A Fergus' Ark Two-Color Postcard, With Commentary

My brother Jay recently sent me a batch of blank postcards. I was glad to get them, since my supply is down to only a few hundred. The nearby resale shop that used to sell me cards at 25¢ each, or even 12.5¢ on sale days, has jacked up the price to $2 and $3 a card. At that price, forget it.

One of the cards he sent depicts Fergus' Ark, a floating seafood restaurant formerly in Wilmington, NC. The card must be 50 years old, and produced as cheaply as a color card can be -- a two-color printing job, which just screams cheap.

Note the writing on the card. Someone made a comment on the restaurant, presumably after a visit, and it wasn't favorable. "ordinary no good no atmosphere expensive for what one gets"

This is scanned from the back of the card. Not the entire back, which has a space for writing a message and a address like any postcard, but only a corner of the card. The mascot fish wears a top hat and carries a cane, for that touch of piscine class.

The Cafe Fear Museum web site tells me that "the first Fergus’ Ark (1952-1965) was a floating restaurant moored at the foot of Princess Street in Wilmington. The ship the Ark, originally named the General Frederick C. Hodgkins, was built in Wilmington in the early 1920s. According to the restaurant’s menu, the Ark had been a banana boat, a floating casino, a quarter boat for members U.S. Coast Guard in World War II, and, in 1946, the U.S. Maritime Commission’s office space. Then Ivon Eldridge Fergus (1914-1998) bought the Ark in September 1951 and converted it into a restaurant.

"The first Fergus’ Ark closed in February 1965 so that a coast guard facility could be built in its place. Mr. Fergus then opened a Fergus Ark on Market Street and two others on Carolina Beach Road and Oleander Drive. At one point, Fergus owned four restaurants... As for the Ark, it was initially sold to a Florida businessman. Over the next decades, it changed hands a number of times yet it was still afloat in the 1990s, serving as the office of a Florida boating supply company."

Item From the Past, With Links: March 3, 1981

Spent most of today in Neal's 13-year-old station wagon. Neal drives, I navigate, Stuart catnaps in the back with our provisions. This morning we left Durham, headed east on US 64, stopping in Nashville, NC, to eat at Hardee's (egg & bacon biscuit). Then on to the coast. First we went north, through Nags Head -- saw the Atlantic Ocean proper for the first time just below Joe Justus' fishing pier, which was closed for the season -- and up to the Wright Bros. National Memorial to see their memorial and the very spot where they flew. They didn't fly far that day.

We also climbed to the top of Kill Devil Hill, where the brothers tested gliders for some years. From the top of nearby Jockey's Ridge, an enormous sand dune that we also climbed, we watched modern-day hang gliders taking advantage of the gusts blowing across the island, so strong at times that it was hard to hear each other. We were befriended by a big black dog who played with us but also chased hang gliders. We never knew whose dog it was, and it followed us part of the way as we ran down the landward side of the dune back to the station wagon.

We traveled on and by about 3:30 passed the Bodie Island lighthouse to our right (west) and continued southward along a road that sometimes seemed to be passing over nothing but water. At Hatteras Island, we found a posted ferry schedule and discovered that we could go to Ocracoke Island today, but not on to Cedar Island. Ocracoke is a narrow, 20-mile stick of an island between Hatteras and Portsmouth islands, with a small town, Ocracoke, on the SW end. The rest of the island is beach on either side of a single two-lane road.

With temps cold but not below freezing, we decided to camp a few miles from the town, arriving at the campground at about sunset. A sign at the campground said CLOSED. We drove around the chain across the parking lot entrance and soon found a site over a small hill from the parking lot, facing the Atlantic, but surrounded by small dunes to keep the wind away.

We pitched camp. That is, we threw down our sleeping bags. The lamp wouldn't light, but the camp stove did, so we prepared to cook country ham. The wind blew it out, and it wouldn't light again despite many tries. By this time it was very dark and very cold, so we ate an entire box of cookies and a bag of Doritos. We each got into our bags and had little else to do but talk and look at the stars.

Ah, the stars! The best I've ever seen. No Moon. No city lights. No tall trees. Nothing but a vault of diamonds on black, and the wispy band of the Milky Way. I'd never seen all of the Little Dipper before, ever. There they were, all of them. Picked out a number of other constellations, but only those few I could do by memory. Jupiter and Mars rose later.

Other than that, it was a long night. The ground was hard, like trying to sleep on a cold, bumpy cement mattress. It was impossible to warm up my feet. I'm pretty sure I slept, but it was broken up many times by semi-consciousness and weird dreams. I was glad, we were all glad, to see Dawn spreading her rosy fingers across the eastern sky.

Postscript, 2009. A miserable night on the beach at the time, but I remember it fondly now.

