Islands at the Edge of Time: A Journey To America's Barrier Islands

By Gunnar Hansen

Islands at the Edge of Time is the story of one man's captivating journey along America's barrier islands from Boca Chica, Texas, to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Weaving in and out along the coastlines of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina, poet and naturalist Gunnar Hansen perceives barrier islands not as sand but as expressions in time of the processes that make them. Along the way he treats the reader to absorbing accounts of those who call these islands home -- their lives often lived in isolation and at the extreme edges of existence -- and examines how the culture and history of these people are shaped by the physical character of their surroundings.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Feb 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610914505

Book preview

Stewart

Preface

One day while flying from Boston to Miami I looked out the window and saw Fire Island along Long Island’s southern shore. The surf breaking against it was clearly visible, even from some two miles in the air. I was struck by its narrowness, as well as its beauty from such a distance. As we flew south, we passed the barrier islands and marshes of the Jersey shore and then the Delmarva Peninsula. I noticed the obvious—America’s coast is one long series of barrier islands. What, I wondered, are they like? And so this book was born.

Since that day I have fallen in love with these islands: with the heat and sun and loneliness of Padre Island; the quiet self-containment of Saint Helena and its surrounding barriers; the silence of the abandoned and vulnerable village of Portsmouth. These islands are some of the loveliest places I have ever been. On them I saw dense stands of live oaks draped with Spanish moss; flights of brown pelicans riding the onshore wind; thirty-foot sand hills covered with delicate evening primrose; lagoonal salt flats shimmering in the heat; solitary deer feeding in the golden-green marsh grasses; great thunderclouds marching in from the sea, so overpowering that the small sand where I stood was as nothing. I also saw days so placid and graceful that the light glittered blue across the lagoon waters as if nothing could ever disturb them. I had never imagined I would see such sights, never imagined I deserved to see them.

In a way, this book started in the middle, when I joined the coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey in Beaufort, North Carolina, and accompanied him to some of the Carolina Banks. Pilkey seems to have a profound grasp of what surrounds him as he strides down a beach or picks his way across a marsh. At the same time, to watch him with details, to observe him stop and peer down and brush away a bit of sand, is like being with someone who is seeing such a place for the first time. I began to view barrier islands not as sand, but as an expression of the processes that make them—forces made visible.

From Beaufort I traveled on, stopping at Saint Helena and the Sea Islands south of it in South Carolina and Georgia to get the lay of the land and to see the great marshes of Glynn, which as a youngster I had read verses about. (Such was the result of a southern education, to suffer through the poet Sidney Lanier.) I recited them to myself: How ample, the marsh and the sea and the sky! A league and a league of marsh-grass, waist-high, broad in the blade... I stopped on Jekyll Island, across these marshes, where at the turn of the century the rich had come to hide from the outside world. Today it is covered with golf courses and vacationing Americans whose bumper stickers cheerfully announce that they are spending their children’s inheritance.

Then I drove west along the Gulf Coast through Alabama and Mississippi and across the deep swamplands of Louisiana to Texas. Here was Galveston where, fresh out of high school, I had first tried to surf (the waves were too small, I was too ungainly). Here was where my grandfather had been born and where he had survived a hurricane. Long before I reached arid Padre Island, deep on the lower reaches of the Texas coast, this scouting trip had told me that there was much along America’s barrier islands to talk about. I knew I wanted to write this book.

Originally my intention was to travel all the way from south Texas to Long Island’s South Shore. And I did so; during my return north on this first trip, I did explore north of Ocracoke and Portsmouth, North Carolina, where this book now ends.

I saw the Hatteras Light, where the National Park Service (with various geologists, engineers, preservationists, and promoters allied on one side or the other) was trying to decide what to do with the lighthouse. It stood in danger of falling into the sea as the island moved out from under it—which is what barrier islands do. Some wanted to build a wall around the light to protect it from the encroaching sea. Others wanted to move the light back from the shore, where it would be safe for another century or so, at least till the moving shoreline caught up with it again. Here was the entire issue of barrier island development: do we tough it out and try to control Nature, or do we back off and admit we are overpowered? Eventually the park service sided with those who wanted to withdraw. The light would be moved.

I crossed over Oregon Inlet, which separates Hatteras and Bodie islands and is considered by some the most dangerous channel on the Atlantic Coast (particularly by those fishermen who have to pass through it every day). Here another struggle: the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build a jetty to supposedly stabilize the inlet, though such hard structures are illegal in North Carolina. I did not wait to see who won; I feared the worst.

