Legends of the Sandbar

For Walker, Mickey, and Mona; and for all others who have taken the last wave...

3. prelude

13. Prelude

25. Genesis: Outer Banks

35. after the Storm

46. After the Storm 72. The Five Senses of the Sandbar

105. The Ghost Dance 135. Excerpts from an indian Summer

156. The Campfire Legends 159. Shooting the Pier 160. Avon Sunday 160. The Waves of September 11

177. Rememberings

187. The Rise and fall of the Gov’ner’s Surf Club

190. On Bonner Bridge

197. Red Man’s Remains 209. The Wrath of Mars 211. Mickey

217. The last wave 237. Community 256. MAP

Prelude Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go.

Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere.

Prelude

It was, from the beginning, a fool’s errand.

On a diamond-speckled Outer Banks morning in January 2008, I stepped into a pair of rubber chest waders and walked into the ocean, clutching a twothousand-dollar camera.

I didn’t mean to go far. I just wanted to get closer. I wanted to explore, with this light-gathering machine that had become my life’s obsession, the chaos of breaking whitewater, the fractal patterns of mist blowing off the lip of a perfect barrel, the marbled-meat formations of seafoam being sucked back into yet another explosion of swell onto shore. Moments I’d witnessed while surfing, swimming, or just standing at the water’s edge; moments come and gone and come and gone with no one to bear witness to them but myself and a few friends. I wanted photographs that could survive the intantaneous. I told myself, just a few feet into the ocean. That’s all.

But my enthusiasm got the best of me. High on the visual distortion of a wide-angle lens, I lost perspective, and waded too close into a dredging shorebreak wave, whose rip knocked me off of my feet and sucked me under. Instinctively I shot my right arm up in the air as the rest of me took a cold, wet beating. Seconds later I surfaced, my head drenched, my waders filled with pebbly sand and freezingcold saltwater, my camera miraculously unscathed. I had managed to fire off two frames of the wave, both of which remain with me as records, talismans, warnings from my first ill-equipped attempts at bringing a vague idea to fruition.

That afternoon I went online and ordered a waterproof housing for my camera. Two days later, it arrived at my doorstep: four pieces of moulded plastic, four metal clamps, an assortment of buttons, all sealed tight with silicone and

O-rings. To think this thing would keep my camera functioning inside a churning, pounding vortex of oceanic fury seemed ludicrous. But, as countless photographers before me have done, I assembled it, slid my camera inside it, latched it up, and took a leap of faith.

It was a small step, one of myriad that I’ve taken in the course of this endeavor. The idea — to render this world of dune and barrels, of wind and rippers; to freeze-frame the exploits of the hometown surf-heroes that inhabit this strip of sand dangling at the edge of the Atlantic Continental Shelf — had been with me for years, spawned from countless late afternoons out in the water with a few friends, watching the low sun wrap around their silhouettes or light their faces up against a stormy horizon, seeing them launch their fiberglass rockets into the sky.

But to actually make something out of that idea required some gestation, some thinking and dreaming, and ultimately, the tacit permission of the water-gods to swim a camera into their world and brave the consequences.

The distance from my house to the ocean is less than a quarter of a mile.

From there the road goes north/south, and it is along this road, NC Highway 12, that I traveled, following the surf, following the crew, riding shotgun or solo, sniffing out pictures season by season. Hardly an epic journey, but a journey all the same.

A journey of flooded cameras, salty sandy red eyes, summer mornings that come too early, and twilit evenings that never seem to last long enough. A journey of ice-cream headaches, near-misses and direct hits, days happily wasted chasing light and motion, afternoons where a phone call or a brief look at the ocean could give me cause to drop all business, no matter how pressing, in pursuit of what I could always rationalize

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as art. A journey peopled with good friends and total strangers, and total strangers who have since become good friends.

And foremost, a journey of serendipity, of surfacing with shots that I almost didn’t take or don’t remember taking at all; beautifully imperfect shots, many of which would be sorely out of place in your average surf magazine, but which, seen together as a whole, have taken on a life and painted a picture all their own.

I have lived on the Outer Banks for over fifteen years. From my birthplace in Norfolk, Virginia it’s less than a two-hour drive, but it took me tens of thousands of miles and half a lifetime of wandering to arrive here. I still hesitate to call it home; like many of the local residents I have a hard time staying in one place for too long.

I’ve left again and again, to pursue other projects, to take on assignments, or just to get the hell out of this godforsaken place.

But as far as I range, and as many times as I’ve taken the measure of some far-off locale and thought, I could live here, I have always wended my way back to these shores.

Despite my inner protests about life here — and believe me, there are many — this place has a way of holding on loosely, of offering small gifts that become difficult to live without once you’ve had them. Like clean air. Salt water. Spectral maritime light. The embrace of a small, tight-knit, unpretentious community. And perhaps the greatest gift of all, perspective. Living on the fluid edge between land and sea, one develops an intuition for the ebb and flow of life’s vicissitudes — good times, hard times; bonfires and breakups; weeklong gales and bluebird days; periods of high stress, periods of extreme boredom — they all come and go like so many waves upon the shore, some of them perfect and beautiful, some of them so small you don’t even notice them, some of them big and

messy and powerful enough to drown you, but with luck and wits and will, you survive.

Life here is a strange combination of regular and irregular rhythms, a drumbeat with shifting accents that always comes back round eventually to the one. And, like that crazy drummer with his sneaky beats, the spirits that dwell in this place will creep up unannounced and throw out a dazzling sunset, or a crystalline moonrise over the ocean, or a week of weather so perfect it makes you giddy — just when you’d made your plans and bought your ticket out of here.

In my years on the beach I have seen the slow creep of development add hundreds of houses and dozens of commercial buildings to the landscape, and I have watched the relentless pounding of the surf claim its fair share of bungalows and beach-boxes from the shoreline in return.

I’ve endured harsh winters and slogged through sizzling summers, enjoyed freaky January warm fronts, and witnessed electric August storms lighting up the night for hours on end. I’ve ridden out several major hurricanes, two of which blew new inlets straight through this thin strip of sand upon which we have built our houses.

And, as everyone here does, I have gotten to be on intimate terms with the winds. I’ve learned the moods and character of each of them: the bonechilly Northeast, which rips right through your clothes and churns the ocean into an aquatic battlefield of whitewater and salt mist, but also blows in warm tropical currents from the Gulf Stream and operates as the most consistent source of surf, year in and year out. The steady Southwest, which carries the scent of farms and swamps from the mainland, grooms the ocean to a fine sheen, and in the springtime brings the scent of honeysuckle, which you can smell out in the lineup on those rare perfect

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days when all the forces align — but which, in the summer, blows in hordes of biting black flies that can force even the hardiest of beachgoers to seek cover. The humid South, which follows the Southwest on certain hot summer days, picks up speed, and turns a sparkling morning into a blownout afternoon. The balmy Southeast, which breathes a fine Caribbean mist up the coast on late fall days, promising Indian Summers that can last clear on into January. And the howling Northwest, which blows the angst of millions down from the Megalopolis. The Northwest — or North-worst, as the townies call it — brings no warmth and little surf; but we would be nothing without it, for it is along the ghost-path of this wind that our visitors come every summer, fueling the service economy that allows us to live in this place and chase our waterborne dreams.

The first photographs I produced for this series were dusky, blurry, silhouetted; moody and strange, like the shadowy tales of shipwrecks, lost colonies, and sandcovered settlements that haunt this place.

Over time the faces shadowed by those silhouettes became clearer. And over more time those faces fleshed out into people: people with idiosyncrasies and relationships and histories. Watching these same people come together, swell after swell, I began to realize the importance of these ephemeral surf-breaks as places of communion. And it became evident that beyond indulging in my own little art project, I was, by making the pictures public, representing a culture; and incumbent upon me thus was a certain responsibility to get it right, or at the very least, to capture some shred of collective essence; to convey what it feels like, and what it means, to live on this evershifting sandbar and to be a part of this waterlogged band of misfits.

These days, especially in the surf world, the term legend gets thrown about

fairly cavalierly. Anybody who can throw six feet of spray or doesn’t flinch at paddling out in the frigid depths of January seems worthy of the rank; and any misadventurestrewn drinking binge or travel story, which last year may have been described as epic, is this year described as legendary. So lest it appear that I’ve chosen my title out of laziness for the lexicon of the moment, allow me a few remarks concerning the word, as well as my usage of it within the context of this book.

The word legend derives from the Latin term legenda, which means, simply, reading. Originally it referred to small illustrated books which Catholic monks would carry with them, in which were inscribed stories of the lives of the saints.

Anyone who is familiar with Catholic lore knows that the saints constitute a virtual pantheon of local and regional heroes, around whom astonishing accounts of bravery and wisdom and magic have been woven.

Over time, the word lost its strictly religious provenance, and came to describe a certain kind of folk-tale.

Legends traditionally feature real people whose deeds or experiences have been exaggerated to the point that their veracity is understood to be questionable. In other words, legends straddle truth and fiction, myth and reality. They form a bridge between a community’s history and its collective imagination.

We tell legends for many reasons, but perhaps the most important one is the age-old human desire to transcend the banality and brevity of mortal life; to raise our deeds above the forgetfulness of time. In our hearts we feel there is great significance to what we do, but we live in an eternal present where only fossils and footprints of the past remain; and the only way to hold on to the moments of greatness

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peopled with a cast of characters that either through conscious collaboration or pure happenstance came within my focus while I was working on the project.

Not everyone represented in these images is a surfer, or even lives here. But every single one of them has sunk their toes in our sands, played in our waters, and felt the late-afternoon satisfaction of walking barefoot over weather-beaten wood at the end of a long day in the sun. Just as the border between land and shore twists and shifts and contains a bit of each in the other, so too are the blurry distinctions in these parts between tourist and local. Those of us who live here sometimes succumb to the hubris of thinking we own the place, but almost all of us come from somewhere else; and more to the point, nobody owns this place. By law and by mutual understanding, we’re all part of the same sunburnt, saltpruned, surf-stoked dysfunctional family, and we all deserve a fair share of the gift of these shores.

It is in that spirit that I make this, my humble offering to all who know and love the ocean, whether it be right outside your door or thousands of miles away. Even if you have only seen it in pictures and dreams, it is my hope that these images evoke something of the experience of teetering on the ledge of a breaking wave, the excitement of dropping in, turning, and finding yourself careening along its face, even the sweet satisfaction of getting crunched and taking the force of the ocean’s might right in the chest. And for those of you who know these waters well, who have put in your time and who live and breathe the Outer Banks and have the sunbleached hair and the weatherbeaten skin to prove it, well, I hope that in these pages you’ll recognize a bit of the salty world you and I, whether reluctantly or with all the pride in your soul, call home.

— or tragedy — that we or our kindred have experienced and witnessed is through story and memory. And the best way to preserve those stories is to affix them mnemonically to a specific place, a landmark — something you can point to and say, this is where it happened, can you see?

Legends throughout history have relied on the shared knowledge and collective experience of a community to keep them alive. But beyond their use within a certain population of insiders, legends can also serve as keys to understanding nuances of a culture that would otherwise be opaque to outsiders. By hearing the tales people tell of their place, of their heroes, and of significant events within their history, we learn what they value, what they take pride in, and what they fear.

