![]() Most of the fruit wasn’t seasonal, but the market did have fresh strawberries from the Lewis farm in Rocky Point. They looked good, too, and I’d wager that that they came from a local farmer. Way in the back, there were also several bags full of May peas in a cooler. In a refrigerator in the back, for instance, I found a lonely box of rutabagas and another of beets, both certainly fresh and local. Most of it probably gets shipped in from all over and a lot of it is awful kitschy, but just when you’re feeling overwhelmed-you can barely move inside, it’s so full of stuff-you start to discover interesting things. This place has everything: live bait, fertilizer, fruit and vegetables, knick knacks and geegaws, hardware, jam, jellies and preserves, smoked meats, candy, boiled peanuts, nabs and crackers, sodas and beer, and a lot more. And then in the midst of all that there’s the Eagle Island Produce and Fish Market. There’s a faint smell of sulfur dioxide in the air and the entire time I was there-I was in the area for four or five hours-heavy brown smoke kept drifting across the highway from I don’t know where. There’s not much else out there except the county landfill, a giant scrap metal recycling facility, the empty shell of a fish scrap factory, a cement plant, a quarry, and a lot of old chemical and fertilizer plants, many of them abandoned. ![]() You pass the market when you’re driving south toward the Battleship North Carolina or BrunswickCounty. It’s an old roadside produce stand, fish market, and general merchandise store a stone’s throw from the Northeast Cape Fear River, on a lonely stretch of Highway 421 that otherwise is home only to endless miles of marsh and a bleak industrial landscape. What a strange and wonderful place this is.
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