I went north along the Delmarva Peninsula, past Assateague Island with its famous horses and remnant hunting camps. I passed through heavily developed Ocean City, Maryland. One geologist, speaking of overdevelopment and environmental skullduggery, claims that it is here that the bodies are buried.

I traveled along the Jersey shore, from the wistful and fading Cape May along all those islands now paved, braced by seawalls, and stripped of their beaches. Here lay the true meaning of the geological neologism newjerseyization. I passed through Atlantic City, an island where people came and dreamed of being somewhere else. I saw this part of the journey as my Descent into Hell, where all values had been lost, perhaps, but where I still had a chance to revive mine and escape back into the world with a new vision.

Finally I traveled out to Long Island. Passing Fire Island, where the park service was struggling with the issue of island development, I went east along the South Shore. Looking out from Shinnecock Inlet, I imagined I saw the sand draining away from the barrier island, carried by the littoral drift deep into the sea. This, I thought, would be a fitting place to end my book.

But that was not to be. I realized as I traveled and thought about what I was seeing, that I actually had two books—one about the nature of these islands and the experience of those who live on them, and another about the disturbing question of barrier island development. A book focused solely on development, I decided, would wait till a later time. For now I would make the less concrete journey. And so, when I got to Portsmouth, I knew I had found what I was looking for and I had said what I had to say. This book would end there.

One image in particular has stayed with me. I was leaving the islands for the last time and had driven north along Ocracoke late in the day to catch the ferry to Hatteras. Offshore the sea was wild and the winds strong, though the weather was easing. The ferry moved slowly north along the back side of the island. Between it and Ocracoke a sand ridge extended some distance. The water was shallow out to the ridge, and I saw two men wading across, shining their flashlights into the water, netting fish. The daylight was almost completely gone; only some blue remnants lingered in the western sky, enough to reveal the dark shape of the ridge against the brighter water. The sky was clearing. Saturn, massive and bright, was already visible.

Here is what stayed with me: The two fishermen casting their lights back and forth at their feet seemed to be walking on the water.

Chapter 1

Boca Chica

Boca Chica, Texas, in March. The sun near the horizon, the air filtered through a petroleum-blue haze. Three days earlier, the biggest solar flare ever seen had erupted from the surface of the sun. Though the x-rays and ultraviolet light had reached the earth in eight minutes, the second stream of radiation—the solar wind of electrons, protons, and other atomic particles stripped from their atoms—was only now entering the earth’s magnetic field. This evening, as the sun settled onto the horizon, I could see the cool spot on its northeast quadrant where the flare had blown off, a black mote three times the diameter of the earth. The air was thick and cloudless, and I looked directly at the un-distorted solar disk as it approached the horizon.

The new moon floated directly above. It had come between the sun and the earth the day after the flare, and in much of western North America people had watched it eclipse part of the sun. Now two days old, it hung suspended, a thin silver scythe blade almost touching the sun, its horns pointing upward. The moon’s dark side faced the earth, clearly visible.

I had come to the barrier beach at Boca Chica to begin an erratic journey along America’s barrier islands. These islands run almost continuously from south Texas along the Gulf of Mexico to Florida, then up the Atlantic coast past the Sea Islands, past the Outer Banks, past the famed and hideous Jersey shore, past Fire Island to the small barriers of southern Maine—a twenty-seven-hundred-mile beach, the longest stretch of barrier islands in the world.

Even though we often think of the mainland shore as the coastline, these fragile offshore barrier islands are America’s true coast. They serve as buffer to the mainland, protecting it against the direct attack of the sea. When the ocean hits it, a barrier island deflects the blow with its low angle to the water. And if that is not enough, if the water still slams too hard, then the island moves; it gives in a bit and accommodates the onrush. Barrier islands retreat when the sea rises; narrow when its energy increases or the sand supply diminishes; even spread out again when there is more sand.

These islands are small—most only a few feet above sea level, many only a mile, or even a few hundred yards, wide—and ephemeral—moving constantly, grain of sand by grain of sand, with the motion of the sea against them. From the air a barrier island appears to be a fine white band snaking along the mainland. From any distance at sea, it is nothing more than a thin dark line on the horizon.

I was taking this trip because I wanted to know about the geology and environment of these islands. But I had other, less concrete reasons for going. I was born on an island, and live on one now. I count myself blessed to have spent more than half my life surrounded by water. Since I became aware of islands as places in themselves, I have seen life on them as somehow different from life on the mainland. Now I wanted to know what made an island, particularly a barrier island, so different. What was the spirit of such a place?