In modern times we have much more powerful tools at hand to tell our stories. We can cast charismatic actors to embody our archetypal saints, set them on a soundstage and film them overcoming insurmountable odds to the swell of orchestras and synthesizers. But there is still, I believe, great power in the art of the illuminated text, the original legenda. A book is tangible and portable, and requires no technology to experience. You need only open it, read it, and look into the images on the page to enter into its world.

This sandscape, these people, the sport that they live and breathe, the ocean they study obsessively and the waves they ride with both precision and abandon — there are legends within legends here that could fill volumes, a deep well of story far beyond the scope of this book. This is by no means a comprehensive collection of surf lore from the Outer Banks, mined for anthropological or academic purposes.

Rather, it is an entirely subjective portrait, filtered through my own experience and

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Genesis: Outer Banks

This land was formed out of the surges and storms of a rising sea, the same rising sea that will one day swallow it back.

It lives inside the bookends of glaciations, a by-product of the heaving cycles of geological time.

When human beings were taking their first steps onto the African plains, the area that is now the Outer Banks lay under hundreds of feet of water. As those ancestors multiplied, branched off, and went forth through the continents, the earth began to cool, and a vast portion of the seas were sucked into the expanding polar ice caps. Most of what is now Canada and Northern Eurasia was buried under glaciers.

Hunter-gatherers that had ventured north in milder times were forced south to eke out a living in more temperate zones. The oceans dropped hundreds of feet, and coastlines spread out into the sea, joining islands and peninsulas and creating settlement opportunities and migration-routes that have long since disappeared underwater.

On the Atlantic coast of the Western Continents, the falling seas exposed a vast stretch of land reaching seventy miles out into the ocean from its present boundary. The terrestrial space now occupied by the Outer Banks was then an unremarkable, yet-to-be imagined line on a wide coastal plain, covered intermittently by bog, forest, and grassland.

Then, sea-currents shifted, wind patterns changed, the earth warmed.

Glaciers began to melt, and then to recede, and the waters rose. Coastal settlements had to be abandoned, islets were cut off from the mainland. In Europe, Mesolithic pilgrims escaped the flooding plains of Doggerland and the Adriatic and dispersed into the birch forests that sprang up in the fresh deglaciated uplands, chasing auroch and venison, populating the great boreal

peninsulas and islands of Scandinavia and the North Sea. Wandering Asian tribes walked east across a giant land-bridge into the Americas, and the Bering Sea filled in behind them, stranding them on a vast unpeopled continent.

On the eastern edge of that continent, the low country surrendered to the melting waters. The first humans to reach that coast encountered a vastly different landscape than the one we know today, but what exactly that landscape looked like is hard to say, so rapidly was it changing. Doubtless they were humbled and awed by the moody, land-eating sea they encountered.

Eventually, some seven thousand years ago, the climate stabilized. Sea-level rise slowed to an almost imperceptible creep. A new coastline was roughly sketched out. What had once been mighty river valleys were inundated with sea-water, creating a vast estuary system of bays, deltas, and tidal inlets.

As the ocean waves chewed into the headlands of these estuaries, longshore currents drove the sandy detritus up and down the shore, creating spits in wrinkles along the tide-line. In major storms the ocean would push against and wash over these spits, slowly building them into dunes and cutting their backs off from the mainland. As the dunes became higher, longer, and more stable, they fused with one another, creating the long stretch of sand we now call the Outer Banks. The water on the west side of these Banks was lagooned, and the sediments from the inner waterways piled up inside the embayment.

Today, in the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds, the average depth is no more than six feet, underneath a surface of water covering thousands of square miles.

Similar — if less extreme —

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geological events occurred all up and down the coast, creating an archipelago of barrier islands stretching from New York to Mexico, fed by the confluence of river sediment and ocean sand, and shaped and molded by wind and waves. All of it, a mere five thousand years old. A nano-blip in geological time. Most of these islands continued to move inland with the rising sea-levels and prevailing winds, but the Outer Banks grabbed hold and remained stuck out into the Atlantic, as if snagged on something underneath, something slowing their westward movement.

If these islands were formed as part of a grand design, it was certainly not for human habitation. Geographers call them barrier islands to connote a purpose, and that purpose is generally considered to be to buffer the mainland from the ravages of the sea. They have always been difficult places to live, and settlers have always known them to be thus. Even the inhabitants of the legendary Lost Colony had originally intended to build their New World in the friendlier waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and would have done so were it not for the whims of a recalcitrant sea-captain eager to get back to civilization.

Aside from a small group of Croatan Indians living in the sheltered woods behind the Great Cape, and the occasional hunting party from the inner shores and islands, early explorers found the Outer Banks to be uninhabited. And for good reason. It is nearly impossible to grow corn — or any other vegetable suitable for human consumption — in the sandy, salt-battered earth here. And while the waters teem with the bounty of ocean and marsh, they are also extremely dangerous. Shoaling channels and heavy seas have claimed more than enough lives for the region to earn the title of Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Since the area was first mapped

by explorers, 26 inlets have existed on the Outer Banks, usually pierced open in a matter of hours by violent hurricanes, and then closed up over decades by the slow southwestern migration of sand and seed.

The new millennium alone has already seen two such inlets formed, impressing upon those of us who live here the dramatic mechanics of barrier island change.

For the first two centuries of European-American settlement, the hardy lot that lived on these dunes considered the mainland-facing soundside to be the front of the island, and the exposed ocean side to be the back. Villages were built around small marshland harbors and inland forests protected by the elements. Mail-boats ferried people back and forth from the mainland, often having to wait out violent storms before crossing.

Sometime in the late 19th century, the Outer Banks’ greatest modern resource — the two-hundred-mile beach that spans its eastern flank — was first tapped, by planter-aristocrats seeking to escape the malarial summers of the inland South.

Slowly, over the course of a century and a half, the vacation industry grew, settlement and construction increased exponentially, and grass and trees were planted to make the place more hospitable. Many aspects of the Outer Banks that we consider to be endemic — large swaths of the maritime forest, the double-dune system that runs from Carova to Ocracoke, the magnificent Silver Lake — were engineered, with both private and federal funds, over the better part of the twentieth century. Were the Banks to have remained as they were found at the time of European settlement — lowlying, virtually desert-like humps of moving sand — they would seem very inhospitable indeed.

In the 1960’s, close on the heels of the California surf revolution, pioneers

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like Jim Bunch, Bruce Shepherd, and Bob Holland cast a new eye on the ocean and began to exploit what has become, in the twenty-first century, perhaps the Outer Banks’ most mythical resource: Waves.

In the brief span of time from then to now occured all the surf-yarns to be told here, all the tall tales of epic winter swells, rides of a lifetime, and hurricanes with names like Isabel, Irene, Olga, Katia, Sandy, and Hermine. Surf culture on the Outer Banks is hardly half a century old, and for most of that time it has remained on the periphery of the vacation industry, its images perfunctorily slapped on the cover of tourist magazines, its mom-andpop shops squeezing a profit out of sales of flip-flops, t-shirts and name-brand hoodies in order to keep the racks stocked with boards, leashes and wetsuits for the locals.

But in that time the Outer Banks has developed a mystique in the larger surfing world. It is a place most surfers have heard of, and increasingly seen photographs of, but which few outside a tight-knit band of east-coast wavehunters have actually surfed.

Among those few, however, giants have paddled. In the 1980’s, a 12-year-old Kelly Slater came up from Florida to cut his teeth on heavy waves in the shadow of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. It was arguably the power of Hatty at its meanest that matured him into the eleven-time-and-counting world champion that he has become. In the 1990’s our first native superstars, Noah Snyder and Jesse Hines, burst into the national scene, and put the Outer Banks on the map. And today, Buxton’s Brett Barley is re-defining what it means to be a surf-hero, using the latest technology to document solo sessions at hidden breaks along the Hatteras coast and broadcast the evidence worldwide through online surf media, while raising a family in the southern comfort of

his hometown.

It’s hard to keep Outer Bankers from coming back home, as much of the world as they may see, as many perfect waves as they may surf on exotic shores. Something about this place gets into your bones, makes it hard to live anywhere else.

But it comes with a price. Erosion.

Sea-level rise. Climate change. These are fighting words in the political arena, but on these beaches it’s just a part of life. The long view of geology and archaeology makes two things very clear: the earth is constantly changing, and humans have always wrought massive change upon the environment, from deforestation to species annihilation to agriculture to air pollution. Yes, absolutely, our presence affects geography and climate in innumerable ways. But without us, the climate would still be changing, and whatever our fate in the millennia to come, the earth will continue to change. It has always happened, and will continue to happen, despite our heroic efforts to stem the tide. The oceans will continue to rise, until other geological events reverse the process, and then they will fall again. But you and I will be long gone before then.

In any case, the surf will continue to come. From summer southwests to autumn tropicals to winter storms now being named things like Athena and Nimo, we’ll get waves. Cottages will crumble, the road will be breached, the sand will migrate. But we’ll still get waves. If sea level rise continues as predicted, these islands will once again be submerged some nine hundred years in the future. But the waves will continue to come. Nothing will stop the movement of the ocean. Our time on this sandbar, and its time on earth, are but brief sentences in the annals of epochs.

The beginning, the middle, and the end, all slipping into one another, like the churning shoreline that fuels our passions.

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After the Storm I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds Have riv’d the knotty oaks, and I have seen The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam, To be exalted with the threatening clouds But never till tonight, never till now, Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.

After the Storm

In the blink of a salt-rubbed eye the weather moves in, seemingly out of nowhere.

It may begin as a pitch-perfect day.

The blinding sun, the smell of Panama Jack.

The squeals of sandy toddlers, the gaggles of bikini-girls. The scorch of summer skies and the squawk of seagulls.

Then something shifts. The breeze picks up, the temperature drops, barometers plummet. The sky takes on dark chiaroscuro tones, eating away at the warm light disappearing on the horizon.

Beachgoers, shaken from their seaside reveries, gather their plastic toys and scatter like crows. The wind whips the ocean into a froth of whitewater and salt spray, the sand rises up in a burning mist. The rain, when it comes, comes horizontal and heavy.

Enter the dark side of the Outer Banks: a hundred-mile strip of dune sold to the overworked masses as a summer paradise of crystal waters and blazing sunsets — now, a brooding netherworld of cloud, wind, and airborne sand.

The storm will last an hour, a day, possibly three, maybe seven. Black cumulus will hang heavy in the sky, and fierce ocean wind will permeate everything with its damp chill. Most folk will be driven indoors, to hibernate until the next patch of good weather.

But here and there, up and down the shore, there are signs of life.

In front of Avalon Pier, a rag-tag procession of pickup trucks, SUV’s, and beat-up sedans with racks on top rolls through the parking lot, each vehicle pulling up to a different spot along the bulkhead, parking to face the sea. They will stay a minute or two, maybe ten or twenty, maybe an hour — engines running, tailpipe smoke wisping in the damp wind — their drivers warm inside, watching, waiting. A few intrepid fishermen brave it out on the pier, the platform trembling with each wave

crashing through the spindly pilings, the spray shooting up through the planks and drenching their trousers. Clouds of seafoam roll along the sand. Breakers lash against houses laid bare to the ocean’s fury from years of shoreline erosion.

