In Eastern North Carolina, patience is ebbing along with the floodwaters. It has been 12 days since Hurricane Floyd started dumping water on the state's coastal plain. Rivers that nourish the agricultural heartland are seeping back toward their banks.
More roads are passable and trucks bearing food, water and government officials rumble in.
The Tar and Neuse rivers will hold parts of Pitt, Edgecombe, Wayne and Lenoir counties in the grip of their fetid waters until receding later this week. In Tarboro, Robert Moody knows it will take time for the good people he's seen coming into town to resurrect the homes and the spirit buried under mud and receding water. But Sunday was Moody's 10th day with only a six-foot cot to call his own in the Tarboro High School gym. He has no idea where he will be 10 days from now. His double-wide mobile home is in Princeville, the town everyone tells him is all but gone, wiped away by the wrath of Floyd.