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.
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| 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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