Somewhere down the beach, a pack of young gremlins is out surfing the slop, bobbing up and down in the chunky soup, whooping and hollering as the sea tosses them around and saltwater sprays their faces. There’s little hope of getting a decent ride in conditions like this, but the kids don’t care; it’s better than staying inside playing video games. Red flags on the beach flutter furiously, reading NO SWIMMING…but no one said anything about surfing.

A woman in a raincoat walks past, her hand clasping tightly to her hood, body slanted sideways into the wind, a dog on a leash. A few gulls swarm around something that has washed up in the storm, leeching a whiff of decay into the storm-washed air.

Other than that, the beach is empty.

But inside houses all up and down the Outer Banks, surfers are listening to the mechanical voice coming from the NOAA weather radio, its uninflected drone creating a soundtrack for their anticipation: Seas. ten to fifteen feet.

Winds. east-northeast. at. thirty-five to forty knots. becoming southwest. at. five to ten. by. Sunday. Conversations in bars, surf shops, and post offices revolve around speculations, predictions, high hopes and jaded doubts. Buoy readings, surf cams, tide charts, Surfline, Magic Seaweed, the Weather Channel…the obsessed and everstoked are piecing the conflicting reports together like so many ingredients in a witches’ brew, poring over the information like mad scientists, knowing that however hard they try, they will never know what tomorrow holds. Days of anticipation over an approaching swell can end in total

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kinetic energy, fusing their movements with the changing shape and speed of the wave in an improvisation of drops, turns, stalls, pumps, and jumps — an athletic communion with the forces of nature, with no small amount of showmanship and bravado from those who can do it well.

Because of the geographic and meteorological idiosyncrasies of this long, straight, sandy stretch of coast, many variables must align for the surf to reach the level of perfection the larger surf world designates as world-class. It does happen, but almost never when predicted.

Superstar pros who come here for a week to experience the OBX mystique almost inevitably get skunked. There are no bays or coves to block the wind, no reefs or points to reliably focus the swells. What makes surfing possible here at all are small hillsized bumps of submerged sand that collect around piers or form in random spots along the beach from the shifting ocean currents.

These underwater dunes — commonly known as sandbars — lie just offshore, and as the tide shifts they rise closer to the ocean’s surface, forcing the incoming swells to break over top of them. The shape and position of the sandbars affects the shape and quality of the waves that break there.

Some sandbars are steep and evenlyshaped, like cones, forming A-frame waves that break on both sides. Others are shaped like long wrinkles parallel to the shore, and throw up fast, hollow, tubular waves, extremely difficult but exhilarating to ride.

Some sandbars have low rises and soft edges, and create long, slow, easy waves — until the giant swells come and they turn into big-wave magnets.

After a particularly violent storm, sandbars shift. Old breaks die, new breaks are born. Cell-phones vibrate and ping, as an information exchange among wave-watchers up and down the beach commences to make sense of the new

disappointment. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, beautiful clean lines of peaky A-frames or spitting barrels appear — rippable, shacking walls of pure energy — despite all predictions to the contrary. You just never know. The only thing to do is to rise at dawn with coffee in your cup and a prayer in your heart, and go get wet.

As damaging, unpredictable, and violent as storms may be, those who surf live for them. The winds generated by hurricanes, nor’easters and offshore low pressure systems churn the surface of the ocean into chaotic peaks of whitewater; and the nastier the storm, the bigger the churn. As the waves crash into each other, their energy focuses into swells, directional pulses of energy moving across the ocean’s surface in centrifugal/perpendicular arcs, marching like so many lines of footsoldiers through the unobstructed sea. The further the swells travel away from their tempestuous origins, the more organized and regular they become. But as a swell travels across the open ocean, it eventually begins to lose some of the fierce energy that created it; and if it travels too far, it will gradually fade back into the sea. If, however, it finds itself confronted with a solid obstruction –- a rocky point, a sandy beach, a barely submerged reef –- it will crash and burn violently in an explosion of whitewater and curl, an endlessly-repeating expression of the life force that animates the universe.

It is the death of the swell that makes possible the art of surfing. As the swell’s orbitals — cylinders of energy that extend downward into the sea ­— make contact with the rising ocean floor, the column rises higher and higher, and the crest jacks up into a concave wall before tripping over top of itself and slamming down on the surface in front of it. Along the fast-moving vertical edge of this wall, surfers explore an interplay of gravity and

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landscape. Parking lots are scanned for vehicles belonging to the most prescient of seekers. On the morning of a clean-up, board-laden trucks will set out at dawn, and some may drive hours up and down the beach before the crew inside settle on a spot to paddle out.

A good sandbar can last a month, a season, a year, sometimes longer. Often a spot will die for a while and then re-emerge with a slightly different size and shape to it. Some die slow deaths, some die quickly in big storms. There are certain spots that consistently attract good sandbars, and other spots that just magically appear one summer or fall in unexpected places.

And then there is the wind, perhaps the variable most obssessed over by surfers here. A steady offshore wind, blowing against an incoming swell, is the stuff of dreams, prayers, and fantasies; and on those all-too often occasions when the wind fails to switch offshore after a big blow and leaves the ocean lumpy and uninspiring, depresssion can set in among the local crew.

When it all comes together, the window of opportunity can be tight. The surf starts off sloppy and confused, too big, too much whitewater. Slowly it becomes cleaner, more coherent. For an hour or two, maybe three, it’s perfect. Peaky A-frames coming in one after the other, enough for everybody, smooth as silk…Then, as soon as it comes together, it begins to die. The tide comes in, the swells diminish in size and power, maybe the wind shifts once again and blows everything out. You missed it this morning is a common gloat around these parts, along with its kinder refrain, Still some fun ones out... The next day, the ocean will be flat, or choppy, or just not quite good enough to bother; and the crew will disappear until after the next storm.

The ocean takes all comers, from burnt-out punks to born-again Christians;

from pre-teen gremlins to septuagenarians.

Girls and women too, charging big waves, walking longboards with effortless style, or just floating on their boards, bikini bottoms rising out of the water. Summer surfers, Sunday surfers; guys who won’t surf if it’s too cold to trunk it; girls who will always paddle out, even on the iciest days. Brat packs and lone wolves, worldfamous globetrotting professionals, working folks who just want to get wet and catch a few rides before their shift begins. In the summer, tourists, on rented foam-top boards, catching the fever or giving up in frustration. They all come, they all paddle out. And when the forecast calls for epic, the Virginia Beach boys roll in like a band of Turks, charging at the best spots, pulling crazy aerial maneuvers, and generally acting like they own the place.

The level of talent here is high; and at certain spots, if a heavy crew is out, it can feel downright intimidating if you don’t know what you’re doing. Fortunately there are miles and miles of beach and pletnty of opportunities to find a spot all to yourself.

Even on a good day, the large majority of waves go unridden.

Many surfers prefer to keep to their own spot, just to avoid any hassle. It might not be the best wave on the beach, but surfing your home break day in and day out, you become a part of it. You get an intimate feel for the sandbar. You know the crowd who surfs there, and they know you. Your wife knows where to find you. These things matter, as much if not more than finding the perfect wave.

Surfers the world over know that it’s not just about the ride. Ask anybody who has logged untold hours paddling against the current, taken it on the head more times than they can count, and sat forever shivering, waiting for the next wave. All for a ten-second thrill? Not exactly. We celebrate the peak action, but it’s the in-between

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ties people together: pumped, stoked, peak, shoulder, grommets, barrels, floaters, kooks, snakes, sections, close-outs, peaky, spitting: these words and many more constitute a shorthand for conversations in and out of the water. The last swell, the next swell, the wind, the wave height, winter plans for warmer climes: these are the howdo-you-do’s among the surfing community.

They give meaning, shape, color, and poetry to life, love, and lore.

We are lucky to live here; we all know that. But like the Eastern surf itself, the very ground on which we have built our homes is fickle. Every major storm takes a house or two with it. Inlets have been blown open and closed shut, entire towns have been covered in sand. Arguments flare about what to do when a hurricane rips up the road or a beach gets eroded all the way to the edge of the road. You can’t fight mother nature, some say. To which others reply, without our beach, we are nothing, and we must do all we can to protect and maintain it. The debate will continue to rage until we are all washed away.

Life here is precarious; we all accept that as the price we pay. Sooner or later, a Cat Five will likely barrel in and blow this little strip of sand to smithereens. We’ve had warnings. We joke about it, resign ourselves to it, construct possible scenarios for other lives in other places, should we ever lose our home here. Given sufficient warning, most of us will pack whatever we can into our trucks and head for the mainland. But some of us, like the seacaptains of yore, will just let the storm wash over us and take us out to sea. For all it has given to us, it seems only fitting that it would one day take our lives in return.

Until that day, however, there are fish to catch, waves to ride, and many perfect days left to sit on the beach and stare off into the horizon, watching the weather change.

moments that make surfing a life. Getting a new board shaped.Running into an old friend out in the water. Sharing forecast info with the guy at the bank. Throwing on a warm fleece or flannel after peeling off a cold wetsuit, your body succumbing to the sleepy salty endorphin rush. Checking in with the ocean, even when there’s no swell.

And the visuals. The God-light, the green room, the white sparkles of midday, the orange glory of late-afternoon.

There are few more sublime moments to experience in life than that of sitting out in the lineup on a perfect evening with three or four friends, sometime around sunset, watching the world turn into a blazing canvas of reds, yellows, magentas, blues – sometimes even greens – and catching wave after wave as the day fades. On a glassy dusk, with just a touch of humidity in the air to obscure the horizon, the ocean reflects the colors in the sky so perfectly it feels as if you are swimming in a sea of light.

A life of surf is not conducive to the rhythms of the workaday world. Surf has no schedule. It comes on a Monday morning as often as it comes on a Sunday afternoon.

If the surf is up, responsibilities will get put on hold. Kids will play hookie, construction workers will walk off the job site. Lawyers, accountants, and realtors will sneak in midday sessions. The work will get done, eventually; but the swell won’t wait for quitting time. You have to strike when it’s hot, even if it means pissing a few people off. Surf-consciousness breeds a malleable sense of time that can drive clock-driven people crazy.

Sometimes it tests families and relationships, the surf life; but more often than not it builds them and solidifies them. Grandfathers go surfing with their grandkids; husbands and wives paddle out together; church groups and restaurants represent out in the water. The language

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THE FIVE SENSES OF THE SANDBAR bare feet. Sunburn. The prickle of salty skin under a t-shirt, the satisfaction of a hot shower rinsing it away. Salt in your pores, keeping you salty, even after a shower.

Saline sweat, swept away by the breeze. The sting of sand in high winds.

Slipping into neoprene, still damp from your last session. Damp and cold.

Numbness on your upper lip, face frozen.

Frozen fingers fumbling for keys. Peeling off your suit, freezing in the winter dusk.

Cranking up the heat in your car. Feeling the thaw.

The never-gets-old feeling of your board suddenly moving under you as a wave picks up your momentum. Finding the slot, feeling the speed and equilibrium. The ineffable satisfaction of trim.

