Manteo Memories

I just had a trip down memory lane. I just read a CNN Travel article talking about the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where Justin Welborn and I spent the summer of 1993. We were "Living History Interpreters" on a re-created sailing vessel called the Elizabeth II. Basically, we sat around on a ship in period costumes, pretending to be 16th century sailors, and talked to the tourists who came on board the ship.

The lot of us had only two weeks to learn some history, Ptolemy (how the sun circled 'round the Earth), and develop characters and English accents. Unfortunately, the only exposure to English accents that most of us had was from Monty Python. It was horrible. Our first week, a family from the UK asked us what the bloody hell we were speaking. It got better though. By the end of the summer, we had our accents down. Tour guide Emily was from Middlesex (slogan: "Where people have sex in the middle!"), and she said that we'd pass for natives, save for all the 16th century parlance.

I was mariner Christopher Addison of Guilford, county of Surrey. My father and mother ran the Tabard Inn. (So what if I chose the alleged home of Ford Prefect from "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", and the Inn from Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". No one caught it all summer.) Welborn was Mariner Will Staff. He would always greet the children with "How would ya, wee ones?"

When we got bored, we invented "cabin boy" stories. It was an exercise in ad-libbed storytelling. We would talk about the jobs of the average cabin boy, then tell of a particular cabin boy's gruesome death. And it always had to end with "And he did fall o'erboard, and he did die."

It was fun work, but a lonely summer. My parents had just moved to Hawaii, and my brother had gone there to work for the summer. I had a choice: I could work back in Lilburn, Georgia, where I went to high school, and where nearly all my friends had moved on from, or I could work in Hawaii, where I'd be in paradise, but I'd know nobody but my family.

I chose "None of the Above," and took off to North Carolina. I decided that I was going to be on my own in Georgia for the rest of my college years, so I had better get used to living independently. I was poor, and ate so badly that I came back looking every bit like Robinson Crusoe in the fall, scraggly beard and all. But I wouldn't have traded it for anything. You learn a lot about yourself, and what you're capable of, when you remove yourself from all familiarity.