NEW YORK -- Every August my wife Nancy and I leave New York to go south to spend two weeks at a friend's summer house at Sunset Beach, North Carolina. Driving leisurely, mainly so we can ride ferries on Delaware Bay and on Pamlico Sound, we stop for two nights on the way, usually lodging in Onley, Virginia, and Beaufort, North Carolina.
In Onley a few years back, I saw in the parking lot of a modest strip mall something I had not seen before: groups of Hispanics with pickup trucks and vans. Straddling Route 13 at about the midpoint of the Virginia end of the Delaware Peninsula, Onley looks like a typical pit stop -- a congregation of buildings slapped together to service highway users like us. The buildings in fact form a new part of a fairly old town, as I found out by taking a morning walk from our motel, as I do every time we stop there.
The town is not dying. The surprisingly detailed Internet bulletin on it says its population increased between 2000 and 2002, though by just one person: from 496 to 497. In the last few years, indeed, I saw one abandoned house slowly renovated, one overgrown garden gradually cleared.