I knew in a general sense: islands are separate from other places, with clear boundaries, not like the mainland, where one spot blends into the next. And so an island has a sense of definition and limits about it. It is here, and nothing else is here. I can travel only so far before I simply run out of island. On many an island, from some high spot I can see its entire world with a sweep of the eye. And with a sweep of my mind’s eye, I can encompass any island.

Perhaps because of these physical characteristics, we islanders tend to have a deep sense of belonging to a community. We see ourselves, like our islands, as self-contained, free from the outside world. Yet there is an irony—in seeing ourselves and making ourselves separate from the rest of humanity, we are all the closer to those who share the island with us. We tend to think of our fellow islanders as family, and of those who do not live on the island as not. Often there is also a kind of contradiction among us (at least on those islands I have lived on or haunted); for all our wanting to stick together, islanders distinguish between natives and those who are newly arrived, between those who belong and those who wish to belong, between those whose island this is and those whose it is not.

I was setting off in search of something, a deeper understanding of the essence of barrier islands, something that would show me what they shared with each other and how these islands were unlike other places. That was the best way I could describe to myself what I was looking for—I hoped that something would become more clear as I looked. I wanted to know why I was so drawn. Maybe I was searching for the distinction between those who belonged to an island and those who did not.

I could not hope to visit all, or even most, of the three hundred or so barrier islands along the coast. I would go to certain islands because of their geology and because of their people. Serendipity too would lead me; I would go where my travels took me.

I would see much of the Texas coast. In addition to its geology, I was interested in its history. My grandfather was born in Galveston, a barrier island along eastern Texas, and had lived through a hurricane there. I would spend time in Louisiana. As one geologist told me, if I was going to write about barrier islands, I had better write about Louisiana; its sinking shoreline was a model for the disaster that would soon enough engulf the rest of the U.S. coast. I wanted to visit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, special kinds of hybrid barrier islands. And I wanted to go to the Outer Banks, particularly the islands of Ocracoke and Portsmouth—one the last surviving community of Bankers (as inhabitants of the Outer Banks were known), the other abandoned.

I would go in search of people as well. I once read about a man who had survived a hurricane on a small Mississippi barrier island by lashing himself to a tree; when friends in Beaufort, North Carolina, spoke of him, I knew I must learn what I could about him. As I traveled, others would make suggestions. A stranger in Columbia, South Carolina, said I should meet a man on Saint Helena who knitted casting nets (a skill brought here from Africa) and who could multiply and divide Roman numerals. That was enough for me; I remembered an elementary school teacher claiming that act was impossible—a reason, she contended, why the Roman Empire had collapsed.

I had prepared for this journey by spending time with the coastal geologist Orrin Pilkey, Jr. Already well respected internationally by his peers, he was becoming visible to the public as a strong voice among those who felt great concern about the development and use of the barrier islands. As such, he was also becoming a target for criticism; those involved with coastal issues seemed to either love him or hate him.

He has been described alternately as a giant elf and as a dwarf from a Wagnerian opera, descriptions based on his short stature, silvered beard, barrel chest, and, as one writer said, whimsical disposition. I doubt that he cares much for these characterizations. He has also been called (in print) the single most influential voice warning of the inevitably changing face of America’s seacoast and (not in print) that pain in the ass. He probably likes these descriptions better.

Pilkey seems to conceive of barrier islands as living, conscious beings, and at times he even grants them will and thought. The only proper human approach to these islands, he says, is to leave them alone. That is an interesting idea to me. I like the notion of thinking of them as alive; it helps one see how to live with a place. Yet I find myself glad that people have lived on them.

Pilkey and I had walked the beaches of the Outer Banks as he talked geology and gave me a vision of Pilkey’s True Faith. We would meet again when I returned to the Carolinas.

A friend’s father, a sometime vacationer at Nags Head on the Outer Banks, had told me that the islands were all the same. Just sand and dunes and mosquitoes, he said. Sand and dunes and mosquitoes. He had chuckled to himself when he repeated it, as if he had come upon a new idea. Then he started to tell me a joke about two Outer Banks mosquitoes fighting over a tourist.

Even some Texans are not especially excited about their islands. One writer has said that none of the 624 miles of Texas tidewater coastline offers anything spectacular in the way of scenery. What, I wonder, is she looking for?

The barrier islands are spectacular—moving, restless sand with life clinging onto it. There are plants: from the sea oats anchoring the dunes to the Spartina grasses of the back marshes, from small white morning glories in the beach sand to great maritime forests. And there is wildlife: pale ghost crabs picking their way out of their holes at night, countless gulls and terns drifting overhead or prowling the surf zone, delicate and rich protein life in the brackish bays between the islands and the