Grizzly, Russian, Black, Asian, Cinnamon

When in a tourist town, do as the tourists do. As I mentioned, Cherokee, NC, was our tourist town of choice on this particular trip, and besides eating at the Little Princess Restaurant ("Indian Owned, Indian Operated" a sign said, and the place served pretty good fried chicken), we wandered around one of the tourist nodes along the Oconaluftee River until we saw this: a bear pit.

Supposedly, there's a bear pit in Pigeon Forge, too. Talk about rare tourist attractions, unless you consider it a minor species of zoo, and even then, how many zoos specialize in bears? PETA would not approve; all the more reason to visit. I asked about the price: $4. Even rarer -- a tourist attraction that hasn't participated much in the entertainment-price inflation of recent years.

You go upstairs to a second-floor complex, and look down on the bears, who are in concrete enclosures on the first floor:

Feeding the bears is encouraged, as the sign says. But only food bought at the bear pit. Lilly and Ann pestered me until I bought a small plate for $1, including apple slices and bread. The bears knew all about the supply of food from above, of course:

Clearly, in the past visitors have had the urge to have the bears wash down their food with handy carbonated beverages. Chief Saunooke says don't do it:

If you held bread or apples in your hand, and moved it with circular motion, this bear would wheel around a time or two as well, expecting a reward for his effort:

I'll give the place credit for pretending it was more than entertainment. It was educational, too! At various places were signs offering a lot of detailed information about bears. No one was reading these, naturally, and even I didn't have much patience for them.

After about 30 minutes, having seen all the bears on exhibit (about a dozen), and not willing to pay another $2 to see cubs in a special room, we headed for the door.

The exit led directly into Chief Saunooke's large souvenir shop. The funny thing was the sign on the other side of the exit, the one that souvenir shoppers might see. It said: DANGER. DO NOT ENTER. That was a complete lie, obviously intended to prevent people from accidentally entering the bear pit observation area without paying.

The Roads Ahead

The best-known road that we drove last week was the section of US 441, also known as the Newfound Gap Road, that crosses Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It is a windy little road, ascending to a point near Clingman's Dome, Tennessee, and then descending into North Carolina -- or the other way around, depending on which way you drive it. Verdant beyond belief in early July, the road also has pretty much everything you'd want in a mountain road any time of year, such as winding switchbacks and access to various historic structures and hiking trails. Plus scenic overlooks. A lot of scenic overlooks; after the first few, you quit getting out of the car.

At about Mile 10 (I think), still in Tennessee, there's the Mother of All Switchbacks, a place where the road loops completely around and passes over itself -- or loops around and passes under itself, depending. The warning sign describing this particular bit of road topography is pictured here (see November 10) -- a memorable sign.

I'm astonished that the photographer got a photo of that sign at all, since stopping or pulling over on the Newfound Gap Road is risky business. While smooth (partly repaved in recent years, I read), most of the road has no shoulder, and traffic is heavy. The park is the most popular one in the entire national park system -- 9.4 million visitors in 2007, according to the National Park Service. One any given day in the summer, a large number of that total seems to be on Newfound Gap Road, which made for a number white-knuckle moments, especially at when traffic appeared three and four and five RVs deep on the other side of the road, just as you hit a switchback. Carefree highway, it's not.

Unsurprisingly, Newfound Gap Road passes through Newfound Gap, a location some distance lower than Clingman's Dome, the highest point in the park, but important enough that the dedication of the park was held there on September 2, 1940. The occasion was considered important enough that President Roosevelt himself came to speak, from a platform of stones built for the occasion by the CCC. A plaque marks the spot now; less obvious is the fact that the Tennessee-North Carolina border runs through the site. Through the plaque, I've read, which is a fitting bit of symbolism to mark the cooperation of the two states in putting the park together.

Ann took this picture of the place, with only a little help from me.

Interstate 40, which skirts the park to the east, has its own share of curves, along with enough mountainous landscapes to count as scenic. Like stretches of I-89 in Vermont or I-10 in Louisiana or the Mackinac Bridge, it makes the case that the Interstate system is not completely a bore.

In fact, a little bit more of a bore would have suited me. Along much of I-40 from the park to Asheville, trucks aren't allowed in the left lane, and are required to go slower than cars. The result was long lines of trucks in the right lane -- six or eight. Drivers of lesser vehicles, such as a dark green Sienna all the way from Illinois, either had to hang behind the trucks, or pass the trucks on the left, between them and the concrete barrier, through a couple of serious curves.

Despite their obvious dangers, I-40 and the Newfound Gap Road were good driving roads. Better, however, was a piece of the as-yet unfinished Foothills Parkway, tucked away just north of the park, connecting the town of Crosby, Tenn., with I-40. At five miles or so, it was an abbreviated Newfound Gap Road, with some similar scenery, but almost no traffic. An obscure gem of a road.