The Water Is Wide: A Memoir

After school each day, Pat explores the island on foot. One day, he finds “a magnificent old house,” long abandoned and decorated with “a very large and tattered confederate flag” (74). He recalls that he has “known a great many Confederate flag nuts in my life, rabid dreamers” for whom the “Confederate flag summons primitive emotions” (74). He notes that he feels disgusted by the flag and what it represents, but also acknowledges that the flag, “mute in its testimony to a defeated cause and expiring way of life,” retains a certain dignity (74).

Pat gets to know Ted Stone, from whom he collects his mail every day. The “quintessential outdoorsman,” Ted can “plow a field, milk a cow, gut a hog, cook a trout, clean a rifle—all the things that [make] us such complete opposites” (75). They are politically opposed, too. Ted describes the black islanders as “filthy savages who shouldn’t be allowed to have children” and says that they “all ought to be shot” (76). Ted and his wife, Lou, built their own school on the island so that their son would not have to attend school with the black students.

Moreover, Stone expresses a “blind, uncompromising, unconditional” patriotism, “almost Third Reich in its fervor and rigidity,” which he demonstrates in his support for the United States’ participation in the Vietnam War.