Life on an Island - Part 3

Many people ask us, “Where do you have to go to get the things you need?  You can’t possibly have everything you need to get by on the island without going to a city to shop.”

Here are the things we really need in the Village of Ocracoke in order to live here all the time:

The Trash Dump.  We do not have trash pickup here or recycling pickup either.  So, we all go to the dump almost every day and take all  of our stuff with us.  You can take:  household garbage, recycling, tree limbs and yard trash, electronics, building debris, anything else you need to get rid of.  There is one place where we put things that we want to get rid of but someone else may want.  When we come back the next day what we have left there is always gone…sometimes it is even claimed while we are in the process of unloading it.  It is a great thing to be able to get rid of refuse any day of the week.  The dump is less than a half-mile from our house.

Getting Ready to Unload Our Trash

The Post Office.  We do not have home mail delivery on the island.  Everyone has a Post Office box and we go each afternoon to get our mail and catch up on all the news around the village.  The mail truck  comes over on the Hatteras Ferry each day and gets over here between eleven and noon.  The mail is all put up by the time the Post Office reopens after lunch at 3:00 pm.  Celeste, Melissa, and Matt take care of all of us. We love going to the Post Office and would miss out on an important community time if we got mail at home rather than gathering it there. The Post Office is beside the dump and makes it easy to go to both on the same trip.

Golf Carts and Bikes at the Post Office

The Variety Store.  The Ocracoke Variety Store building houses the Variety Store, the Hardware Store and the ABC Store.  The Variety Store has everything we need in the way of groceries and various sundries.  The Hardware Store has everything from paint to nails and can even loan you a pipe crimper if you need to do  plumbing repair.  We all  have an account at the Variety/Hardware Store, so everything just goes on your bill there and you pay once each month.  Makes shopping very easy! The Variety Store is located about 1/3 mile from our house on the way to the Post Office.

The Variety Store Has EVERYTHING We Need

Eduardo’s Taco Stand.  Even though we have about fifteen very fine local restaurants on the island, a favorite stop for everyone is Eduardo’s Taco Stand.  Eduardo Chavez cooks with the love of his heart and the memories of his ancestors as he feeds us year round from his location at the end of the Variety Store parking lot.  If you are going to stop at Eduardo’s, there will likely be a long line.  He is open each day for breakfast and lunch (8:00-3:00) and again for dinner (5:00-8:00).

Eduardo's is the Best

The Bank.   First National Bank of Pennsylvania is now the owner of our island bank.  It has been here for years and the name has changed several times through mergers and acquisitions.  We can depend on Judy, Laura, Sandy, Donna, and Karmen, who know us all and take care of us. The Bank is about 500 yards away at the end of our street.

Yes ... It's Our Favorite Bank

Jimmy’s Garage.   Jamie Jackson and his mama, Linda, can get you fixed or maintained and on the way again no matter what you are driving and no matter what is wrong with your car.  Jamie’s dad, Jimmy, started the garage and Jamie grew up in it.  Now Jimmy has retired and Jamie runs the show.  They are only a couple of hundred of yards away on our very street.

Anything else we need comes over by UPS each day from Amazon or other sources of choice.  If we are not home, UPS puts things in a safe place on the screened porch so we don’t have to worry about rain damage.

Even though we do travel a lot on the storytelling circuit, it would easily be possible to live here for years without ever leaving the island.  Yes, we do also have a wonderful physician, Dr. Erin Baker.  So, what else could you need?  Come and rent a house for a  while and give it a try!

Living on an Island - Part II

In 1938 Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, published the following statement:

“When we look  up and down the ocean fronts of America, we find that everywhere they are passing behind the fences of private ownership.  The people can no longer get to the ocean.  When we have reached the point that a nation of 125 million people cannot set foot upon the thousands of miles of beaches that border the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, except by the permission of those who monopolize the ocean front, then I say it is the prerogative and the duty of the Federal and State Governments to step in and acquire, not a swimming beach here and there, but solid blocks of ocean front hundreds of miles in length.  Call this ocean front a national park or a national seashore, or a state park or anything you please--I say that the people have a right to a fair share of it.”

The Secretary’s statement was in response to the 1937 establishment of the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, the first National Seashore in America’s National Park System.

In order to accommodate hunting interests, in 1940 the name was changed to the Cape Hatteras National Seashore Recreation Area and, until 1952, was passively managed by the National Park Service.

