Every year, I like to try to run a race on or close to my birthday. This year, my birthday falls on a Monday, so I picked the Ironman 70.3 Virginia’s Blue Ridge, which was held today, Sunday, June 4th. Featuring a reservoir swim, a hilly (actually, mountainous) bike, and a relatively flat half-marathon run, the race was excellent (though the bike portion did include a savage 4.7-mile segment with an average incline grade of 5.9%, which the race organisers called the “the Claw”).
The race was held in the city of Roanoke—a name that is commonly associated with Roanoke Colony. Popularly known as the Lost Colony, Roanoke Colony was the first attempt to establish a permanent English settlement in North America. The colony refers to two related attempts to establish settlements on Roanoke Island in 1585 and 1587, involving more than a hundred colonists, but when a ship returned to the island in 1590, all the original colonists had disappeared. The only clue to their fate was the word CROATOAN that was found hand-carved in the camp’s palisade, suggesting that the surviving colonists may have relocated to a nearby island named after a local tribe of Native Americans (and now known as Hatteras Island). No conclusive evidence of the fate of the colonists has been found, though recent archeological research suggests that many of the colonists survived on Hatteras Island, where some of them may have interbred with local Croatoans.
Although considerable attention has been given to the fate of the 120 English colonists on Roanoke Island, much less attention has been given to the fate of the tribe of Native Americans for whom the island was named: the Roanokes, who are estimated to have numbered in the thousands at the time of their first contact with the English. In 1584, one year before Roanoke Colony was founded, Wanchese—who has been identified as the last leader of the Roanokes—was taken to England, where he and another local were the first Native Americans to be hosted in England as honoured guests. Unlike his companion, however, Wanchese apparently evidenced no interest in learning English, and after returning to North America in 1585 he broke off relations with the colonists. Following the failure of England’s settler Roanoke Colony, the Roanoke tribe itself effectively disappeared.
While Roanoke Island and Croatoan/Hatteras Island are located off the coast of North Carolina, the city of Roanoke, where my race was held, is in Roanoke Valley in Southwest Virginia. The city was founded in the nineteenth century in a region that was originally home to another Native American tribe, the Tutelo, who were similarly pushed out by European settlers. The bike portion of the race follows a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The parkway, which extends for nearly five hundred miles through the Appalachian Mountains of North Caroline and Virginia, is the longest linear park in the US, and one of the three-most visited parks in the US national park system. The Blue Ridge triathlon was first held in 2019, but in 2023 it was announced that the race would be temporarily paused, ostensibly to allow for repairs of the local stretch of the parkway. Hopefully the race will eventually resume, because it would be a shame if it were to disappear, and perhaps be forgotten.
How to cite: Rojas, Carlos. “Just Another Day: Carlos Rojas.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/carlos-rojas.
Carlos Rojas is professor of modern Chinese cultural studies at Duke University. He is the author, editor, and translator of many books, including Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China, New World Orderings: China and the Global South (with Lisa Rofel), and a dozen books by Yan Lianke.
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