Spray like needles on the back of your ears from a spitting barrel. The shock of cold water in winter. The bliss of cool water in summer.

Sun on your wet back in the lineup on a hot day. Water in your ears, in your nose, in every corner and crevice.

Salt in your eye. Rubbing your lid to scratch it. Board-rash and crotch-rot.

Sand in your bed. Sand in your shorts. Sand on the gas pedal, felt with bare feet. Sand in the pockets of your shorts as you reach for change at the store.

The wind. Blowing goosebumps, blowing across the hairs on your arm. Hot, cold, warm, cool, brisk, bracing, light, heavy, hurricane-force, ever-present, everchanging, wind.

Taste. Salt. Coffee. John’s. Beer.

Barbecue. More salt.

Strawberries in May, sweet corn in July. Crabs from Jimmy’s, shrimp and scallops from Tar Heel. Clams you dug yourself and roasted in the backyard. Salty kisses. Margaritas with salt. Watermelon.

Dune Burger. Lisa’s Pizza. Black Pelican, peanuts with beer. Frozen yogurt from Surfin’ Spoon. More coffee. More salt.

Fresh-caught grouper, cobia, striper.

Sound. The wind, blowing against the backs of your ears. Blowing through seagrass like a whisper.

The black-noise roar of a nor-easter, filling all frequencies. Flags fluttering, fast and hard. Halyards ringing, hammering against aluminum flagpoles.

The rhythm of a solid swell, pounding and receding, heard half-a-mile inland on a windless night. The beat of your own heart, anticipating tomorrow.

The bass-drum boom of a fat barrel collapsing. Spray blowing over the back of a six-foot death-wall, sounding like rain, high and crackling, hitting you in the face, taunting you for hesitating.

Water retreating from a gravel bed on the shoreline. Foam bubbles on the skim gassing off, hissing all along the length of the tide-line.

The whoops and hollers in the lineup. Laughing and chattering. The flufffluff-fluff of a line of pelicans, flying four feet over the ocean surface.

The high lonesome call of an osprey, circling in summer, searching for fresh prey to feed its chicks. The barking of dogs at dusk. The fevered chirps of a flock of murmurating starlings, mesmerizing and faintly ominous.

The NOAA marine radio, robotic and repetitive, rattling off numbers that mean things to sailors, surfers, and fishermen. The hum of Route 12 rolling under your tires. On the radio, 99.1, the Sound, playing Sublime. For longboarders, NPR, or a Bob Marley box-set on bluetooth.

Thunder rumbling, growing louder.

The thud of rain on a cedar-shake roof. Rain falling loud and fast for a few long minutes, then returning to a patter. Rain subsiding, a robin’s song celebrating the let-up.

Squealing, screeching seagulls.

A symphony of frogs after heavy flooding rains. The incessant ocean. The wind.

Touch. The wind in your hair, slapping against your face. Hot sand on

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Red drum. Old Bay and Texas Pete. Oysters, raw and snotty, slithering across your tongue and down your throat, saturated with the sea-salt terroir of Pamlico, Lynnhaven, Eastern Shore.

Saltwater in your mouth, going down your throat. The taste of eating it.

Saltwater at the back of your throat as you cough it up. The taste of pure stoke.

Smell. Salt blowing in off the ocean.

Fresh air after a storm.

Dogwood and honeysuckle in the spring. Jasmine and Russian olive in the fall.

Pollen of oak in May, smothering everything, sneeze-inducing.

Sunscreen. Wax. Resin. Moldy wetsuits in the back of the truck. Coffee.

Weed. A cigarette on the wind.

The stench of swamp-gas, the stink of septic leak. Sulfur and anaerobic decay. Festering flood-water. Yankee poop.

The smoke of marsh-fires from across the sound, burning for months, shrouding some summers in a tangy apocalyptic haze, trapping the heat, amplifying the hot crazies of the dog-days.

Sweaty bodies and stale beer, incense from some soon-to-be-forgotten white reggae band. Patchouli, Chanel, and damp t-shirts. Salt on the night wind. The scent of all the night’s promise.

Cedar shake. Bonfires. Smoke and barbecue. Diesel and fish-guts.

Sight. Sunshine. Smiling faces.

Friends in the water. The shape of a new board. Loblolly pines, etched upon the western horizon.

Dark clouds moving across the sky. Morning light. Evening light. The light of midday. So much to see. It could fill volumes, go on forever.

The long gnarly arms of oaks waving slowly in the wind. Patterns on the dunes, footsteps in the sand. Sea-glass hunters, pacing the beach, heads down, eyes focused on their gleaming quarry.

Sandpipers floating along the

sky-reflecting skim-line on spindle-legs.

Beach chairs, beach umbrellas, beach dogs, bikinis. Lifeguards on ATV’s. Tan-lines and lobster-backs. Wisps of horsetail clouds, the grid of a mackerel sky. Cirrus, cumulus, nimbostratus.

Victory-at-Sea whitecaps on the ocean. Storm surge battering the oceanfront, shooting up the walls of picturewindow cottages.

Lines of a long-period swell, sparkling under a perfect blue sky. Marching towards the shore. Breaking perfect. Gotime.

Morning fog in autumn. Mist rising like fire from the sea on a frozen morning.

A rare spring fog burning off at midday, sunlight glittering through the haze, water droplets racing across your field of view.

Flags at half-mast, for the latest world tragedy. Flags flying south, west, northeast, indicators of ocean conditions up and down the highway.

Sunrise. Sometimes bright and cloudless, burning over the water, blinding. Sometimes purple and sublime.

Sometimes hidden in gray, soft and sleepy, night fighting but surrendering to day in a seamless gradient. Sunsets, lighting up the sky like you’ve never seen anywhere else in your life. Technicolor afterglows, going on and on after the cell-phone flocks have left the soundside gazebos, unaware that the real show happens after the orb has bid adieu.

Night lightning, spidery flashes lighting up a sky of stormclouds.

A friendly face at the Stop-n-Shop.

Familiar trucks at your favorite surf spot.

Leaves in autumn, rising up in a circular column. A perfect wave, breaking as you reach the top of the dune-line. The wind, battering sand and sea-grass, shaking old windows. Haunting your dreams.

Memories linger, prolonging the moment, allowing you return, stored inside you like kindling, like water in a well.

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THE GHOST DANCE Dance there upon the shore; What need have you to care For wind or water’s roar? ...What need have you to dread The monstrous crying of the wind?

The Ghost Dance

If you happen to be driving through the village of Rodanthe, NC on a fine spring morning when there’s a fresh swell coming in from the ocean, you might catch sight of a lithe sixty-year-old man with silverand-blonde dreadlocks riding an ancient beach cruiser across the road, a clean white surfboard under his arm and a plain black wetsuit pulled down to his waist, heading out for a surf at the end of his street.

He doesn’t really surf anywhere else, or with anyone else. Though he lives a stone’s throw from Rodanthe’s fabled S-Turns­, and a few minutes’ drive from some of the better spots on Hatteras Island, he’d rather surf somewhere he can be at peace, and not have to contend with lineups, crews, snakes, pros, kooks, or, god forbid, photographers.

His features lined by the sun and wind, eyes the color of the ocean, dreadlocks the color of sand, he looks as if he sprang from a fairy rath deep in the dunes — which is close enough to the truth, if the one-story white clapboard house in which he lives, filled with artwork, guitars, and sea-treasures, qualifies as a rath.

Chances are you have seen evidence of his presence elsewhere on the Outer Banks. His mural art, depicting breaking waves, dancing trees, exotic flowers, and bright yellow suns, covers the walls of restaurants up and down the beach, and his smaller pieces adorn coffeeshops, rental homes, and private residences from Corolla to Ocracoke. His iconic wooden shop-signs line the roadscape of Hatteras Island, and you may have chosen a burrito or a burger off of one of his hand-painted menus.

He also paints surfboards. I myself own a blue one, emblazoned with a spidery yellow sun, custom-penned by him in the summer of 2002.

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If he has a nickname, I’ve never heard it. He goes by his given name, Richard. And with his longtime companion Claire, he lives a life of quiet creativity, struggling to maintain a foothold on the ever-growing and ever-endangered island outpost he calls home. He plays harmonica and sings in a band. Mans the helm at the local surf shop. Offers a helping hand around the community wherever help is needed. And, when at home, which is his preferred habitat, he spends his days and nights with Claire, drawing, painting, talking, playing music, and welcoming friends who always seem to be dropping by for a beer and a chat.

Early on a warm February afternoon, I stop in for a visit. Richard and Claire are in the kitchen, seated at the table intently working on drawings, trading colored pencils as they talk. Light streams in through the southern-facing windows, picking up bits of multi-colored dust that swirl around their heads like disintegrated pieces of a cartoon thought-bubble.

I knock on the window. Claire turns, lights up a smile and waves. Richard rolls out a squint-eyed bodhisattva grin as if he had been expecting me, and both of them get up to welcome me at the kitchen door.

A flurry of conversation ensues. It’s a moment I never grow tired of, coming through that door and, without fail, being greeted with such warmth and genuine happiness.

I first met Richard fifteen years ago, in the company of fellow Hatteras Island stalwarts Walker Pruden and Bert Lowdermilk. These three amigos, veterans of an earlier, wilder era on the Outer Banks, regaled me with half-remembered vignettes far more interesting than the sepia-toned yarns of tourist books and the Kodachrome memories of my own childhood vacations.

I crashed on Walker’s couch in Salvo. I slept on Bert’s boat in Ocracoke. We played guitar. We drank beer. We surfed. The easy company of these mellowed-out surf punks gave me a new perspective on the Outer Banks. They were the real deal, and felt no need to prove it to anybody.

As a wave-hungry teenager, circa 1972, Richard had ventured north from his home in Atlantic Beach in search of better waves, and met Walker one afternoon out in the water, chasing some windswell north of Nags Head Pier. Walker, barely fifteen at the time, introduced Richard to the feral aristocracy and outlaw culture of the Outer Banks in the ‘70’s.

It was so different back then, Richard remembers. Just vast tracts of sand, a few restaurants and stores here and there.

Tons of crazy characters. It was just so cool, so remote. And the waves. He was hooked.

Richard’s adult life was to take him on an odyssey far from these barrier islands, however, as he made multiple forays to California, Florida, and points beyond.

He married, divorced, struggled with addiction, and spent a couple of years as an international supermodel.

Eventually, scalded from a failed relationship, he returned to Rodanthe, to the embrace of old friends. And at a local art show where he was exhibiting his work, he met Claire.

She wanted to buy a painting from me, he says. I’d seen her around and wanted to get to know her, so I said, how about forty dollars and a walk?

Their first date turned out to be a debauched pub crawl through the town, but they were inseparable ever after. So they have dubbed their 15-year relationship the walk.

When they first moved in together to their roadside bungalow, the house

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was the only fixed structure on a lot about an acre in size, and from the attic it was possible to see the ocean, even check the surf. On the scruffy dune out back, which stretched all the way to the Pamlico Sound, their landlord, the late Mac Midgett, casually maintained a small collection of junked vehicles. It seemed the perfect hideaway for a pair of renegade artists.

