Outer Banks Adventure

Our Outer Banks adventure started in Kitty Hawk, NC. OBX, which is what most people call the Outer Banks, is a 200 mile stretch of barrier islands off the coast of southeastern Virginia and North Carolina. This magnificent string of island pearls separates Currituck Sound, Albemarle Sound, and Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean which is rough and unpredictable on any day and the water temperature is 58-degree Fahrenheit in May.

Our journeys are never just vacations, they are adventures of discovery, finding amazing jewels of geography, places of wonder, nature, reflection, introspection, memorials, forts, and our country’s rich history. We seek memories that enrich our souls, eyes, and minds.

We experienced the Atlantic Ocean’s fury enough to build a healthy fear and respect for the watery giant. My daughter and I were covered in black silt by the rough waves and my husband was picked up by a riptide and slammed onto the ocean floor, suffering cuts, abrasions, and bruises on his forehead and right shoulder. When he emerged from the bottom, he was bleeding from his injuries but lucky to be alive.

The beaches are lovely, with endless dunes covered in grasses, colorful blanket flowers, and sand crabs scurrying across into their hiding holes, but the water is so rough that only experienced surfers dare to enter the waves. Hundreds of skate egg black casings washed up on the yellow sand each morning. The Atlantic Ocean is quite different from the placid Gulf of Mexico in Florida with its sugary crystal white sand and emerald, green waters.

Cape Hatteras National Seashore represents the area’s rich biodiversity. Trees, shrubland, and beach grasses keep the ecosystem alive. Birds, turtles, rabbits, and other creatures inhabit the islands. Shackleford is home to a herd of wild horses just like further north on Corolla Island. I am not sure if the horses are from the same group that washed or swam ashore from the Spanish galleon five hundred years ago. Wherever they came from, they thrive here on their own just like on Corolla Island. There are no homes on Shackelford but there are homes behind the dunes on Corolla. Humans and wild horses share adjacent spaces and the beach without any problems.

Roanoke Island is famous as the site of the early English settlement of the United States where the Roanoke Colony vanished in 1587, including the first English subject born on the island, Virginia Dare, which lent her name to the Dare County and many other geographical points of interest. I am sad to say that the infamous Roanoke Colony which was left behind for three years without supplies and protection before the governor returned, is still missing.

Roanoke Botanical Gardens

Roanoke Island displays a monument on Fort Raleigh, First Light of Freedom, marking the existence of the Freedmen’s Colony. After the Union forces occupied the island in 1862, Roanoke Island became a haven for black families from the region and a Freedmen’s Colony was established there during the war.

The Outer Banks area has a darker name, the Graveyard of the Atlantic, on account of the more than 600 shipwrecks, victims of shallow sandbars, dangerous storms, shoals, and war, who lost their cargo and crew in the rough seas.

A shoal is a ridge, a bank, or a bar made up of sand or other shifting material, close to the surface or above it, which can create a dangerous situation for navigation and thus sink many ships loaded with cargo. One such cargo was, 500 years ago, released onto the ocean and it drifted or swam to the shore. Since then, wild Spanish horses make Corolla Island’s beaches and marshes their home.

The turbulent ocean off Cape Hatteras sank many seafarers who risked these dangerous shoals to take advantage of the north- or south-flowing currents nearby. Hurricanes drove many ships aground. Other ships were lost in wars. The waters in this area were also called Torpedo Junction during WWII when German subs sank many Allied tankers and cargo ships. So many lives were claimed by the rough waters in this area!

The day we took the ferry from Cape Hatteras to Cape Lookout and Shackleford Islands, it was cloudy, chilly, and drizzly. We were the only passengers going to the islands, but several locals returned with us at dusk, on the last ferry ride of the day. We found the two islands peaceful; Shackleford looked deserted and lonely save for the wild horse herd; Cape Lookout Island had a tropical feel of a castaway island with a strange silence and utter loneliness sort of way even though there was evidence everywhere of human care and maintenance.

Kitty Hawk Memorial on the hill

The famous photographer immortalized on the spot 

Kitty Hawk was the place where the Wright brothers first took flight in their plane on December 17, 1903. A monument high on the hill commemorates their achievement and the actual location of the plane is adorned by a life-size flying machine and a statue of the witnesses and of John Daniels who happened to take the perfect picture of the lift-off. 

