Legends of the Sandbar

Fall comes, and something shifts. The breeze picks up, the temperature drops, barometers plummet. The sky takes on dark chiaroscuro tones, eating away at the warm light disappearing on the horizon. Beachgoers gather their plastic toys and scatter like crows. The wind whips the ocean into a froth of whitewater and salt spray. The sand rises up in a burning mist. The rain comes horizontal and heavy. 

Enter the dark side of the Outer Banks: a hundred-mile strip of dune sold to the overworked masses as a summer paradise of crystal waters and blazing sunsets—now, a brooding netherworld of cloud, wind, and airborne sand.

The storm will last an hour, a day, possibly three, maybe seven. Black cumulus will hang heavy in the sky, and fierce ocean wind will permeate everything with its damp chill. Most folks will be driven indoors, to hibernate until the next patch of good weather.

But here and there, up and down the shore, there are signs of life. 

In front of Avalon Pier, a procession of pickup trucks, SUVs, and beat-up sedans roll through the parking lot, each vehicle pulling up to a different spot along the bulkhead, parking to face the sea. They will stay a minute or two, maybe ten or twenty, maybe an hour—engines running, tailpipe smoke wisping in the damp wind, the drivers warm inside, watching, waiting. A few intrepid fishermen brave it out on the pier, the platform trembling with each wave that crashes through the spindly pilings, the spray shooting up through the planks and drenching their trousers. Clouds of sea foam roll along the sand. Breakers lash against houses exposed to the ocean’s fury from years of shoreline erosion.

Somewhere down the beach, a pack of gremmies is out surfing the slop, bobbing up and down in the chunky soup, whooping and hollering as the sea tosses them around. There’s little hope of getting a decent ride in conditions like this, but the kids don’t care. Red flags on the beach flutter furiously, reading “NO SWIMMING.” No one says anything about surfing.

A woman in a raincoat walks past, her hand clasping tightly to her hood, body slanted sideways into the wind, a dog on a leash. A few gulls gather around something that has washed up in the storm, leeching a whiff of decay. Other than that, the beach is empty. 

But inside houses all up and down the Outer Banks, surfers are listening to the mechanical voice coming from the NOAA weather radio, its uninflected drone creating a soundtrack for their anticipation: “Seas. 10 to 15 feet. Winds. East-northeast. At. 35 to 40 knots. Becoming southwest. At. Five to 10. By. Sunday.” Conversations in bars, surf shops, and post offices revolve around speculations, predictions, high hopes, and jaded doubts. Buoy readings, surf cams, tide charts, Surfline, Magic Seaweed, the Weather Channel. The obsessed are piecing the conflicting reports together like ingredients, knowing that however hard they try, they will never know what tomorrow holds. Because of the geographic and meteorological idiosyncrasies of this long, straight, sandy stretch of coast, many variables must align for the surf to reach the level of perfection that designates as world-class.

It does happen, but almost never when predicted. Days of anticipation over an approaching swell can end in total disappointment. Then, later, beautiful clean lines of peaky A-frames or spitting barrels appear despite all predictions to the contrary. Traveling surfers who come here for a week to experience the OBX mystique almost inevitably get skunked. There are no bays or coves to block the wind, no reefs or points to reliably focus the swells. You just never know. The only thing to do is to rise at dawn with coffee in your cup, a prayer in your heart, and go get wet. 

What makes surfing possible here at all are the small sandbars that collect around piers or form in random spots along the beach from the shifting ocean currents. After particularly violent storms, sandbars shift. Old breaks die, new breaks are born. Cell-phones vibrate and ping, as an information exchange among wave-watchers up and down the beach commences to make sense of the new landscape. Parking lots are scanned for vehicles belonging to the most prescient of seekers. On the morning of a cleanup, board-laden trucks will set out at dawn, and some may drive hours up and down the beach before the crew inside settle on a spot to paddle out.

A good sandbar on the Outer Banks can last a month, a season, a year, sometimes longer. Often a spot will die for a while and then re-emerge with a slightly different size and shape. There are certain spots that consistently attract good sandbars, and other spots that just magically appear one summer or fall in unexpected places. And then there is the wind, perhaps the variable most obsessed over by surfers here. 

When it all comes together, the window of opportunity can be tight. The surf starts off sloppy and confused, too big, too much whitewater. Slowly it becomes cleaner, more coherent. For an hour or two, maybe three, it’s perfect. Peaky A-frames coming in one after the other, enough for everybody, smooth as silk. But just as quick as it comes together, it begins to die. The tide comes in, the swells diminish in size and power, maybe the wind shifts once again and blows everything out. The next day, the ocean will be flat, or choppy, or just not quite good enough to bother. The crew will disappear until after the next storm.

*

This land was formed out of the surges and storms of a rising sea, the same rising sea that will one day swallow it back. 

