We have really enjoyed lingering along the estuaries and wandering through the old coastal towns of North Carolina. There is a similarity between coast lovers in New England and here. Fish and boats occupy a great many people, and there is a pride of place in many towns that feels familiar.
The number of old and beautiful houses along the waterfront and parallel streets of Beaufort rival those in Bath, Camden and Freeport, Maine. 
Every other house has a plaque next to the front door identifying the original owners, their dates and stories. Across the lively waterfront is Carrot Island and a Rachel Carson nature reserve, inhabited only by birds and wild horses. We saw only one grazing along the edge of the beach as we sat on a sunny restaurant deck eating lunch and watching groups of pelicans float by over our heads. To see more, we took a little flat-bottomed skiff ferry out to Shackleford Banks at the mouth of Beaufort Inlet, close to the spot where Blackbeard’s sunken ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, is being excavated from the sand bank which has covered her for almost 300 years. (Her story, and many of the artifacts already cleaned and identified are on display in Beaufort’s fine small Marine Museum.) The Bank, a mile wide and nine miles long, is home to a herd of one hundred and forty really wild horses. None of this grazing on people’s lawns. We didn’t see any galloping on the beach, however. The three we did see were too busy cropping breakfast from amongst the sand dunes and under scrub pines to expend energy running with the wind, but it was easy to imagine what a sight it must be when they do gallop over the deserted beach. 
<
Lani would have been pleased to hear our ferryman tell the story of Rachel Carson’s work to make people realize that the DDT runoff from upland farms had killed the fish and birds along the coast, and then praise the work that had been done to clean up the rivers that were carrying poisons to the estuaries. He remembered how exciting it was to see the brown pelican population come back to Beaufort, and how grateful the locals were to Carson. Thrilling, indeed.
The Bogue Banks, heavily built up along the Crystal Coast west and south of Morehead City (named for the town’s founder, John Motley Morehead!), were less of a thrill. We made a short visit to the famed fishing pier on Bogue Banks 
which was surrounded by at least a hundred parked trailers. The people fishing off the pier looked happy, but what an eyesore on the land side of the lovely beach.
Cape Lookout National Seashore begins on the south side of Ocracoke Inlet and runs for 56 miles south to the Shackleford Banks. It no longer has any permanent settlements but is accessible for camping and hiking, and yes, including ferries to take your truck over there to drive on the beaches. 
So far the only beach we’ve found in NC where you cannot drive on the the beach is Wrightsville Beach, a hugely over-developed strand of beach off Wilmington.
To get from Beaufort to Wilmington, you have to drive inland in order to get around Camp Lejeune, and it’s a long detour as Lejeune is enormous and includes a big estuary. As you can imagine, the shopping centers and strips around it feature heavily Hummers and similar vehicles, and other services attuned to the population of Lejeune. The best one we saw, from the road, was Dirty Deeds: Bar and Laundromat.
Driving along the highway that borders the camp, especially close to the main gate, you see lots of heartfelt welcome home signs for servicemen returning from wherever their duty has taken them.
We detoured through Wrightsville Beach 
in honor of Katie’s college classmate Martha, had lunch in a local fish hangout, and went on into Wilmington with no undue regret – either for the horribly built-up beachfront or for Old Tom’s family attachments to the place. Imagine having to drive down from Cambridge, MA to go to that beach when you could drive Down East to Maine…
Post a Comment