As the years went by, they colored the cottage with all the love that was between them, and whenever you stepped into the house, you could feel it immediately. Their artwork covered the white walls, their styles beautifully complementary. Seashells, driftwood, and other beach-finds filled shelves and lined windowsills. A faded blue Persian rug covered a grayish carpet, and cozy second-hand furniture filled out the living room, the porch, and the kitchen. Old photographs and recent drawings were taped to the refrigerator, and little love notes sat unmoved by the coffee machine, the cabinets, and the kitchen table.

With stones that a random visitor brought from the mountains, they built a fire-pit in the side yard, and friends would come down to drink beer, roast oysters, and enjoy the couple’s easy hospitality.

Characters like Red Man and Mojo Collins often spent the night, playing music until the wee hours, shooting arrows at tin cans in the back yard, huddling around the fire and talking story.

They had it all to themselves, a little corner of paradise. Or, as Richard likes to say, paradise with teeth.

The Midgetts got into the business of moving small houses from oceanfront lots to make way for bigger rental-machines, and a number of these small houses were relocated next to the cottage. The back dune became crowded with trailers and

Richard and Walker, Trestles, 1978. Photo courtesy Richard Byrd.

RV’s, whose owners would show up in the summer and drive them off the sandy lot for two-week holiday excursions down south.

Their little hideaway was getting crowded.

Then, on August 27, 2011, Hurricane Irene bore down on the island.

The storm flooded huge swaths of the inland waterways, spattered the oceanfront with storm surge and skin-stinging sand, and blew an inlet straight through a narrow stretch of the Pea Island National Seashore.

As the waters on Hatteras Island rose, Richard and Claire realized that their house was going to be flooded. They stacked everything they could on top of tables and cabinets, and moved whatever they could carry up to the attic.

They passed a frightening night watching the storm from the attic window, ruing the loss of everything they could not save from the floodwaters.

In the daze of morning, they surveyed the wreckage. The salt water had killed their garden and most everything else in the vicinity. Mobile homes had floated into their driveway. Their ground floor quarters were destroyed. Overnight the world that they had created in the past eight years had been washed away.

For the next nine months they camped out in a nearby rental home, while they worked alongside neighbors and contractors, tearing out insulation, ripping up floors, knocking down siding. Old photos, documents, art pieces, furniture — the ruined detritus of their demolished dream-life — had to be jettisoned.

Richard lost teeth. Claire had a nervous breakdown. Stress and pessimism loomed over their days like a thunderhead, despite the beautiful weather that followed all winter long.

Their rebuilt house boasted composite wood veneer floors, professional

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sheetrock-and-eggshell walls, and stainless steel appliances. It had none of thecharacter of their old, eclectic, hippie-house, but structurally it was a much-needed update and overhaul. Spring came, and they set about settling in as best they could.

Then Hurricane Arthur hit, suddenly, ferociously, on the fourth of July, just as they were starting to feel comfortable. The house flooded again.

It was like a punch in the face, Claire recalls.

This time they lived out on the screen porch while the floors were being rebuilt. Recovery was easier the second time around, and they treated their porch-life like an extended camping trip. But Arthur’s gratuitous blow cemented an overwhelming sense of the fragility of their world. Despite their attempts to carry on and to paint their old lives back into existence, the handwriting on the wall kept bleeding through.

These days our conversations linger longer and longer over the changes that threaten the sanctuary of their little house on the side of the road at the edge of the continent. The rising sea levels and growing intensity of storms. The beep-beep-beep of earth-moving cranes clearing sand from roads and re-building dunes — machines which have become a permanent fixture in a town that otherwise would have been washed away by the ocean years ago.

The recent influx of urban boardsporting professionals who treat the area as their own private recreational facility: blowins from the north who tend to show little respect for, or interest in, the local community. And the relentless rat-tat-tat of new construction, which continues in spite of a depressed economy and examples in every direction of derelict structures laid waste by wind, sand, salt, and the incessant

pounding of the ocean.

Richard has begun to call it the Ghost Dance, this life they are living, a nod to the Native American religious movement of the same name that began over a century ago. It was basically kind of a death dance, he says by way of explanation. The Indians were getting moved off their lands, or just killed. It was basically the apocalypse as far as they were concerned. So they just started this dance. It was they only way they could stay connected to the spirit of their culture.

So now, he says, whenever I’m playing with the band and we’ve got some kind of nightmare crowd of binge-drinkers from up north who keep hooting, Wagon Wheel! or Play some Skynyrd!, I say to the other guys, we’re doing the Ghost Dance tonight. Just keep on dancing. Whenever the septic tanks overflow from over-use and algae bloom fugs up the water, we just keep dancing. Nasty customers and crazy drivers on the road, just keep dancing. Another hurricane bearing down on the island, just keep dancing.

Soon there may be another threat to dance against. The highway to the north is being re-built as a bayou-style bridge spanning the sound on the back side of the island, and the proposed new highway is slated to re-connect to the existing road along an easement less than fifteen feet from their kitchen door.

The purpose of the new bridge, to allow a portion of the north end of Hatteras Island to return to its natural state, is revolutionary, and controversial. Where it falls short, however, is that the road is sited to return to the mainland at one of the most fragile and exposed points of the island — and right in the middle of a residential area.

We’ll have to cross a highway just to walk to Midgett’s store, Claire says.

And there will be road crews just

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outside their door for months, maybe years.

Not to mention the eventual gridlock of summer traffic that will blow car exhaust through their windows on the prevailing southwest wind.

They will have to decide, when that day comes, whether to stay and tough it out, or to up stakes and try their luck somewhere more insulated from the ravenous fangs of progress and the unrelenting winds of geological change.

In the meantime, the boards still hang from the ceiling inside the front porch, and a wetsuit sits on a laundry-line, waiting for morning. It’s a three-minute bike ride to the ocean, to an empty wave that Richard has surfed religiously for the past thirteen years. That’s a hard thing to give up.

Midnight on a Monday night in the dead of winter. Claire sits at the kitchen table, finishing up a drawing she’s been slowly working on all day. She has decided to frame it and give it to me.

This is today, she says. And now you can always remember.

Richard is in the living room, lights out, stereo cranked loud. He’s standing in the middle of the floor, singing along, his hands pantomiming something between air-guitar and air-drums. The CD changer alternates between a Dave Alvin record, a Black Crowes disc, and a rough mix of the album he and his band are working on.

We’ve just feasted on a delicious stew of beans, rice, and veggies, and now a plate of homemade cookies sits on the table.

The music pauses. Claire says something like, I just want all the good tastes together, all at once! and steps outside to smoke cigarette.

Richard laughs and calls out to her as she opens the back door. I don’t know how long we can keep this going, Claire, but as long as we can, darlin, we will!

Excerpts from an Indian Summer Each golden day was cherished to the full, for one had the feeling that each must be the last.

Tomorrow it would be winter.

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The Campfire Legends

It started on a whim. Somebody had half a keg left over from a party and it needed to get finished off. So they took it to the beach and put the word out. Bring guitars.

We packed up a couple of trucks, piled in, and headed for the Ocean Bay beach access. Then we drove south along the ruttracks in the sand until we saw the fire.

Ten or twelve people were there already, pumping the keg and setting logs around in a circle. Plastic cups passed around three to a hand, warm Bud Light spilling over the edges. It was shaping up to be a pretty good bonfire.

Then the music started.

I don’t know what it was about the combination of people that gathered that night. At the end of every song we’d look around at each other, nobody daring to speak until the last note faded completely. Then we’d erupt in laughter. Song after song, the rhythms intensified, the harmonies thickened, the gusto grew ever greater.

We knew we’d started something.

After that night we continued to gather, usually around the full moon.

Many of us at those fires were veterans of the local music scene. We’d logged untold hours lugging amps and setting up speakers, playing our hearts out for a hundred bucks a night to hard-drinking vacationers. We were burnt out. The fires gave us new life. Others were new, or timid, or aspiring. The fires gave them courage.

Around the fire, we were all equal.

Most nights we’d have eight guitars ringing sympathetically in the night air, djembes pounding rhythms into the sand, and twenty or more voices singing full-tilt, uninhibited. A wall of sound, with fourand-five-part harmonies, and sometimes a couple of off-key singers filling in the spaces between.

Relationships were kindled and snuffed at those fires, friendships forged, opportunities taken. Skinny dipping, midnight surfing. Spirits passed around in flasks, sensemilla mixed with wood-smoke. The ocean air mingled with the freedom of being

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barefoot and slightly intoxicated on a moonlit night. Things happened.

No recordings were made of those sessions. No evidence exists aside from traces of bonfire glass. But to have been there, in the middle of that rough circle, surrounded by that mighty sound, with the keening of the wind and the crackle of fresh wood, the rhythmic boom of the surf, the yelps and cheers — there was something primal about it. We weren’t singing ancient folk songs or doing spirit-dances; but we were gathering round the fire, as have humans since time immemorial, making a joyful noise.

We played the music we knew, the songs of our age. Young Americans. Spirits in the Night. Listen, do you want to know a secret? I’m thumbin’ my way into North Caroline. Yeah, I got a first class ticket, but I’m as blue as a boy can be. Around the fire, these songs became our oral tradition, our inherited lore.

One night, in the silence between songs, somebody whispered, Campfire Legends!

It spread around the circle like a will-o-the-wisp. It became our secret code, our band name, our private hell-yeah. We had half-baked visions of going on the road, in a bus, only performing around bonfires.

Concerts would be free, out in farmers’ fields and whatnot, and we’d get by with donations, the old passing of the hat. A band of modernday troubadours, traveling through holes in the postmodern landscape. Once we almost booked a gig in the backyard of a local bar, but we couldn’t get around the legality of building a fire.

Why the fires ended, that’s easy enough to explain. Getting permits became harder. The winters were getting colder.

People were marrying off, or going through nasty breakups, or leaving the beach for New York, or California, or Mexico.

It’s just a fact of life. For most people, even an endless summer comes to an end.

But I take comfort in knowing that some other tribe is out there somewhere right now, banging away on guitars, howling at the

moon, faces flickering in the light of the fire.

Shooting the Pier

In the early years of the millennium, Kitty Hawk Pier was a derelict space.

Hurricane Isabel had chewed off half of its length, and the remaining structure looked as if it could fall into the ocean at any time.

A chain-link fence spread across the dune from one end of the property line to the other. Do Not Enter signs were placed at the entrance to the parking lot, and blown sand had covered up the concrete. But the iron chain roping off the lot had been bolt-cut so many times that at some point it became understood that replacing it was futile. The locals were going to have their beach, until somebody cared enough to force them off.

So, for a couple of years, the condemned pier and the surrounding beach basked in pirate glory. Holes were skillfully sliced in the fence, and the parking lot hummed with activity. Surfboards and beach umbrellas moved in and out of trucks and wagons, moms lathered sunscreen on squirming kids, and light summer winds perfumed the air with salt, coconut, cedar and the steam of hot skin to produce an aroma only to be found on certain beaches, on certain summers. Poets and sages still haven’t created a word for the state of being that smell induces.

In the summer of 2004, a small sandbar had formed around the pier, a perfect low-tide summer longboarding sandbar. It peaked about twenty yards south of the pier, and sloped evenly on both sides. A series of slow-moving offshore lowpressure systems delivered continuous fourfoot swells for months. Smooth, consistent rollers, breaking right and left, the rights going straight under the pier. Only one thing to do with a wave like that. Shoot the pier, all summer long, like some old Kodachrome from the '60's.

