NOTE: This is an essay that I just put the final touches on here in Morocco, but that I started on a rainy fall night in my little house on Hatteras Island.
26th September, 2009
Another day has flown by and I am beginning to realize that another season is slipping away like sand through my fingers. It seems like just a little while since I sat on the Terlingua porch and watched rain clouds brooding over the Chisos, wondering at the closing of another chapter and the beginning of one entirely foreign to me.
A brief eternity later, I sit at my kitchen table having the same discussion with myself. How has six months flown by so fast? It is late at night, or perhaps early in the morning, but I cannot sleep. The house, which I share with two other rangers, is silent. The stillness is unbroken, save for the drip of rain from the eaves. I am still unused to the rain, especially after my time in South Texas. Rain here is to be expected often, at least once a week, and either comes gently in the night or violently during a thunderstorm. I have been jolted awake many times by the raging cacophony of these southern storms; the thunder is deafening and the lightning so frequent that at times there is more light than darkness.
Tiny green tree frogs make their away across our window glass, catching mosquitoes and other insects. They hide when daylight comes with nothing to mark their presence but their tiny leavings, miniscule pellets of glistening wings. This habit of hiding, however, is somewhat problematic as they are often where you least expect them; falling on you when you open a door or wedged in between dishes in the drying rack. There was one afternoon, not so long ago, that one fell from the Oil House awning onto my ranger hat and proceeded to ride around up there and greet visitors with me for the next several hours.
After these six months here—three weeks left—I have learned so much about the ocean and the sound, really the marine culture in general. I can cast a line past churning breakers and pull in my dinner, I can throw a cast-net into the glassy waters of the sound and haul in a wealth of little crabs and minnows. I have learned how to harvest, cull, steam, shuck, fry, and most importantly eat Oysters. I can catch, steam, and crack blue crabs; so many things that I could never have learned in my mountains, all possible from living on the edge of the sea.
I have always had a deep respect for the Ocean, but never the sense of wonder and awe with which I regard it now. So much is happening out there beyond the breakers, things that I cannot begin to explain; it is like living in a walled city on the fringe of a dark forest. The boundaries are clearly defined but no one can guess at what is happening in the forest save for what can be gleaned from by the cries of unseen creatures, and the glimpse of shapes whispering between the trees.
The ocean is so alive; every drop contains a plethora of tiny creatures and in the dark of night the very waves glow with bioluminescence. It has become normal to see dolphins in the mornings, and see tiny Sea Turtle hatchlings motor their way toward the moonlit surf at night, leaving neat and orderly tracks in the hard sand like stitches on a baseball.
After growing up in the protective embrace of the Rocky Mountains, living on such a small and narrow island has been difficult at best; we are 30 miles from the mainland and there have certainly been times when this is quite acutely felt. This is not to say that I have been at all bored this summer, not at all, it is just so different from that to which I am accustomed.
Existence here is simple, rather than being defined by the overwhelming press of wild country on all sides, as most of my previous homes have been, Hatteras Island is defined by the water and the people who live here seem to spend half their lives in it, on it, and surrounded by it. Instead of having a multitude of things to do at my disposal here, it is rather a specific repertoire of
activities in whose regularity I have begun to take comfort.
Life here moves slowly and the island seems to have a strong, quiet pulse that matches the rhythmic boom of the breakers off the Cape. The shimmering golden evenings of fall have replaced the miasma of heat and humidity that defined the summer months. Now the dome of the sky has lifted from the island and gazing out onto the ocean from the top of the lighthouse is like looking at an infinite sheet of glass. The heat fueled storms that marched across the sound like regimented troops nearly every day of July and August, have become less and less frequent. Most afternoons a clear and calm and I have grown to love spending hours up to my waist in the mirrored waters of the Sound, throwing out my cast-net for whatever creatures lurk in the weeds. Sometimes I go out to the beach with my friends and coworkers and we sit on our coolers sipping beers and watching the lines from our surf-fishing rods move in the swell, ready to jump up if there is a strike.