When humans were taking their first steps onto the African plains, the area that is now the Outer Banks lay under hundreds of feet of water. As those ancestors multiplied, branched off, and went forth through the continents, the Earth began to cool, and a vast portion of the seas were sucked into the expanding polar ice caps. The oceans dropped hundreds of feet, and coastlines spread out into the sea.

The terrestrial space now occupied by the Outer Banks was then an unremarkable, yet-to-be imagined line on a wide coastal plain, covered intermittently by bog, forest, and grassland. Then, sea-currents shifted, wind patterns changed, the Earth warmed. Glaciers began to melt, and then to recede, and the waters rose. On the edges of the Americas, the low country surrendered to the melting oceans. Eventually, some 7,000 years ago, the climate stabilized. Sea-level rise slowed to an almost imperceptible creep. On the eastern shores, a new coastline was roughly sketched out. What had once been mighty river valleys were inundated with seawater, creating a vast estuary system of bays, deltas, and tidal inlets. 

As the ocean waves chewed into the headlands of these estuaries, longshore currents drove the sandy detritus up and down the shore, creating spits in wrinkles along the tideline. In major storms the ocean would push against and wash over these spits, slowly building them into dunes and cutting their backs off from the mainland. 

As the dunes became higher, longer, and more stable, they fused with one another, creating the long stretch of sand we now call the Outer Banks. The water on the west side of the Banks was lagooned, and the sediments from the inner waterways piled up inside the embayment. Today, in the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds, the average depth is no more than six feet, underneath a surface of water covering thousands of square miles. 

Similar—if less extreme—geological events occurred all up and down the coast, creating an archipelago of barrier islands stretching from New York to Mexico, but the Outer Banks grabbed hold and remained stuck out into the Atlantic, as if snagged on something underneath. 

If these islands were formed as part of a grand design, it was certainly not for human habitation. Geographers call them barrier islands to connote a purpose, and that purpose is generally considered to be to buffer the mainland from the ravages of the sea. They have always been difficult places to live. Even the inhabitants of the legendary Lost Colony originally intended to build their New World in the friendlier waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and would have done so were it not for the whims of a recalcitrant sea captain eager to get back to civilization. While the waters teem with the bounty of ocean and marsh, they are also extremely dangerous. Shoaling channels and heavy seas have claimed more than enough lives for the region to earn the title of Graveyard of the Atlantic.  

Since the area was first mapped by explorers, 26 inlets have existed on the Outer Banks, usually pierced open in a matter of hours by violent hurricanes, and then closed up over decades by the slow southwestern migration of sand and seed. The new millennium alone has already seen two such inlets formed, impressing upon those of us who live here the dramatic mechanics of barrier island change. 

Sometime in the late 19th century, the Outer Banks’ greatest modern resource—the two-hundred-mile beach that spans its eastern flank—was first tapped by planter-aristocrats seeking to escape the malarial summers of the inland South. Slowly, over the course of a century and a half, the vacation industry grew, settlement and construction increased exponentially, and grass and trees were planted to make the place more hospitable. Many aspects of the Outer Banks that we consider to be endemic—large swaths of the maritime forest, the double-dune system that runs from Carova to Ocracoke, the magnificent Silver Lake—were engineered, with both private and federal funds, over the better part of the 20th century. 

In the 1960s, close on the heels of the California surf revolution, pioneers like Jim Bunch, Bruce Shepherd, and Bob Holland cast a new eye on the banks and began to exploit what has become, in the 21st century, perhaps the Outer Banks’ most mythical resource: waves. 

In the brief span of time from then to now occurred all the surf-yarns to be told here, all the tales of epic winter swells and hurricanes with names like Isabel, Irene, Olga, Katia, Sandy, and Hermine. Surf culture on the Outer Banks is hardly half a century old, and for most of that time it has remained on the periphery of the vacation industry, its images perfunctorily slapped on the cover of tourist magazines, its mom-and-pop shops squeezing a profit out of sales of flip-flops, t-shirts, and name-brand hoodies in order to keep the racks stocked with boards, leashes, and wetsuits for the locals.

Over the years the Outer Banks has become a place most surfers have heard of, and increasingly seen photographs of, but which few outside a tight-knit band of East Coast wavehunters have actually surfed. Among those few, however, giants have paddled. In the 1980s, a 12-year-old Kelly Slater came up from Florida to cut his teeth on heavy waves in the shadow of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. In the 1990s our first native superstars, Noah Snyder and Jesse Hines, burst onto the national scene, and put the Outer Banks on the map. And today, Buxton’s Brett Barley is redefining what it means to be a surf-hero, using the latest technology to document solo sessions at hidden breaks along the Hatteras coast and broadcast the evidence worldwide through online surf media.

But it all comes with a price. Erosion. Sea-level rise. Climate change. These are fighting words in the political arena, but on these beaches it’s just a part of life. The long view of geology and archaeology makes two things very clear: the Earth is constantly changing, and humans have always wrought massive change upon the environment, from deforestation to species annihilation to agriculture to air pollution. 