I had a 9-foot nose-rider that Jesse Fernandez had shaped for me, with Endless-

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Summer stripes painted along its length and the WRV logo on the deck. Underneath, he had penciled in The Mighty Bickford next to his signature and specs. The nickname was an old joke, its origin long forgotten. The board became known as TMB, and it was perfectly shaped for shooting the pier.

Mostly I surfed with Tom Vick, and we would vie for wave counts. We were like dogs who never tired of chasing a ball.

Shoot the pier, take it to the shore, walk back under the pier, paddle back out, shoot it again. It was an easy, effortless ride, just the way life seemed to be that year.

One afternoon in late September I caught a chest-high wave that had a little bump on the outside shoulder, and as I rode through the pilings it heaved up and tossed me smack into one of the barnacleencrusted posts that holds up the rickety remains of the pier. I sputtered, stood up in the waist-deep water, and saw my board wrapped around the post, snapped in two, the lamination on the deck still holding it together like a bent popsicle stick. I had a little bruise on my shoulder, which healed fast enough, and a few barnacle scrapes on my arm, which shed entirely too little blood to mark the occasion. It was the end of TMB.

That winter the Hilton bought the pier and the property that went with it. They put a fence around the perimeter of the lot and started building a hotel. The pirate days were over.

I still have the board, folded over where it split, shoved in the back of a storage space. It's yellowed and rotting, but you can still make out the inscription.

I stopped longboarding for a while.

It was like losing a dog. I didn’t want to just go out and get another. Jesse shaped me a new thruster and I started driving down to Rodanthe. It was time to get serious.

Avon Sunday

Saturday the wind blew hard from the south all afternoon. Crazy, blustery wind, smelling of springtime. We could hear fiftyknot gusts hissing and humming through the trees. Burly stormclouds passed low. But it was a warm, tropical wind, and we were all enjoying that mid-April feeling that we’d finally seen the back side of winter.

The Weather Channel was looping footage of major tornado destruction inland. Property damaged, lives lost. Late in the evening a tornado ripped though Currituck. Phones lit up, with news that the side wall of the Wave Riding Vehicles factory had been torn off. Dozens of halffinished surfboards were blown across the highway. Red Man’s Ghost, they said.

In retrospect it’s easy to say that we knew it was going to be good on Sunday.

But if you stick around here long enough, you learn to live with a lot of dashed hopes.

So we all retired with cautiously optimistic dreams of blue skies and fat barrels.

In the morning I got a call from Jeff Myers. Hey buddy, we’re in Avon. It’s freakin’ beautiful, man. Like I mean, perfect.

Get your ass down here.

I packed up the truck and headed south.

There was not a cloud in the sky, and in the ionized air everything seemed to sparkle. An earthy west wind blew the scent of fresh-tilled fields across from the mainland, flooding my brain with the barefoot certainty that I had absolutely no reason to do anything else today but this.

It was Sunday. From the top of Bonner Bridge, Hatteras Island spread out like an adventure-map. I was going south.

I reached Avon Pier around 11:30. A gaggle of college kids on spring break lay in a pack on the sand like seals, sunning themselves in the unseasonable warmth. Girls were wearing bikinis. Summer was coming.

I geared up, suited up, swam out.

Dappled flecks of white glittered on the surface of the water like brush-marks on an

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Impressionist painting. I started clicking the moment I was in. I wasn’t really sure what I was getting, but I didn’t really care. I was happy just to be out in the ocean with the sun on my face. It had been a long winter.

There was a solid crew at the pier: Billy Hume, Sterling King, Matt Pruett, Jeff, Chris McDonald, Devin Chambers, and a few Avon boys who were tolerating our presence. The surf was sans-pareil: headhigh, light offshore, barrels and ramps galore. From all sides guys were getting shacked, hauling down screamers, spraying me in the face, getting airborne.

Around lunchtime we straggled ashore one by one, refueled, hung out in the parking lot. The day was heating up. I took off my shirt and sat on the hood of the Cherokee playing guitar, my skin soaking up the Vitamin D like a dry sponge.

A consensus was formed to head a little further south, to a spot the Avon boys knew. They gave us the Hatteras pass and led the charge.

The wind and tide started eating at the swell, but it held through the afternoon.

We stayed until the sun disappeared behind the dunes, wringing every last bit of perfection out of the day. After pulling off wetsuits and packing up the trucks, we cleared out of that nameless sandy lane and scattered to our respective hobbit-holes.

On my way home I stopped to watch the rising moon, full and clear, making its own white dapples on the ocean.

The west wind kept blowing through the night, warm and thick, pungent with flowers and the scent of new life. My head was full of salt, my body drenched with the deep sensation of exhaustion and satisfaction that comes from a really good day in the water.

Somewhere up the road a couple dozen surfboards lay stuck in trees, resting in pieces in the ditch, ruined by the fury of a spring squall. Though they would never be shaped and ridden, they had flown higher and further than anything any of the boys rode that day.

the waves of September 11

It may help to understand the setup of the southside to truly appreciate how good the surf was that day.

When the ocean wind blows in from the northeast, as it often does, it churns up a choppy but powerful swell. Think of it as a pattern of miles-wide wrinkles in the sea, barely perceptible under the tempestuous slashes and splashes of a storm-shaken surface, heading to the beach like crusty monster-sized ripples from a giant stone tossed into the middle of the northern Atlantic.

On north- and east-facing beaches, where the wind is blowing onshore, these swells often arrive in an unrideable mess of whitewater and confusion. But when they make landfall at a point where the coast curves sharply back to the south — like, say, Cape Hatteras — their sides fold around the point like the front end of a car wrapping around a telephone pole. Wave scientists call it refraction; surfers, for lack of better slang, call it wrap-around swell.

So, on the south-facing beaches of Hatteras and Ocracoke Islands, the outer flanks of a northeast swell will sometimes bend inwards and head for the shore from a southeasterly angle. Meantime the wind which created the swell keeps blowing from the northeast, unobstructed by the lowlying dunes — essentially blowing against the incoming waves which it produced — creating a cross-offshore breeze, which combs out the stormy bumps and reveals the clean, powerful swell underneath. When the waves begin to break, the wind fills their faces like sails, creating high concave walls and hollow tubes.

This is, at least, the shaky science behind the mythology of southside swells.

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But the reality is that nine times out of ten, a northeast wrap-around setup on the beaches of Frisco and Ocracoke yields nothing but frustration. The swells come in dead parallel to the shore, breaking all at once, with no pocket, no peak, no shoulder, no wall. The sandbars won’t hold them right. The wind is just a little funky. You drive two hours to stare at clean but closingout barrels that are essentially unrideable.

Most surfers from the northern beaches eventually reach an age where gambling on a swell at Frisco is not worth the buy-in of hours wasted driving the length of Hatteras Island searching for something rideable, knowing how greatly the odds are stacked against them.

But on that day...

On that day, everything clicked into place. The swell had just enough angle to it to break diagonally along the sandbars.

The wind had just enough offshore push to it, without being too strong. The waves were six foot, clean, and peeling. It was as close to a perfect day as you can get on the southside. North of the Cape it was blown out. But on the southside, it was pumping.

The Ocracoke boys and girls were up early. We’d been surfing choppy summer swell for months. It had been barrels of fun: long days in the water surrounded by good friends, nights drinking beer and chasing love. But we were hungry for better surf. We’d already ridden up to Buxton and Rodanthe several times, in search of something real to ride, something with some teeth to it. We hadn’t really scored much. But the word was, something big was headed our way.

On the morning of September, 11, we rode out to Pony Pens and saw it,

gleaming in the white-hot sun, beautiful corduroy rolling in, just waiting to be ridden.

We frantically unstrapped our boards from various jeeps, trucks, and beaters, broke into sprints down the beach, and paddled out like mad Vikings.

We surfed as in a dream. Waves like that on Ocracoke are rare as unicorns. I had never seen anything like it. Not there at least.

It was a morning of high-fives, whoops and hollers; of long rides, fast walls, even a few barrels. Easy entry, and screaming fast once you were on it and in the pocket. Everybody scored.

We’d been in the water for a solid four hours when somebody paddled out and said, have y’all heard the news?

It took a while for the story to pass through the lineup. And then it took a little longer to register that it wasn’t a joke. The day was already steeped in strange magic, but this — this was beyond imagining. The unreality of the day suddenly took on a very dark shade.

We all paddled in together, disoriented, dazed; amped from the surf, freaked out from the news.

We weren’t sure what to do. We just knew we had to be out of the water, had to make phone calls, had to make contact with our neighbors, had to find out what was going on.

We headed back into the village.

Shops and restaurants had already closed up. People were out in the streets, sharing information and supposition, sadness and anger.

Those of us who had friends in New York were trying to reach them on cellphones. It was hard getting through. I finally

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got hold of my friends Sarah and Wick. Wick said they were fine, just shook up. Montauk was going off, he said.

We all ended up at the marina, drinking PBR and Budweiser by the docks.

American beers, in aluminum cans, with redwhite-and-blue labels.

The picture of what had happened, and who had done it, and how many had died, had by then become clearer. A name most of us had never heard before suddenly became short-hand for a new breed of killer.

A threat we’d been unaware of suddenly seemed to lurk in every corner. The usual concerns of this little crew of beach bums — the last table’s tip, the whereabouts of the afterparty, tomorrow’s surf report — now seemed embarrassingly trivial. Something was going on out there in the world, and all we could do was watch it happen, over and over again, on TV.

One or two of the boys vowed to sign up for the military, to reap vengeance in person. Fervent talk and wild strings of cursing alternated with long periods of silence.

Up and down the length of the East Coast that day, in surf-bars and beachfront hangouts, similar scenes were playing out.

We’d all paddled out that morning full of joy and excitement, reveling in first big swell of the the fall, bidding adieu to the long flat spells of summer.

And in the intervening hours, oblivious hours that we’d spent laughing, joking and surfing our brains out, the sky had fallen on America.

The rest of the afternoon and into the evening, the waves kept coming, sixfoot, perfect, unridden.

Rememberings ...you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes.

The places are what remain, are what you can possess.

They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way, you too become them.

The Rise and fall of the Gov’ner’s Surf Club As told by Jim Bunch, Kitty Hawk, NC:

As far back as I can remember, I spent my summers in the ocean. I can’t even recall learning how to swim. It just seemed I always knew how.

My grandfather, J. H. Wilkins, and his daughter— Lillian Hunter — had bought some oceanfront property in Kitty Hawk back in 1937. Land was cheap then, and grandpa bought about a mile of it for a dollar a foot. Lillian built a cottage there, about a mile south of the present day Kitty Hawk Pier, and everybody in the family would come down in the summertime.

Back then the bridge from the mainland was made out of wood, pretty scary to drive on, especially if the wind was blowing hard. Before we crossed, my grandpa would stop the car and have everyone roll the windows down, so we could escape if the car ran off the bridge.

It was a pretty tight-knit world; we all knew each other and all the kids palled around together. At the end of every summer we would board up the houses and everything would shut down until the next summer. Nobody stayed year-round back then.