On Tuesday mornings I teach surf-fishing to a group of 15 tourists. I am decked out in my usual ranger uniform with the addition of shorts and Chaco sandals (they are green so they match). Sometimes I go barefoot; to me, nothing defines work as a seashore ranger more than the joy of going barefoot in uniform. Now that fall is here, the mornings are cooler and the fish are livelier; more often than not, all 15 people will catch at least one fish. It is a beautiful thing to see a suburban mother of four jumping up and down and squealing like a schoolgirl; so excited is she by the 6-inch Sea Mullet that she just reeled in. On another occasion, my friend and fellow ranger, Owen had to fly solo for a short time, while I dug my heels in and fought with a skate that kept jumping up, glistening from the breakers. It eventually broke the line, but it was fun while it lasted.
My favorite place that I have discovered on the Outer Banks is just south of where I live near Buxton. It is Ocracoke Island, and is the accessible only by ferry; 45 minutes from Hatteras Island, 3 hours from the Mainland. A majority of the island is Park land and there are beautiful expanses of Class III “Hammocks” which are depressions in the island’s surface that sustain old and vibrant forests of Southern Pines and Live Oaks. The village of Ocracoke wraps around Silver Lake Harbor and now that fall is here, the hordes of tourists have dwindled and the village has grown quiet.
On many occasions when I visited Ocracoke, I pulled my truck onto the ferry and climbed up the stairs to the observation deck where I watched the Laughing Gulls playing in the spray or riding the slipstream of the ferry itself. On rainy days I would it inside the ferry lounge and read a book while waiting for the ferry dock on Ocracoke to come into view. The islands were never out of sight, and the ferry channel was located on the sound-side, but there was always a moment, half-way through the voyage where the ferry would rock suddenly and you could look eastward through the inlet where the waves streamed through.
One cool evening in recent weeks a couple of friends and I caught the ferry after a long day at the lighthouse and drove to the village as the sunset over the sound and lightning crackled from a few itinerant storm cells near the mainland. My friend pulled his car into the oyster-shell cobbled drive of the “Deepwater Theater” and we got out, filtering into the tiny, low-ceilinged auditorium and taking our seats. For the next couple of hours we were treated to a unique bluegrass concert from the group “Molasses Creek” whose music was written on and about the island. It was a beautiful concert and seems an appropriate send-off for the season. As we rode back on the midnight ferry, I stood silently on the bow, watching the beam of the searchlight play over the waves, looking for unforeseen hazards. The few gulls that accompanied us were asleep, roosting high on the tower, their heads tucked beneath a wing.
My season began here on Ocracoke as well. My first view of the Outerbanks was the steady white beam of the Ocracoke Light Station materializing from the misty spring evening and signaling that our 3 hour ferry ride was finally over. I stayed that night in a tiny room on the topmost story of “Blackbeard’s Lodge” and got my first glimpse of the island from the high balcony outside my room. I spent the next day riding my bike around the village streets most paved, some cobbled in pale oystershell. The canopy of Live Oaks that spreads over the narrow avenues gives everything a greenish cast and even at midday the tiny clapboard houses seem pale and mysterious, their siding twined with English ivy and greenbriar.
There is a nature trail there,leading out to a small, sand point near Teach’s Hole, the shallow inlet where the infamous pirate “Blackbeard” met his end after being wounded over 20 times and finally beheaded. It is little known and poorly marked. Over the many times that I have walked it, I have never run into another human being. It winds through the green oak-shadows, past a little cemetery, and finally emerges on this wild stretch of beach out of sight of any man-made edifices aside from the jetty extending from the mouth of Silver Lake. I would sit on a log there and dig my bare toes into the wet sound as the small, soundside waves lapped the shore. It is beautiful place to watch the sunset over the sound and to watch the boats come in to the harbor for the night.
The trailhead is located on a maze of backroads near the small, white Ocracoke lighthouse. The houses are set back from the road some; most have large, shady trees, and inviting screened-in porches. I can see the appeal of these places, traffic even in the high season is hardly a car an hour, and even the windy days are reduced to a gentle sigh in the upper boughs of the oaks. Life back here seems to move at the gentle pace that I identify with the South; it goes as fast, or as slow, as you want it to.