Yes, absolutely, our presence affects geography and climate in innumerable ways. But without us, the climate would still be changing, and whatever our fate in the millennia to come, the Earth will continue to change. It has always happened, and will continue to happen, despite our heroic efforts to stem the tide. The oceans will continue to rise, until other geological events reverse the process, and after they will fall again. But you and I will be long gone before then.

*

On a diamond-speckled Outer Banks morning in January 2008, I stepped into a pair of rubber chest waders, and walked into the ocean clutching a $2,000 camera. 

I didn’t mean to go far. I just wanted to get closer. I wanted to explore, with this light-gathering machine, the chaos of breaking whitewater, the fractal patterns of mist blowing off the lip of a barrel, the marbled-meat formations of sea foam being sucked back into yet another explosion of swell onto shore. Moments I’d witnessed while surfing, swimming, or just standing at the water’s edge—moments come and gone and come and gone with no one to bear witness to them but myself and a few friends. I wanted photographs that could survive the instantaneous. I told myself, Just a few feet into the ocean. That’s all.

Barry Price, former professional surfer, actor.

Kim Diggs, professional surfer.

Brett Barley, professional surfer.

Bryan Harvey, filmmaker for Discovery and National Geographic.

Rascoe Hunt, shaper and glasser at Gail Force Glassing.

Daniel Pullen, surf photographer, with dog, Walter.

David Rohde, glasser for Wave Riding Vehicles.

Jesse Fernandez, shaper for Wave Riding Vehicles.

Marcus Pratt, cook at the Bonzer Shack.

Lynn Shell, owner of Outer Banks Boarding Co.

Delbert Melton, longtime local.

Mary Schmader, traveler.

It was a small step, one of myriad that I’ve taken in the course of this endeavor. The idea—to render this world of dune and tubes, of wind and rippers, to freeze-frame the exploits of the surfers who inhabit this strip of sand dangling at the edge of the Atlantic Continental Shelf—had been with me for years, spawned from countless late afternoons out in the water with a few friends, watching the low sun wrap around their silhouettes or light their faces up against a stormy horizon, seeing them launch their fiberglass rockets into the sky.

The distance from my house to the ocean is less than a quarter of a mile. From there the road goes north/south, and it is along this road, NC Highway 12, that I traveled, following the surf, following the crew, riding shotgun or solo, sniffing out pictures season by season. Hardly an epic journey, but a journey all the same—of flooded cameras, salty and sandy red eyes, summer mornings that come too early, and twilight evenings that never seem to last long enough. A journey of ice cream headaches, near-misses and direct hits, days happily wasted chasing light and motion, afternoons where a phone call or a brief look at the ocean could give me cause to drop all business, no matter how pressing, in pursuit of what I can always rationalize as art.

I’ve lived on the Outer Banks for more than 15 years. From my birthplace in Norfolk, Virginia, it’s less than a two-hour drive, but it took me tens of thousands of miles and half a lifetime of wandering to arrive here. I still hesitate to call it home. Like many of the local residents, I have a hard time staying in one place for long. I’ve left again and again, to pursue other projects, to take on assignments, or just to get the hell out of this godforsaken place. But as far as I range, and as many times as I’ve taken the measure of some far-off locale and thought, I could live here, I have always wended my way back to these shores. 

Despite my inner protests about life here—and believe me, there are many—this place has a way of holding on loosely, of offering small gifts that become difficult to live without once you’ve had them. Like clean air. Salt water. Spectral maritime light. The embrace of a small, tight-knit, unpretentious community. And perhaps the greatest gift of all—perspective. 

We are lucky to live here. We all know that. But like the Eastern surf itself, the very ground on which we have built our homes is fickle. Every major storm takes a house or two with it. Inlets have been blown open and closed shut. Entire towns have been covered in sand. Arguments flare about what to do when a hurricane rips up the road or a beach gets eroded. You can’t fight Mother Nature, some say. To which others reply, without our beach, we are nothing, and we must do all we can to protect and maintain it. The debate will continue to rage until we are all washed away.

Life here is precarious. We all accept that as the price we pay. Sooner or later, a Cat Five will likely barrel in and blow this little strip of sand to smithereens. We’ve had warnings. We joke about it, resign ourselves to it, construct possible scenarios for other lives in other places should we ever lose our home here. Given sufficient warning, most of us will pack whatever we can into our trucks and head for the mainland. But some of us, like the sea captains of yore, will just let the storm wash over us and take us out to sea. 

In any case, the surf will continue to come. From summer southwests to autumn tropicals to winter storms now being named things like Athena and Nimo, we’ll get waves. Cottages will crumble, the road will be breached, the sand will migrate. But we’ll still get waves. If sea level rise continues as predicted, these islands will once again be submerged in a few hundred years. But the waves will continue to come. Nothing will stop the movement of the ocean. Our time on this sandbar, and its time on Earth, are but brief sentences in the annals of epochs. The beginning, the middle, and the end, all slipping into one another, like the churning shoreline.