“There’s four thousand sailboats in this town and eight hundred people,” the woman tugging on a fishing rod told me. She was wrestling a cownose ray she’d hooked along South Avenue near Lou-Mac Park. The ray finally worked himself free. She retrieved her line and chatted with Pete and me while Katie played with her two cute dogs in the gathering dusk.
The Town website says three thousand sailboats, and the 2020 Census lists 880 people, but who’s counting? Oriental claims to be the “Sailing Capital of North Carolina.” There are so few power boats and so many sailors in our marina that I believe it.
There were three power boats along our face dock last night. This morning, the other two continued north. There are more around, though power boats are a minority in this small town.
Sailing must be fine here. Oriental sits close to where the Neuse River empties into Palmico Sound, the smaller of North Carolina’s two major water bodies between the Outer Banks and the Inner Coastal Plain.
The town is named after the Steamship Oriental, which wrecked off the Outer Banks in 1862 while carrying Union troops to South Carolina. The ship, which also carried sails, was less than two years old. The town didn’t yet exist.
Nobody is sure how the US Post Office at Smith Creek picked up the name Oriental. The postmaster’s wife was involved. As was the official nameplate of the ill-fated sugar cane carrier that had been pressed into troopship service. The name stuck. It’s a beckoning name. The town’s New Year’s Eve Dragon Parade is an add-on that has nothing to do with the steamship.
It’s a lovely small town near the waterfront, which is what we’ve seen. Big, lush, green lawns and sturdy, well-kept. sometimes quirky homes. A Provisioning Company sells everything from food to dinghies. There are plenty of shrimp boats and a doll-house-sized seafood market.
An old painted school bus might have been at Woodstock or once used to carry the Cowsills to concerts.
Lou-Mac Park was filling up as we walked back from John Bond Town Beach this afternoon. Townspeople were gathering, chatting, and taking sunset-view seats on bright resin Adirondack chairs. Some arrived by golf cart, which seems to be a popular way to get around. Three or four teens had pulled up in a pickup truck and were sitting on the hood. Two more lounged along the fishing pier rails, vaping.
A hand=painted sign announces Sunday services at the park at 0830 Sunday. We saw a similar notice at the sponsoring congregation, the Oriental United Methodist Church. We’d taken Katie there to run in a big mowed lawn adjacent to the church where a sign said, “Parking Lot. Welcome.” We took that to also mean Katie and her ball.
For most of the day, a stiff gusting-to-25 beam wind slammed IH against the dock. I quickly remembered the tedium of randomly timed waves gunshotting under the swim platform. Katie is not a fan of the boat tugging at its moorings while their report reverberate through the hull.
Which is why we’d gone off to John Bond Beach to begin with, past the Methodist Church Parking Lot and Lou-Mac Park. The beach measured 75 x 100 feet on Google Maps. Enough for Katie to chase pine cones. She threw them into the water by herself, which earned her a swim platform shower before dinner.
She’s asleep on the bridge now; she seems to like sleeping under the stars. I imagine she’s dreaming of pine cones, or maybe the ray: the one that got away.
Irish Hurricane 