By this time the post-war increase in travel and tourism along with  growing concerns about severe erosion of the Outer Banks themselves led to a greatly increased interest in bringing the nominal National Seashore more into the mainstream of National Park organization.

In order to purchase the desired land total and to provide for infrastructure needs, the State of North Carolina (under the proactive leadership of Governor Kerr Scott) was joined by the philanthropic interests of Paul Mellon, heir of Andrew Mellon of the Mellon Bank and Pittsburgh Steel fortunes.

North Carolina put up $618,000 and Mellon more than matched it with $700,000 and the official establishment of Cape Hatteras National Seashore as we know it today happened on January 12, 1953.

As residents of Ocracoke, Trish and I live on the southernmost island tip of the National Seashore.

Ocracoke Island is made up of approximately 2,800 acres of land, about 2,100 of which is National Seashore land.  The island is about sixteen miles long lying between the Atlantic Ocean and the Pamlico Sound and marked by Hatteras Inlet on the north and Ocracoke Inlet on the south ends.

The island is narrow for most of its northeast to southwest length, but it bulges near the south end and that is where Ocracoke Village lies on the sound side of the island.  The location of the village has slowly migrated over nearly a 300 year time period to be at the safest spot on the island in time of storms and flooding.

All of the nearly sixteen miles of beach is National Seashore property.  There is no building anywhere on the beach, a fact that adds protection to the island during severe storms as the village itself is nearly a mile from the ocean front.  The front row of dunes can wash away during a storm and then come back in the next season.  If there were ocean front houses there, they would all be gone in such a storm.

The beach itself was rated this year by Dr. Stephen Leatherman (known as “Dr. Beach”) as the number two beach in America.  Number one this year was Kailua Beach Park in Hawaii.  In 2007 Ocracoke was number one and after being ranked first that year, that honor cannot be repeated for a number of years. Most years since then we have been either two or three.

America's Number 2 Beach For 2019

One section of the beach is lifeguard protected; it is the nearest to the village itself.  The rest of the sixteen miles is often so empty of people that you can find your own private stop with no one visible in any direction even on the busiest of summer days.

If you come here and plan to go in the water, our strong advice is to go to the Lifeguard Beach as rip currents are both invisible and notorious.  If you want to simply walk, read, sun, or escape from the world, then you might want to find your own private spot farther from the village.

Walkway To The Lifeguard Beach

I wish that Harold Ickes could come here today and see that, due to his early concern, Cape Hatteras National Seashore is one of America’s treasured open-to-everyone public seashore-beaches.

Our Beach On A Crowded Summer Day

Living on an Island - Part One

My wife, Trish, and I live on Ocracoke Island.  Ocracoke is the most remote inhabited island at the southern end of the North Carolina Outer Banks. I have lived here nearly thirty years and Trish joined me here when we got married in February of this year.

The first thing you need to know about living on Ocracoke is that it is only accessible on land by ferry.  You could get here by boat or you could fly in to our 3,000 foot airstrip, but, for most people, coming by ferry is the normal way to get here.

There was no ferry to the island at all until the 1950’s and then the service was very sparse as were the roads on the island.  Today there are three ferry routes, and, new this summer, a passenger-only ferry that comes over from Hatteras Island.

The Motor Vessel Silver  Lake, a Pamlico Sound Ferry

We almost always use the Swan Quarter Ferry.  It crosses the Pamlico Sound between Ocracoke and Swan Quarter (population 324, the County Seat of Hyde County) four times each day in the summer and three times each day from the end of September to mid-May.  The ferry crossing is on large vessels that hold about fifty cars each and the trip takes a little bit under three hours.  The first ferry to leave Ocracoke is at 7:00 am and the latest return from Swan Quarter is at 4:30 pm.  From Swan Quarter the driving time to Raleigh is about three hours.  You have to plan well, especially for the return trip, or you will  be stuck until the next day.

There is also a Pamlico Sound ferry that travels between Ocracoke and Cedar Island.  Cedar Island is about forty miles from Morehead City and this ferry works if you are  traveling on down the coast of North Carolina. It is a slower route, however, to most of mainland North Carolina.  The Cedar Island Ferry crossing is about two hours and fifteen-minutes.