On the field of Kill Devil Hills, they mounted an engine on a 40-foot, 605-pound flyer with double tails and elevators. During the four tries, the brothers took turns at the controls. With Orville at the controls, on the first try, the flyer was aloft for 120 feet but, on the fourth try, with Wilbur at the controls, it traveled an impressive 852 feet in 59 seconds. What a remarkable feat to fly like the birds!

Cape Lookout Beach

The Outer Banks are made up of islands, shoals, and spits from Ocracoke Island northward. The beaches south of Cape Lookout are called the Southern Outer Banks. Our adventure ended at Cape Lookout on a cloudy day, with intermittent raindrops on the island and over the ocean.

Shackelford Island

These Outer Banks islands formed millions of years ago from sand dunes, after the melting of the Earth’s glaciers without any help from humans or their man-made global warming. They separate the Atlantic Ocean from the mainland North Carolina and protect the shores from raging storms and damaging waves.

The largest islands are Bodie Island (now a peninsula due to tropical storms and hurricanes which closed inlets that had formerly separated it from the Currituck banks), Pea Island, Hatteras Island, Ocracoke Island, Portsmouth Island, and the Core Banks. Over time, the number of islands and inlets changed due to closing or opening of inlets during violent storms, the gradual shifting of sands called beach evolution.

Mom and her philly

Corolla swamps where the wild horse herd lives

Majestic black stallion

Harem enjoying the beach on Corolla

A harem walking single file on the beach on Corolla

We did not start in Sandbridge in Virginia Beach where it is said that the line of the Outer Banks starts, we started instead in Kitty Hawk, NC. “Road access to the northern Outer Banks is cut off between Sandbridge and Corolla, North Carolina, with communities such as Carova Beach accessible only by four-wheel drive vehicles” like the Hummer which took us on Corolla Island safari to see the Spanish wild horses which roam the marshes and the beaches unafraid of humans, stallions tending to their harems.

The herd has about 126 wild horses which survive on their own without human intervention, feeding off the oat grasses. They are smaller than domesticated horses and arrived on this island from the Spanish galleons which wrecked on the shoals five hundred years ago. Occasionally stallions are found injured from fighting each other and, if necessary, the vets will intervene to save the injured animals, but they are never returned to their previous habitat after being cared for by humans.

People disagree as to where the Outer Banks end. Most agree that the Outer Banks include Cape Hatteras, Cape Lookout, and Cape Fear. Others limit it to Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout with coastal areas in four counties, Currituck, Dare, Hyde, and Carteret. “Some authors exclude Carteret County’s Bogue Banks; others exclude the county entirely.”

The Outer Banks are constantly shifting and suffering erosion by storms as there are no coral reefs to anchor them to the mainland. One example was Hatteras Island which was cut in half by Hurricane Isabel in 2003 by a 2,000 feet wide and 15 feet deep channel running through Hatteras Village. Sand dredging repaired the damage and, in 2011, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers repaired a similar disaster.

There are three main highways that enable visitors to reach the Outer Banks: NC 12, US 158, and US 64. NC 615 is the main route along Knotts Island in the extreme north where it connects only to Virginia by land.

Three state highway bridges connect the Outer Banks to the mainland:

-    1. The Wright Memorial Bridge, the oldest built in 1930 (US 158 between Point Harbor and Kitty Hawk)

-    2. William B. Umstead Bridge, second oldest built in 1957 (US 64 between Manns Harbor and the mainland and Manteo on Roanoke Island)

-    3. Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge, newest, finished in 2002 (US 64 Bypass between Manns Harbor and Roanoke Island between Manteo and Wanchese)

Roanoke Island and Nags Head are connected by US 64 and the Melvin R. Daniels Bridge. All three main highways of the Outer Banks (NC 12, US 158, and US 64) meet at Whalebone Junction.

Bald cypress in Duck

Our favorite tourist destination was the village of Duck with its quaint and diminutive feel of old-world charm. The Duck Town Park stretches for 11 acres of trails through maritime forest, willow swamp, open green spaces, sound side views, and access to the Duck Boardwalk. The six-mile-long Duck Trail traverses the entire length of town.

As we drove through village after village, ghost forests marked the landscape now and then, evidence of previously coastal forests lost to repeated exposure to saltwater due to hurricanes and drought. They had turned into a salt marsh habitat with dead tree trunks and stumps, an eerie sight found throughout Down East Carteret County and many low-lying NC shorelines.