As we got older, some buddies and I started exploring the nearshore beach wrecks — old sailing ships, larger vessels that had grounded during storms. From there we ventured into skin-diving. Since we spent the whole summer there, we could pick those days when the water was the clearest to do our exploring.

After a year at state college, I decided I wanted to go someplace where I could dive and enjoy the beach year-round, so in 1961 I packed up and headed for the University of Miami. That’s where I learned to surf. I spent most days hanging out at

First Street in Miami Beach, learning from guys like Jack Murphy and Allen Kuen. I switched to all night classes so I could surf all day.

The next summer I came home with my board and started surfing at the Kitty Hawk Pier. I was the only one out there, and nobody there had never seen a guy surfing before, so it was kind of exciting.

Pretty soon some of the local guys decided they wanted to give it a try. Mike Hayman I remember bought a board that summer, and Frank Weeks, Earl Jackson, Jerry Davis, Bruce Shepherd — it wasn’t long before there’d be three or four of us out there every day. We all had summer jobs, but you know the deal. If the waves were good, the job would just have to wait.

I went back to Miami for school that fall, surfed all winter down there, then came back the next summer, and things had picked up a little bit. Most days there’d be like fifteen or twenty guys in the water.

Guys down from Virginia Beach, too, Bob Holland and his crowd. And then the next summer, there were like fifty. That’s when it started becoming a problem. That’s when they posted those big signs, no surfing within 350 feet of the pier. There was a lot of contention between the surfers and the guy that owned the pier. It would get pretty nasty sometimes.

That third summer — that was the summer of ‘64 — a beautiful sandbar had formed a little ways south of the pier, and so a lot of us started surfing down there. There was this guy Sheryl Ward, whom everybody called the Gov’ner, or the Gov, who had a an old motel building down there that he advertised in the paper as The Gov’s In, with only one N. He didn’t have a sign up or anything, but he’d rent you a room for 20

Photo by W. Aycock Brown. Courtesy Outer Banks History Center/Jim Bunch/Keith Newsome

bucks or so a night. Most of the time he just lay back in his hammock in front of the place and read the newspaper all day long. Once he saw that surfing was getting popular, he bought a bunch of boards and started renting them out. He and Bill Anderson of Anderson’s store had a little thing going — Bill let the Gov put his boards out in front of the store, and they’d split the profits.

Well, it got to the point where there were too many people parking and surfing there, so the Gov decided to start a surf club. He had these special license plates made, and you had to pay dues, which I think were like ten bucks, and he’d give you one of the plates, and then you would be a member of the Gov’ner’s Surf Club. Really it just meant you could park at Bill Anderson’s store and surf in front of Bill’s land. But if you didn’t pay the dues and get the license plate, then you couldn’t park there, and you couldn’t surf there.

There was a crew of boys from Manteo and Wanchese who’d been coming up every day, and they didn’t want to pay the money, so they ended up parking at a lady’s house across the street. Her name was Miss Kitty. Miss Kitty was paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair, and she just really liked watching the surfers. She’d sit out there on her back deck and watch the guys all day long. So she was happy to let the boys park at her place. So the Wanchese boys kind of had a little club of their own, over at Miss Kitty’s. I remember she was particularly fond of Larry Holmes, this kid from Manteo who had a reputation for being the meanest guy on the beach. Well known for his fighting abilities. But he was always real nice to Miss Kitty. Matter of fact he ended up organizing a bunch of us to pitch in and rebuild the end of her deck so she could have a better view of the surf. We

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got along fine with those boys.

But Bill and the Gov, they weren’t too happy about all that. They didn’t like the fact that the Wanchese boys were parking for free over at Miss Kitty’s.

So it became sort of a rivalry. I guess they thought it undermined the club or something to have a bunch of freeloaders parking over there and surfing in the same spot. We didn’t really care that much. We were all friends for the most part. But Bill and the Gov, they couldn’t stand it.

Me, I was friends with everybody, and sometimes I’d hang out with the boys over at Miss Kitty’s. Wasn’t any big deal as far as I was concerned.

One day it kinda came to a head, though. Bill came up to me when I was coming out of the water and said, JB, you can either go with them or you can go with me, but you can’t do both.

I said, Bill, all I want to do is surf.

That’s all I care about.

He said, Fine then, you can’t park here anymore, and you can’t walk across my land to go surf. You can’t even walk by my store on the road.

So I parked over at Miss Kitty’s the rest of the summer, even though I still had my license plate. I still surfed with the same guys, nothing really changed. I just had to give my money to somebody else if I wanted a soda from Anderson’s.

Bill and I ran into each other at a local bar near the end of the summer and had a bit of a laugh about it. He wasn’t one to hold a grudge, and neither was I.

The following year, the sandbar went away, and we all moved back to surfing the Kitty Hawk Pier. So that was pretty much the end of the Gov’s Surf Club.

All in all it was a good time. One of the best. It really was.

on bonner bridge

As told by Jesse Hines, Nags Head, NC

Me, Matt Beacham and Nick Thornhill, we were all friends. I was 14, Matt was 16, Nick was 17. It was summertime, and pretty much every day we’d drive down south to go surfing. Back then it seemed like Rodanthe was always a couple feet bigger, so we were always going south. We never surfed in town.

So it was a typical summer day, southwest windswell, offshore in the morning, usually good for like five or six hours if you got up early enough, and we surfed until it got blown out and then we packed up and headed home.

On the way back, we were messing around in the car, just being groms, you know, throwing crackers and cracking jokes and stuff. Matt was driving, Nick was shotgun, and I was in the back seat. At some point I said something to Matt — I can’t remember what, just razzing him — and he reached back and grabbed my leg and started digging his fingers into me. I just started hitting him really hard in the arm, yelling “get off me!” and laughing. We didn’t think anything of it, really, at the time, and l don’t know if it had anything to do with what happened.

But a few minutes later, we were on the bridge, right at the bottom of it where it starts to turn, and Matt goes, Man, I feel kinda weird.

And I’m like, You all right?

And Matt’s like, Yeah, I just feel kinda light-headed. But he keeps on driving.

And then, like a couple minutes later, he says, I feel like I’m gonna faint.

And as soon as he says that, he just passes out at the wheel. Like, knocked out.

My memories of it are kind of like

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shock memories, you know what I mean? I just remember certain things and it’s kinda blurry, kinda fuzzy.

At that point we’re going up the big rise on the bridge. And Matt’s passed out at the wheel. And Nick, I swear to God, he’s got his head hunched over, looking under the passenger seat, trying to find some cookies. Totally oblivious. Cause it happened just like that. He didn’t even know Matt was passed out.

I remember reaching forward and trying to grab the steering wheel, and that’s the last thing I remember.

Apparently we drifted into oncoming traffic coming down over the hump, and there was a car coming up from the other way. They saw us and swerved and hit the side of the truck right where I was sitting and it sent us spinning and rolling, and we landed with our back wheels hanging over the side of the rail.

So we were teetering on the guardrail with just enough weight on the bridge side to keep from going over the edge. It was literally a matter of a few inches.

So I wake up to this awful, terrible, screeching, metal-on-metal sound — basically like a can opener, like a giant can opener. And they’re ripping the car open with this big machine, and they’re trying to get me out. Nick, he hit his head pretty hard against the windshield so they were taking care of him. But Matt, he’d had angels around him or something. He’d just fainted is all, and then he woke up fine.

But the car had hit right where I was sitting so my hip sockets broke because they got jammed up into my hips, and my femur broke because that’s basically right where the car hit, and I had a bunch of cuts

all over.

I just remember waking up and the wind was blowing hard from the southwest and we were way up on the bridge so all you could feel was the wind, and this sound, and I remember by this time Matt had woken up, and they were trying to get me out and he was holding my head, because they didn’t know if I had broken my neck, and I had this big cut in my leg, and I just stuck my fingers in my leg and there was all this blood, and Matt was like, No, no, you’re okay, you’re okay! and he was holding me and I remember asking him, Are we dreaming, is this like a really bad dream? and he was like, No, no, we got in a car wreck, you’re not in a dream, and I was like, No, this is a bad dream, this has to be a bad dream!

So they got me out of the car, and the helicopter landed at the end of the bridge, and an ambulance drove up the bridge, and they put me on a stretcher.

They put my neck in a brace, and then they tied my legs down to these leg braces. I just remember it hurt so bad, I was screaming at the top of my lungs. The leg braces were riding up my butt and pulling on my legs because I was so little — I was fourteen years old, and I was a tiny fourteen — and these things were made for adults.

So they put me in a helicopter and flew me to Norfolk Sentara, cause there was no hospital here back then. And because I was a minor, they couldn’t give me any pain medication without parental consent. So they had to wait for my mom to show up to get permission to use anything. And there were no cell phones, so she didn’t even find out about it — she probably didn’t get there till like eight hours after it happened.

So just sat on those leg braces with

like a sheet over me, in the hospital, for hours, waiting for my mom. I mean, they just left me there.

The only thing I could do to relieve the pain was like, reach this certain tone of grunting, like uhhhh — I remember this vividly — if I hit this certain note, the pain would go away for a little bit. So I kept doing that. But there was somebody in a bed next to me on the other side of the screen and they started going, Shut up!

Stop Grunting! Shut up!

I remember doing that for hours, and then my mom finally got there. And then I think they wheeled me in to where the doctor was, and then — I don’t really remember — but basically they said to me, okay you’ve broken your legs, we can either put you in a body cast for six months, or we can put a rod in your leg and you can be surfing again in a few weeks. And so I was like, Uh, I’ll definitely take the rod.

So they put a rod in my femur, and basically there was nothing they could do about my hip sockets. I just had to be in a wheelchair for like a month and wait for them to heal.

So I just lived like that for another fifteen years or so. I was still growing, so the rod got all pinched and started digging into my hip and it just got worse and worse and worse. I went back to the doctor when I was 17, which was about when the pain really started, and he basically told me I just had to deal with it, unless I wanted to be in a body cast for a year.

I started surfing professionally when I was 19, until I was 31, so basically my entire surfing career I had this rod in my leg that was tearing up my insides, and it hurt like hell.

My saving grace was that it was my

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front leg, so I just molded my surfing style around it, and just relied more on my back leg, you know, snaps and frontside carves, stuff like that. But I couldn’t get backside barrels unless I was standing up, because I couldn’t bend my front leg to grab the rail.

It’s kinda funny because I’ve got a couple of backside shots that made the covers of different magazines, and I’m standing up in all of them. I just had to figure out how to work with the pain, and basically had to keep it a secret so there wasn’t any issue with my sponsors. I wasn’t doing many contests, it was mostly surf trips with photographers, so as long as I scored good photos, they were happy with me. And I don’t know what it was, probably luck more than anything, but I got some really highprofile cover shots.

I landed some modeling gigs, too, around the same time. That’s a whole other story, but between traveling around the world surfing, and doing these gigs for Abercrombie and Polo, and then coming back to the beach and working construction, I was pushing myself pretty hard. And I was playing in a band, too. Just going full-tilt, like you do in your 20’s.

But the last few years of it, every time I went on a surf trip, I had to take pills.

