He needed still to find the long spruce strips necessary for his “machine” and so set off to several lumberyards only to be told they had none. Settling for white pine, he gathered up everything and boarded a 4:30 train to Elizabeth City, sixty miles to the south, where the Pasquotank River flows to meet Albemarle Sound.
When, at Elizabeth City, he inquired about the best way to get over to Kitty Hawk, he received nothing but blank stares. No one he talked to seemed to know anything about the place or have the least idea how to get there.
It was another four days before he found a boatman on the waterfront, one Israel Perry, who said he had been born and raised at Kitty Hawk and agreed to take Wilbur across. Perry also had a friend to help him. Wilbur’s heavy trunk and the pine strips would go over on the weekly freight boat.
To get to Perry’s schooner required going by a small skiff much the worse for wear and leaking badly. When Wilbur asked if it was safe, Perry, to assure him, said, “Oh, it’s safer than the big boat.”
With constant bailing the whole three miles, they managed to reach the schooner, which was indeed in sadder shape. “The sails were rotten,” wrote Wilbur, “the ropes badly worn and the rudder-post half rotted off, and the cabin so dirty and vermin-infested that I kept out of it from first to last.”
The weather had been fine all day, but by the time they started out of the wide Pasquotank River and down the sound, it was nearly dark and the water much rougher than the light wind had led them to expect, as Israel Perry pointed out several times, clearly “a little uneasy.” The voyage ahead was forty miles.
The wind shifted and grew increasingly stronger. The waves, now running quite high, “struck the boat from below with a heavy shock and threw it back about as fast as it went forward,” Wilbur would write. He had had no experience with sailing, let alone rough water, but plainly the flat-bottom craft was woefully unsuited for such conditions.
In the strain of rolling and pitching, the boat sprang a leak, and with water crashing over the bow required still more bailing.
At 11 o’clock the wind had increased to a gale and the boat was gradually being driven nearer and nearer the north shore, but as an attempt to turn round would probably have resulted in an upset, there seemed nothing else to do but attempt to round the North River Light and take refuge behind the point.
The situation suddenly became more dramatic still.
In a severe gust the foresail was blown loose from the boom and fluttered to leeward with a terrible roar. . . . By the time we had reached a position even with the end of the point, it became doubtful whether we would be able to round the light. . . . The suspense was ended by another roaring of the canvas as the mainsail also tore loose from the boom, and shook fiercely in the gale.
By now their only chance was to take in the mainsail, let the boat swing stern to the wind, and, under the jib only, make a straight run over the sandbar. This, as Wilbur wrote, was a highly dangerous maneuver in such a sea, but somehow Perry managed without capsizing.
He would not land on sandbars for a thousand dollars, Perry told Wilbur. So they lay at anchor in the North River the remainder of the night. Having no stomach for any food Perry might have below, Wilbur dipped into a jar of jelly Katharine had packed in his bag and stretched out on deck.
Setting the boat in order as best they could took half the next day. It was afternoon before they got under way again and not until nine that night were they anchored at Kitty Hawk, where again Wilbur slept on deck.
He finally went ashore the next morning, September 13, two days after leaving Elizabeth City.
He headed first to the home of William Tate, the former Kitty Hawk postmaster with whom he had corresponded.
In all, Kitty Hawk comprised perhaps fifty houses, nearly all the homes of fishermen, and Tate, too, made most of his living that way three months of the year, beginning in October when the fish were running. As he would later write, “The community of Kitty Hawk at that time was a hardy race, chiefly descendants of shipwrecked sailors whom storm and misfortune had cast upon the shores of the North Carolina coast.” He himself was the son of a shipwrecked Scotsman. The life there, Tate stressed, was one of “double-barreled ISOLATION.”
Houses had little in the way of furniture. Their bare floors were kept clean by scrubbing with white sand. Families raised most of what they ate in small vegetable gardens while the “men-folk” hunted all they could. Clothes were hand-sewn and most everyone got by with just two or three changes of clothes—“one for special occasions,” it was said, “and then one on one day and one on the next.” Mail came about three times a week. Children went to school about three months a year, and no one, it seemed, knew what a vacation was.
Tate and his wife, Addie, gave the visitor the warm greeting he had promised, and Wilbur, as Tate remembered, “proceeded to unfold a tale of hardship” about his trip from Elizabeth City. “He was a tenderfoot and of course had a tale of woe to tell.
His graphic description of the rolling of the boat and his story that the muscles of his arms ached from holding on, were interesting, but when he said he had fasted for 48 hours that was a condition that called for a remedy at once. Therefore we soon had him seated to a good breakfast of fresh eggs, ham and coffee, and I assure you he did his duty by them.
When Wilbur asked if he might board there temporarily until his brother arrived, the Tates excused themselves to confer in the next room, but without closing the door. Hearing Addie say she was not sure their home would do for such a nicely dressed visitor, Wilbur stepped to the door to tell them he would be quite happy with whatever accommodations they could provide.
In a long letter to his father, Wilbur described the Tate home as an unpainted, two-story frame house with no plaster on the walls, “no carpets at all, very little furniture, no books or pictures.” For Kitty Hawk, this was above the average.
A few men have saved a thousand dollars, but this is the saving of a long life. . . . I suppose a few of them see two hundred dollars a year. They are friendly and neighborly and I think there is rarely any real suffering among them.
Beside fishing, they tried to grow their own beans and corn. As there appeared to be nothing but sand, Wilbur thought it a wonder they could grow anything.
Until Orville’s arrival, Wilbur worked at setting up camp on a good-sized hill half a mile from the Tate house, overlooking the water. That done, he began preparing their glider, most of his efforts taken up with a change in the wingspan from 18 to 17 feet, because of his failure to find the spruce spars needed and having to be satisfied with the pine substitutes that were two feet shorter. As a result the fabric for the wings—a beautiful white French sateen—had also to be cut back in size and resewn. To accomplish this he borrowed Addie Tate’s sewing machine of the kind one pumped by foot.