Fort Macon is an example of the need for coastal defense. The region around Beaufort was very vulnerable to attacks and especially Beaufort Harbor, North Carolina’s only major deep-water ocean port. Blackbeard and many other pirates passed through Beaufort Inlet at will. Beaufort boat repair displayed ballast stones that were recovered from Queen Anne’s Revenge, Blackbeard’s most important ship which sank off the coast.

The war of 1812 showed the weaknesses of existing coastal defenses and the need for a fort in this area. Fort Macon was designed by Brig. Gen. Simon Bernard and built by the U.S. Corps of Engineers in 1826-1834 for a cost of $463,790 to guard Beaufort Inlet and Beaufort Harbor. According to the Archives, Fort Macon only had one ordnance sergeant acting as caretaker stationed by the Army at the fort.

Driving back to Virginia, we came upon the small waterfront town of Plymouth on the Roanoke. Founded in 1787, this tiny place that time forgot boasts a black bear festival every first Saturday in June and 4 bears per square mile. We drove for 45 minutes through unpaved roads with signs to not disturb the bears and all we saw was a couple of bear scats. The bears were asleep in the trees dotting the landscape between crop fields. It is true that Coastal NC has the world’s largest black bears, and the Albemarle/Pamlico Peninsula has the highest black bear density in the world, but we did not see any bears. Some beautiful specimens were taxidermized in the Bear-Ology Black Bear Museum in Plymouth. The glossy brochure welcomed us to Bear-olina. But the musty smell of the museum, however interesting, chased me away.

Cape Lookout Island Lighthouse

Our week-long remarkable adventure the length of beautiful NC barrier islands (OBX) came to an end, with regrets of places we missed like Portsmouth Village and Ocracoke. Ocracoke required a two-hour ferry ride one way, and the water was too rough to undertake such a long oceanic ride.

How Did We "Fundamentally Change" So Fast?

The gilded cage
Photo courtesy of Internet free stock

How did American culture fall prey to the lowest common denominator in our country?

When did we start admiring primitive cultures and considering them superior to our western civilization, giving in to their needy and outrageous demands no matter what happens to our own citizens?

How did the western world fall prey to Marxist-Leninists, to Islam, and to the rap music of the ghetto and prison culture?

How was Europe colonized by Islam in just a few decades of open-borders immigration? Why did its leaders eagerly embrace Islam instead of their own citizens, committing cultural and demographic suicide?

How did American education change so fundamentally that now communism and jihadi Islam are praised and admired?

How did our education decline so much that Boards of Education are composed of liberals and universities are populated by Fabian socialists and communists who have watered down the curriculum to the point where “studies of” have become one of the more popular majors in college even though jobs are not available in such fields?

How can sane educators teach Common Core indoctrination into collectivism and Islam in elementary, middle, and high schools, and still sleep at night, content that they have done their job to educate the youth of America into what it is to be a successful American citizen?

How in the world so many “useful idiots” socialist educators and administrators have made it into their positions of influence and power with superficial academic preparation?

I remember one outstanding history teacher, Judy M., who always posted gruesome pictures of the Holocaust in the hallways.  Her message to students was that we must never, ever forget.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower had ordered plenty of pictures taken of the liberated concentration camps because he realized that someday there will be individuals who will deny that the Holocaust ever existed.

In April 1945 Dwight Eisenhower visited the concentration camp near the town of Gotha and wrote about his experience:  “I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency… I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.” http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=136

And Eisenhower was right. A 2014 Common Core assignment, a mere seven decades later, asked students to write on the topic, “Did the Holocaust really happen or was it staged for political reasons?” The six million Jews, gypsies, priests, and other innocents who died in concentration camps must be rolling in their graves. http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/education-2/common-core-students-asked-to-write-essay-did-the-holocaust-really-happen-or-was-it-merely-a-political-scheme\

When Judy M. introduced the topic of the Great Depression each year, students had to forgo food all day except for thin soup so they could truly understand what it was like for people standing in soup lines. Students eating in the cafeteria their allotted bowl, surrounded by an abundance of food, found out that it was hard to concentrate and go about their daily studies with growling stomachs. There are not many teachers left like Judy M.

Carl B., invited victims of communism to his classes to give first-hand testimony of life under a totalitarian regime. He asked victims of the Holocaust with numbers tattooed on their arms to tell the story of what happened to them in WW II concentration camps and how few of their family members survived.  He had former Ambassadors, Governors, and decorated veterans come to his classes. He was so proud of our American heritage and of our selfless courage in the face of adversity!

