My Imagination by Niles Reddick

On the first day at the dig site on Roanoke Island, I’d mostly used the mattock, trowel, and brush. I also realized just how tedious and boring the work of archaeology could be, nothing like the action-packed Indiana Jones movies I had been obsessed with as a child. I’d volunteered for the part time work, partly for the experience, partly to get closer to Alana, the Graduate student supervisor, and partly to impress my professor in hopes for extra credit in the course. We’d heard all the stories in class. In the five years after the Roanoke colony had been established, visitors found it abandoned when they returned from England, its one hundred plus settlers missing, and the word “Croatoan” carved onto the palisade’s wood.

 Most of the theories assumed the settlers had either moved to the island of Croatoan, were killed by natives, died of disease, attacked by the Spanish from the South, or simply struck out on their own to relocate together because of much needed food. Theorists asserted that some of the colonists had likely died and those who remained integrated with local tribes, though no descendants of Native and English integration had ever been identified and no skeletal remains had ever been discovered for DNA testing.

My personal hunch was they’d moved on, too, if the scheduled provisions from England by ship never showed. I imagined it would be a terrifying experience, worse than being left behind by my parents at a department store with strangers. The difference for me was that one of my parent’s returned to the store to take me home. When the English finally arrived with provisions, the colonists were gone. It was as if they’d completely vanished.

I used the mattock and the brush to gently dig out something hard right below the surface. While I hoped for a human bone, which would have earned me a lot of extra credit, the discovery turned out to be a rock. The dust rose in small clouds around me in my Indian style position. The puffs of dust rose mostly because there had been no rain, and it was hot and humid, too. I imagined similar small clouds of dust rose when the Algonquin shaman danced in circles to call upon the great spirit for rain, for a plentiful supply of animals or corn, and to keep the white man from sailing to their shores and taking over their lands. I figured it must have been the earliest of eminent domain cases.

I thought of the Algonquin tribes that must have inhabited the area nearest Roanoke. I’d read they believed in a great spirit and were mostly a peaceful group of people, and their shaman or Midewiwin often had visions and guided them. I felt they were in harmony with nature, and while we might see their beliefs and practices as mystical compared to the colonists’ beliefs, or even our modern beliefs, they were smart, acted upon their intuition, and were able to read their environment. I didn’t want to believe the natives would have killed the settlers. If anything, I imagined that the settlers brought disease with them and distributed it, unknowingly, to the natives.

A group of us working the site decided we’d go see “The Lost Colony” live theatre production after work. It had been going for nearly eighty-five years despite a fire, a hurricane, and Nazi U-boats patrolling the outer banks during World War II. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt saw the first production, and the ongoing live show helped foster some acting careers including that of Andy Griffith’s. I imagined I’d sit by Alana, maybe take her hand into mine or put my hand on her leg to see what reaction I’d get, if I stood a chance of romance at Roanoke Island. I imagined I might make a discovery and share it with her.

When I felt I’d stumbled upon something else that was hard and lodged in the dirt, I fantasized it might be a piece of jewelry, maybe even another signet ring, like another professor and archaeologist had discovered thirty years before in a different location. Unfortunately, it turned out to be another rock.  A few friends who were working at the dig site with me had located a few shards of English pottery dating to the time of the colonists, and that was reassuring to our professor that we were in the right place and fueled hope of finding something significant, like someone who wins a few dollars on a lottery ticket and buys more tickets hoping to hit a jackpot.

I imagined some of the colonists had died, some may have moved off island to what today is the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, and some may have gone even further inland. I wondered what they would have thought of an alligator had they encountered one. They must’ve imagined it to be a dragon or Satanic. Since they believed they were close to the Pacific Ocean, they may not have ventured much further.

Alana had shared with us about the hundreds of UFO and orb sightings here and in the Outer Banks. I imagined those frightened colonists being visited and saved by aliens, the light beings, not the grays ones who, according to abductees, experiment on humans. I fantasized they were whisked away into the heavens where they had all the food they needed, like the elderly people in the movie Cocoon.  I imagined the old shaman or Midewiwin told the children of the tribe the story of the sky people who’d saved them from the strange white men. I preferred a nice ending to the more realistic ones: starvation, being eaten by alligators, shot with bows and arrows, or hacked to pieces with tomahawks.  

“Are you daydreaming again?” Alana asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was imagining the colonists.”

“Imagining isn’t the hard work of archaeology and discovery.”

“Understood,” I replied. I had lived in my imagination and conjured realities my entire life, and no matter how hard I tried or focused, I never changed. When I was told the funding for my part time job was cancelled a week later, I knew there was no hope of romance for me on Roanoke with Alana, and I disappeared even more quickly than the colonists.

Niles Reddick.

Image: The First Colony Foundation conducts an archaeological dig in autumn 2009 at Fort Raleigh National Historical Site, to find artifacts related to the English colonies at Roanoke Island in the 1580s. from wikimedia commons – Public domain.