old tarpaulins obstruct my view.

When we stop for gas, I venture into a sagging, one-storey building with a sign on the roof that says Liquors. Inside, between darkly gleaming rows of Jack Daniel's and Jim Beam, is a neat stack of Virginia wine, "product of the Shenandoah Valley." I take two bottles up to the cash.