The late Carl B. loved history so much, he dedicated his entire life to preserving an abandoned three-story ante-bellum home in which doves had made their nests, and brought it to its former glory, filling it with antiques, carpets, music, and paintings of the era. He invited groups into his home every year during Easter and Christmas to admire and enjoy a restored labor of love. A 400-pound statue from a New Orleans antiquary graced his lawn on a bluff, shaded by colorful azaleas in the spring.

Carl B. organized a Pilgrimage tour to other ante-bellum homes in the area and facilitated an evening visit of the local Civil War cemetery. His students chose a few tombs, researched the family history, and, wearing period costumes, re-enacted a candle light tour, describing the lives of those buried there.  People from around the country and around the world came to Columbus, Mississippi for the annual Pilgrimage and the Cemetery Candlelight Tour.

What happened to the American psyche? What intervened since 1979? Was it the establishment of the Department of Education by Jimmy Carter that began the slide of our education system?

Was it the college the education, a mill of socialist indoctrination, producing educators who were certified by the state to make beautiful lesson plans and eye-arresting bulletin boards, but lacked substantive content in their teaching areas? 

College of education majors attracted weaker students, who often lacked basic courses of math and science. The fluff degrees taught them the latest methodology of instruction, usually an untested fad created by a college professor trying to get tenure. Such professors were the role models to emulate around the country, the darlings of the conference circuit, lecturing other minions how to dumb down the education system. 

Was it the fact that we socially-promoted students, we accepted them into college based on racial quotas, minority groups, and other discriminatory systems, and not on merit? 

We now have college professors who are open vitriolic Marxists who staff or chair departments of studies of feminism, racial issues, social equality, social justice, environmental justice, and collectivism, the hallmarks of communism.

Were educators in a North Carolina high school Common Core approved English class teaching vocabulary or were they proselytizing for Islam?   Why would an American teacher be willing to drill their American students into such a subliminal Islamic lesson? Why would an American administrator approve such a curriculum and not call it into question? Why would parents not care what their children are taught? http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/12/north-carolina-public-high-school-proselytizing-for-islam-in-vocabulary-lessons

If teachers had used Christianity and Jesus to teach vocabulary, liberals would be up in arms, invoking the manufactured excuse that church and state have no place in a state-run school curriculum, and demanding that the offending teachers be terminated immediately.

Common Core has not been tested, it is the dream of Bill Gates who has invested over $200 million of his vast fortune into its implementation and it is now pushed by politicians on both sides of the aisle.   

It is sad how far and how quickly the Republic has “fundamentally changed.” Can we restore the spectacular education system that we had prior to the founding of the Department of Education that drains $72 billion annually from taxpayers? Can we reverse the insane Common Core math that is impractical and counterproductive in the real world? Can we reverse the Islamic and Marxist indoctrination of Common Core?

The liberal media is constantly harping and criticizing American values, often in front of foreign audiences, lying and inciting hatred and racial bigotry, enmity, protests, and violence. Manufactured reality takes center stage while real news are ignored. The main stream media is constantly dishonest, covering up for the Democrat Party and for corrupt politicians.

The “journalists” are talking heads who read teleprompters well, indoctrinating the entire country into falsehoods and lies, clouding the minds and judgment of impressionable youths with the agenda of the Marxist Democrats who are now running the country.

The globalist billionaires, with no allegiance to our country, have used their vast fortunes to turn it into a banana republic, infusing their money into progressive causes that are detrimental to the United States, supporting illegal immigration, amnesty, and open borders in their pursuit for cheap labor. Shamelessly, they are using their fortunes to make more money at the expense of future Americans who will eventually find themselves citizens of a global tin-utopia ruled by the United Nations.

The globalists and Hollywood elites with their decadent lifestyles are destroying the future of our children and of America. They are demolishing the middle class by demanding that everybody must be equally poor and equally miserable.

The welfare mentality and dependency created and promoted by politicians has produced generations of adults living on the financial plantation of the Democrat Party that needs their votes but doesn’t care about their education.

The Americans on the dole, who have given up their freedoms in order to live in gilded cages tarnished by fool’s gold, seem content to receive their welfare checks, the crumbs from the powerful elites who run the “changed” world.

Last, but not least, professional corrupt politicians of both stripes are also “fundamentally changing” the country by serving their own greedy interests in the quest for power and control.

Who will inherit the “fundamentally transformed” western civilization and what will they do with it?