An Island Vacation
Our family has been coming to Ocracoke Island since the early 70’s. Not every year, just when we can manage it. It’s a long trip across North Carolina to the Outer Banks and then there’s a two and a half hour ferry ride. You do feel like you have come to the end of the earth.
Except for the small village of Ocracoke, the island is a National Park. It’s about 14 miles long and so narrow that visitors can see both Pamlico Sound and the Atlantic Ocean as they drive along the highway. The beaches are clean and uncrowded, great for hunting shells and surf fishing. On the sound side wild ponies, remnants from a Spanish vessel that sunk more than four centuries ago, are now confined to a limited area because of the damage they do to the sea grass on the dunes. Huge sea turtles also come to lay their eggs and the park service is quick to rope off that area during nesting season.
At first, when we came, we pitched a tent just behind the dunes in the National Park campground with its pit toilets and cold water showers. The children loved hearing the ocean at night and walking just over the dunes to play in the surf.
The land juts out strongly into the Atlantic here and the waves can break as high as our heads when we are out in the breakers. If we do it right, we are not pounded by the wave crashing down on us and tumbling us about. We call them “washing machine” waves. There is a strong backwash that pulls the sand from around our feet, so we are standing in a hole when the next wave comes. Exciting and scary. We keep a close watch on everyone and use the buddy system.
Other times the waves lap gently on the beach, the wind dies down, and hordes of voracious mosquitoes come at dusk. In August hurricanes are a distinct possibility. We have had to cut our vacation short a couple of times. The time Percy tried to keep the tent up against 70 mile winds will always be remembered. We finally gave up and spent the rest of the night in the station wagon. Only an army tent tied down with long wooden stakes was standing the next morning.
Now we gather as many of the family as we can and rent rooms in Blackbeard’s Lodge down in the village. One family rents an apartment with cooking facilities and the others rent rooms ($480 and $240) This year our son Mark, our daughter Laurel and her family and teen aged friends came with us. The lodge was built in l936 and it is a rambling weathered cedar shake building. Beach towels and swim suits hang over the scaffold-like railings of the stairs that climb outside to second and third floors. There are 27 rooms and apartments. The spacious lobby has comfortable chairs for reading and a pool table in the game room. The front porch rocking chairs are almost always occupied. In the hot part of the day, children splash in the pool.
One of the attractions of Ocracoke is the story of Blackbeard, the pirate. In the early 1700’s, Edward Teach used the safe harbor of Silver Lake and other “holes” on the sound side to hide from the British Navy. He was an educated man who could read and write when few of his fellow seamen could. He maintained a reputation so fearsome that seamen were said to jump overboard when he appeared on the deck of the pirate ship that was attacking them. At the end when he felt hard pressed, the story goes that he hid his loot somewhere on the island.
Even at the height of the tourist season life seems to move at a slower pace. People lounge around the docks at O’Neal’s to see what fishermen bring in. There are many art galleries and gift shops to browse in. Some of the men carve decoys and birds in the wintertime. There is a sand castle contest and a tiny parade on the Fourth of July. It’s an hour’s walk out to the lighthouse. Many of the houses were built with timbers from ship wrecks. Folks made do with what was at hand. There is an old Ocracoke saying from a mother to her newly wed daughter, “Tell me what you want and I’ll tell you how to get along without it.”
I love walking along Howard Street. Ancient cedars and live oaks meet overhead shutting out the bright sun. The tiny yards around houses built before the Civil War are fenced in, the fences built in the time when the ponies roamed freely on the island. Many houses have cisterns that collect rainwater. Until recently when a desalinization plant was installed, water was in critical short supply. There are many old tombstones in the small family graveyards along this street. In the Howard cemetery, that of Ann Howard, born l724-1841, aged 117 years reads,
Lo! The prisoner is released
Lightened of her fleshly load
Where the weary are at rest
She is gathered unto God.
Native Ocracokers love to tell stories. Of shipwrecks, of many rescues of the people from ships that were sunk by German U-boats, and most of all fishing stories. That’s another column and Percy has his own fishing story to tell.
-- Mary