On the edge of the harbor, bordering the maze of piers, private docks, and the bristling field of masts and rigging, there is a small bar shaped like a boat. It only has a few stools along its prow and a few tables sitting haphazardly around it. It is a good place; in the summers it gets crazy, but in the shoulder seasons (a ranger’s favorite time of year) it is only locals and seasonals. Talk revolves around fishing, indeed conversation often stops as a sunburned and barefoot local steps off of their boat and throws a massive Marlin that they caught out on the Gulf-Stream down onto a nearby cleaning table. Conversation resumes and often turns to similar fish that the speaker had caught another time. “It was this big…”. I but out when the conversation turns to fishing, I don’t know too much about it once you get outside a frigid Colorado trout stream. Even what I teach tourists every week, I had to be trained in. Oh well, if there is anything that rangers are good at, it is faking expertise. I could dazzle you with my lighthouse “expertise”!
Another chapter of this tale took place off of the island, in the labyrinthine backroads of the Deep South, where I drove so many weekends to reconnect and visit a family I barely knew after a life spent in the Colorado mountains. I spent days wandering the North Georgia mountains with my cousin, and best childhood friend of my grandmother, Jane. I felt the cool breeze on the top of Bald Mountain and rode slowly through the streets of Helen, GA, in a horse drawn carriage pulled by a gigantic Belgian horse. I spent evenings on the bayou in South Alabama and sat on the dock with my feet in the water watching shrimp investigate my toes and then vanish, startled into the dark, brackish water. I’ll be able to taste and smell the sweet tea and hush puppies for months to come, and hear the lilting accents of my family and friends that I now know better than ever.
With Africa looming on the horizon in a few short months, I am glad I have been able to reconnect with these people from my past. I have rediscovered an important part of my roots and have glimpsed the people and culture that I came from. I won’t forget the nights motoring around on Mobile bay in my friend Michael’s small boat, casting for fish underneath the pier lights. Nor will I forget the evenings spent sitting in the cool forests of Appalachia, sitting on my tailgate and plucking old southern hymns on my little mandolin while fireflies wink in and out like green stars among the trees. I feel that now I can leave my country in Peace, that many loose ends have been tied off, or at least laid gently down, ready to be picked up when I return.
My season ends soon, less than a month away, and I realize that I will miss this place. I look at the small green frogs on the window and listen to rain pattering down on the roof and try to grasp the memories and experiences that I have acquired here. So many things foreign to me when I came here have become commonplace: the feel of sand under my bare feet inside my house, the feeling of salt spray sticking to my skin, the ordered chaos of breakers off the point, and the blue lightning of bioluminescence crackling from my footsteps in the wet sand. I remember cool spring days, and warm summer nights; lightning striking the water 10 miles off shore and the thousand shades of blue the ocean can turn in a single day. I have learned to identify shells and seabirds, I have learned the integral part that barrier islands play in the ecology of our coastlines; I have even learned to identify Sea Turtles by their track patterns and have enjoyed the thrill of being eyeball to eyeball with a baby Loggerhead no bigger than my palm, its tiny flippers spinning like a whirligig.
As the memories run together, I see brilliant beam of the lighthouse sweep the dark waters of a moonlit sea and feel the heavy wind on my face. I hear the thunder growl as the rain drips down from the 150 year old eaves of the Keeper’s Quarters front porch. I hear the wind hum through the southern pines that extend away into the distance, as alike and orderly as blades of grass. What will stand out in my mind as the years go by from here? What will I carry with me as I live out my life in the mountains and deserts of the Southwest, where I belong? Will it be the shining days, the peaceful nights? Maybe the brilliant light shows of the mornings on the sea and the evenings on the sound? All those will stay with me I am sure, but I think the main thing that I will take from Cape Hatteras, as I leave here and mentally file it away next to my other parks and other places I have loved, is this: The pace of life and delicate existence of a people surrounded by the sea. How the presence of the sea affects all aspects of life here, for better and for worse. Like the coming of winter to the San Juan Mountains, the sea is something as indefatigable as fate and everything here hinges upon it.
I know that I will likely never get a chance to work here again, and I know that I may never even get a chance to go back to visit. But I also know, that in the years to come, as I lay my head down beneath the wheeling stars on a dark and distant mesa, I will close my eyes and fall asleep to the sweet sound of waves.
-Charlie Kolb
Cape Hatteras NS, North Carolina
