Beach Attire

The Outer Banks of North Carolina have been in the news a lot lately. As of this posting, ten houses have collapsed into the ocean over the past several weeks. A hurricane didn’t come ashore but two passed by out at sea and caused unusually high tides. I have followed this story closely because we lived on the Outer Banks in the mid 1980’s. We had to evacuate two different times within a two month period due to hurricanes. The danger is real. Most of the old time residents stay during big storm events but my husband convincingly said, “The risks are low but the stakes are high”. We left. We weren’t able to return to our house for an entire week. The entire island had been washed over, from the Pamlico Sound to the Atlantic. A foot of sand covered North Carolina Highway 12, the only way to access Hatteras Island. We had to wait until bulldozers plowed a way through before we could go home. The houses that were recently destroyed were unoccupied. They were all built on tall stilts, the accepted way to protect from ocean overwash. They were constructed around the time we lived there or even shortly after that. Everyone knew these barrier islands would retreat toward the mainland over time. What no one anticipated was what a short amount of time that would be. The people whose families had been there for generations, chose to live on slightly higher ground in villages and away from the beach. I remember when we lived there, how badly we longed to buy a lot on the beach and build a house. $25,000 was the cost of an oceanfront lot at that time. A great price but we didn’t have it. We tried to talk my husband’s mother, who lived in a condo in Florida, into investing in this. When she came to visit us, we all walked on the beach together. If you’re familiar with Florida, it’s nothing like the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Florida is manicured. There are seawalls and sidewalks with benches to sit and admire the view. On the Outer Banks, you wend your way through trails in the dunes to get to the beach and then there’s a whole lot of nothing, if you think like many Floridians. No fancy houses, no palm trees, no upscale stores or restaurants. Instead, a sand dunes and sea oats and ocean. She didn’t change from her heels and panty hose to take that walk on the beach. They were low heels but nevertheless, not the kind of shoes you’d wear to walk through sand. If you wore shoes at all. She was a delightful woman, supportive of our different ideas and tastes but this was definitely not her “cup of tea”, as she liked to say. So we didn’t get to have a house on the beach and after another storm flooded everything we owned yet once more, we ended up moving back to the mainland. I’m grateful we weren’t able to sway her on that property. It’d be underwater now.

Photo courtesy lecreusois at Pixabay.com