I am, by default, a telecommuter. On any given weekday you’ll find me in the front room of our little ranch house in t-shirt and jeans drafting away at my desktop machine. It’s a rather comfortable work setup, and I can only hope that it lasts for a good long while. Which brings me to today, about a half a dozen times a year, I commute to our “corporate” office in Manteo, North Carolina.
Manteo is an small harbor town with a population of just over a thousand people. Architecturally it has some interesting older houses, as well as its fair share of not-so-interesting houses. A quiet little island town with all the charm & frustration that comes with it. It is beginning to grow on me personally, not in the way that Atlantic Beach has (it’s hard to beat the vivid memories of summer vacations as a child, walking down to the Triple S Pier as well as the Sportsman’s and watching the fishermen fighting the surf) but still, it has its moments.
With that said, Manteo is suffering from what I’m certain dozens of other small coastal communities are suffering from… unsustainable development. We have precious few towns with the sort of history that Manteo has here in the North Carolina. I’m hesitant to say none, but if you count back to the Roanoke Colony, it’d be a fair assessment. It’s a shame in my opinion, that the closest the average developer can come to “respecting the history” of an area is to make their super-profitable condominium projects mildly “historic” in their decoration. There is so much more to the way a small fishing village / harbor town works than sticking some historic trim & cedar shakes on a box and calling it historic. I’m afraid that in addition to be environmentally extremely wasteful, all the projects I see on my ride into town have no real connection to the island community (except of course, for proximity.)
Anyway, enough soapbox ranting for me… The ride down wasn’t bad at all, and the 4Runner got north of 23 MPG on the ride down, so that’s pretty exciting in and of itself. I did get a closer look at the wildfire that’s tearing up acres and acres of land down here. Not much to see from the road, though the smoke plume it self looked something like a gigantic tornado, so wide you couldn’t see the edges.
I’m looking forward to a nice productive day here at the office, and a quiet evening in my hotel room reading some of Kunstler’s Home from Nowhere. I hope everyone has a great day, and I look forward to heading back to town tomorrow.
Cheers!