The third way to get on and off the island is by Hatteras.  The Hatteras ferries are much smaller than the large Sound ferries, but…they run from five in the morning until midnight and run every hour in the winter and more often than that in the summer when traffic is heavy.  The Hatteras advantage is that you have many more (and later in the day) departures, but, you have very slow traffic on the Outer Banks coming and going.  There are a half-dozen villages where the speed limit is 35 mph in the summer and a lot of heavy  tourist traffic.  If you choose to go this way to get from Ocracoke to Raleigh you will be driving a bit more than 100 extra miles compared with travel by Swan Quarter.  Sometimes, though, it is necessary, especially if traveling up the East Coast to Washington, New York, or New England.

New this year is the Ocracoke Express, a passenger only ferry that runs between Hatteras and Ocracoke.  You can leave your car at Hatteras, and, for one dollar each way take a fast passenger ferry that comes all the way down to Silver Lake Harbor in the village rather than to the north end of the island as the car ferry does.  Once on the island, there is a new Free Tram system that circulates among nine tram stops about every fifteen minutes through the course of each day.  (Anyone can ride the Tram…you don’t have to ride the passenger ferry to do this.)  The Ocracoke Express is bringing a lot of people over for the day without their having to wait in line for the car ferry and it keeps a lot of cars off the island.

The Ocracoke Village FREE Tram

We love the ferry ride!  In the morning you can get on the ferry and them you do not have to start driving for three hours.  It is free time!  Ferry time is time to read, time to sleep, time to write letters or pay bills.  It is a special spoiler if we are taking our Airstream trailer on the ferry with us.  Then we can fix breakfast, go back to sleep, or even watch a movie on the way.

The ferry trip home is just as delightful.  We get on the ferry in Swan Quarter and our driving is finished.  Now we can read, do needlework, have a snack, nap, watch a favorite program, or do absolutely nothing.  As soon as we are on the ferry it is like getting on to a time machine…we disappear from the time of the mainland and travel back to our island where each day is two days long and we don’t have to get into a car (unless we want to) until the next time we are leaving the island.

Will there ever be a bridge to Ocracoke?  Not if anyone who loves it here has anything to do with it.

A New Life for 2019

One year ago today (July 26, 2018) I flew to Johannesburg to begin a three-week trip around South Africa. The trip came out of an earlier storytelling workshop at which Ruth Walkup told stories of her childhood in the Congo.  As the week progressed, some of us suggested that Ruth organize a trip for us.  So, on this day last year, nine of us were flying, most directly from Atlanta, to South Africa.

As we had great adventures and saw unbelievable sights, I began to realize that I was alone in experiencing many things that truly deserved to be shared.  This was my first trip out of the country since my late wife, Merle, had died in 2017.  I was not used to having such experiences alone.

When the trip ended, the fall festival seasons was beginning to unfold.  One of the festivals at which I was featured was the wonderful Lititz Festival in Pennsylvania.  When the festival was over on Saturday night, my next responsibility was to be in Jonesborough, Tennessee by noon Monday to begin the week as Teller in Residence prior to the National Storytelling Festival there.

On the way from Lititz to Jonesborough the route came down I-81 through Virginia and passed by the city of Roanoke.  My dear friends, Harry and Natalie Norris, lived there.  Harry and Natalie are long-time supporters of the National Storytelling Festival and of the Sounds of the Mountains Festival right there near Roanoke.  I asked them if I could spend the night with them, and the plan was made.

Each year for a number of years I had met one of Harry’s employees at Howell’s Motor Freight when she came with his family to Jonesborough.  On some years I also saw her at the Sounds of the Mountains Festival.  It was a five-minutes a year visit with Trish Johnson, whose warm and embracing smile was easily remembered  from one year to the next.

Some days before arriving at Roanoke, I called Harry with a question.  “What do you think would happen if I asked Trish out to dinner the night I am there?”  His answer was immediate: “She would wet her pants!”

I did call and I did ask.  She immediately agreed and we had the plan made for what turned out to be our one and only real date.

When that day came, we had a wonderful time.  We walked, ate ice cream, walked more, had dinner...but mostly we talked nonstop for hours.  It turned out to be our only date.  Both of us knew from that early meeting that we felt like we easily and naturally belonged together.

All else that needs to be told is that we were married on Ocracoke Island on February 19 right in the middle of the first case of  flu I ever had in my life!  We got a big chunk of the “sickness and health” part tested right at the beginning.

Much of the spring was spent getting Trish moved to Ocracoke and her old house cleaned out in Roanoke. By the beginning of summer, it was pretty well done.

Now, a year after that flight to Johannesburg, everything I do and everywhere I go we are sharing together. It is the beginning of new life and a new world.