Like if I knew we were going to be doing a lot of walking, or if I knew it was going to be really gnarly, or a really long day, or just super-cold, I’d have to eat a bunch of pain pills. And my main sponsor was O’Neill Wetsuits, so we were always going on trips to like Norway, Alaska, Iceland. You know, really cold places. And we’d be doing a lot of walking, like through snow and ice and rocky beaches.

I knew I had to do something about it, so I finally went to another doctor and he

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took some x-rays and said, dude, your hip looks like a ninety-year-old-woman’s. You need to get a hip replacement right now.

I told him I couldn’t do it. Cause I knew if I called up my sponsors and said, hey, I need to get a hip replacement, I’m gonna be off for the next six months, that would have been the end of it. So I waited as long as I could, until I turned 30 and was ready to quit surfing professionally, and then I got the operation.

`And now, it’s crazy, it feels like nothing ever happened. Like, no pain at all.

After all those years, I’m just so excited now every time I go surfing because it doesn’t hurt anymore. I feel like I’m getting all those years back. It’s not like I’m out to achieve anything, but it just feels great to be able to do things that I haven’t been able to do. It’s like I’m a totally different surfer now.

I’ve had to make my peace with everything that happened that day and all the years after. I was angry about it for a long time, you know, kinda like, why me, God? But looking back, in spite of the pain, those were some of the best years of my life.

It’s kinda strange, you don’t remember the pain the way you remember everything else. When I think back on everything, I just remember the people and the places and the waves and all the little funny incidents that happened along the way. I mean, my hip was killing me the whole time, but now that the pain is gone, it’s kinda like it got washed away from my memories a little bit too.

You can’t pick and choose what happens to you in your life. I’m just grateful I lived to tell the tale. I mean, we could easily have died that day.

Red man’s Remains

As told by David Rohde, Kill Devil Hills, NC:

Look, let me just state for the record that I don’t believe in ghosts. I was educated by Jesuits, and if there’s anybody who’s gonna make you seriously question all that stuff, it’s the Jesuits.

So I’m not gonna say, yeah, absolutely, there’s this ghost at the Wave Riding Vehicles surfboard factory, and, well, everybody here knows it’s our old friend Red Man who passed on some time ago who decided he was going to haunt the place for ten years. Cause I don’t believe in ghosts.

But at the same time, I’ve seen things. I’ve heard things. I’ve felt things.

Not like in my bones, but physically. Like on my head. Like I got whacked in the back of the head — hard — by a sanding block that had been sitting securely on a rack five feet away. No law of physics that I know of can explain how that happened. And that’s one incident out of dozens.

And I’m not the only one. Pretty much everybody at the factory has got at least a handful of Red Man ghost stories. So call it what you will, it’s not so much about what I believe, as what I’ve experienced.

What we’ve all experienced. Yeah, you can make jokes about us all inhaling too much resin fumes and foam-dust and whatever else, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that some really strange things happened in the factory after Red passed away.

Okay, backstory. Red came from California. His real name was Robert Manville, but I don’t know anybody who called him anything other than Red Man or Red. His dad surfed, and was a bit of a small-time dealer, so I guess you could say he was born to it, on both accounts. One

day this local guy traded his dad a surfboard he’d found in a dumpster for a bag of reds, those uppers that were big in the sixties and seventies. That became Red’s first board.

Paid for, with a bag of reds.

Red started shaping early on.

He was a natural at it, and he got lots of work, with some of the biggest names in California. His boards were hot commodities, but he had a reputation for being kind of a grifter. I don’t know any of the details — I’m not sure anyone does. All I know is he’d had some sketchy dealings, had shadowy parts of his past he never talked about.

But he was a genius of a shaper. His lines, his curves — I still use them in boards I shape today. All of us around here do.

There’s just something iconic, something perfect about the way he drew a curve.

Anyway, the surf scene in LA in the 80’s was kind of crazy, lots of out-of-control drug use, huge parties, that whole LA vibe, and at some point Red had just had enough and he had to get out.

That’s one version of the story at least. Another is that he got run out of town.

Maybe he owed somebody money, who knows. Anyway, his friend Jim Fuller was shaping on the East Coast, and surfing was taking off here so there was a lot of demand for shapers.

So Red came east, like the rest of us. Running from something, like the rest of us. And like the rest of us, he found some kind of rootedness and a sense of home here in this land of lost children. He spent a couple of years up in Virginia Beach, but he gradually drifted down here. WRV needed a solid shaper, and so they offered him a full time position in the North Carolina factory.

In his time off he’d go down to Rodanthe and moonlight for Hatteras Glass

Photos left and following page courtesy Richard Byrd

and hang out with the crowd down there.

It was almost like the further away he got, the happier he was, but he never stopped shaping, wherever he went. Even on vacation.

The shaping world is full of eccentric, obssessive, even mystical characters. It goes with the territory. They’re like the blacksmiths of the surfing world.

They create the blades that warriors take into the fray. And just like in blacksmithing, there’s a tad bit of sorcery in what they’re doing. Working with the elements, channeling the forms and patterns of nature into something that can parry and thrust and move across a wave. It’s a mixture of art, science, and just plain intuition, and the smallest little thing can throw off an otherwise perfect board. Or turn it into a magic board.

Until a few companies started using computers and machines in the late ‘90’s, every surfboard ever made was made by hand. Every single one, all over the world.

No two were alike. Think about that. You could have two boards with exactly the same specs, shaped one after the other by the same guy, and one could be magic, the other could be a total piece of crap. And believe me, no shaper gets it right 100% of the time. But Red got it right more than most.

Pretty much overnight he became one of the top shapers on the Outer Banks. He was always just a step ahead of everybody else. It wasn’t so much that he was some kind of innovator; I mean, by the time he came here in the early 90’s, the thruster revolution was already firmly entrenched. Surfboards had pretty much reached the peak of their evolution as far as shapes went.

But Red just had a way with the foam. He just carved really beautiful lines.

Go around and ask people about their

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magic boards. I guarantee you just about every serious surfer over the age of 35 on this beach has a magic board somewhere in their quiver that was shaped by Red Man. Guys would call from Hawaii to get their Pipeline guns shaped by Red. His longboards were legendary. He just had the touch.

Red had an incredible work ethic, too. I think it was his way of dealing with whatever he was dealing with on the inside that he never really shared with anybody.

He just kept it all under wraps by sticking to his routine. He was a little OCD, had to have everything in the right place. You’d go to his house, and everything on the coffee table would be perfectly lined up — books, pencils, even where he set his drink down.

His shaping room was always immaculate.

Most people who didn’t know him thought he was really quiet — so quiet it was a little uncomfortable to be around him if you didn’t know him — but at the factory he was hilarious. He had his pack of Kool cigarettes that he always kept in the exact same spot on the shelf, and his styrofoam cup that he drank beer out of. He’d crack jokes, get into arguments with the other guys. All in all he was just a great guy to be around, and his presence really set the overall mood of the factory. There were the usual drama, politics and rivalries that you get in any working environment, but Red kept his cool. At least most of the time.

It wasn’t any big secret that Red struggled with addiction all his life. When he first got here his drug use was pretty off the chain. He’d do a bunch of blow or whatever and then stay up all night shaping boards, blasting music, hanging out with friends.

And yeah, he got into the needles too.

But once he got into the groove working at the factory, he kinda mellowed out and just focused on his work. Just beer and cigarettes, and foam-dust.

Every now and then. though, he’d go off the rails and slide into a seriously heavy bender. He’d disappear for a couple days and just get wrecked — but then he’d show up the next day at the factory and get right back into his routine. This would happen, like, once a year.

But a couple of times he just happened to party with the wrong girl.

Again, the details are pretty sketchy, but let’s just say there were needles involved.

And that, as far as anyone knows for sure, is how he got sick.

After he got his diagnosis, Red just kept on working, all the way to the end. It almost made you cry to see it. Guy knows he’s dying, but he just keeps on showing up for work, keeps on living his life — shaping boards, shooting beer cans with his compound bow, hanging out with his friends.

After he died, Richard and Claire flew out to California with some of his ashes and scattered them in the Pacific.

It wasn’t long after he died that weird things started to happen. Stacks of paper would suddenly get blown around in the offices, even with all the doors closed.

Boards lined up against the wall would get knocked down like dominoes. And the power would keep going on and off. We’d come in the morning, and everything would be on — the radio, the lights, the fans.

Sometimes I’d go into the shop on a Sunday, do a few things, feed the cats that hung out in the woods behind the building, close everything up, turn out all the lights.

Then I’d come in the next morning, when I knew nobody’d been there, and all the lights would be on, the compressor would be going. It got to the point where it wasn’t even strange to us anymore. It was just Red.

When I got hit on the head by that sanding block, it felt like Red was clapping me on the head for working the planer a

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little too hard. Like he was watching me, and schooling me.

As weird as it all was, we all began to feel like Red was this presence around the factory, and when we weren’t doing things right, he’d make his opinion known by knocking things around.

Then there was this freak storm in the spring of 2011 when a tornado ripped through and tore off the back wall of the shaping building, and blew a few dozen boards across the highway. We joked about it, saying Red must not have been happy with those shapes.

Jesse Fernandez probably saw the craziest stuff. He and Red were rivals of a sort, so that stands to reason. It was like they still had a few things to work out.

Jesse says he still sometimes talks to Red Man while he’s working on a board.

You know, like, What do you think, Red?

We all talk to Red, strange as it sounds. I still keep a fresh pack of Kools on the shelf, right where he used to put them.

Not for me, but for Red. I still feel like it’s his space. He probably thinks it’s a total mess, but I do try to keep it clean. You know, for Red.

Many times I’ve felt Red’s presence in the shaping bay. I’ll be working on a board, carving out a line with a planer, and I’ll feel something on my hand, sort of guiding it, maybe putting more pressure on it or pulling me back, to ease up on the line. I’m not going to try to explain it or defend it, that’s just what I’ve experienced.

At first I thought it was all in my head, but I’m not so sure anymore.

Lately it’s been fairly quiet at the factory. I think maybe Red is ready to move on. But every now and then he’ll breeze through, knock something off the wall or blow some papers around. Just so we don’t forget him.

The wrath of mars As told by Brett Barley, Buxton, NC:

Honestly, I would give back everything — all the good waves, all the photos, the entire incredible day — for it not to have gone down the way it did in the end. I’ve apologized many times, both publicly and to the individuals involved. And if I need to apologize again, I will. Because I truly regret the worry I caused.

But that being said, it was an incredible day of surfing.

It was early February, and a huge nor’easter had been blowing for a week straight. The Weather Channel had named it Mars, and we were anticipating a big swell.

The day before, the Diamond Shoals buoys peaked at, like, 19 feet at 17 seconds or something, which is — well, put it this way, that’s as big as I’ve ever seen around here. But the question was, could any spot here handle that kind of size?

Two weeks before, during the Jonas swell, we’d found this spot. I’d rather not say where exactly. Every other spot we tried that day was shutting down, but this one was holding it, way outside, like half a mile out. And firing. Like double-overhead, screaming fast, big huge drops, long shoulders. We just don’t get surf like that around here on the outer bars.

But we knew it could handle more.

So the day Mars cleaned up, me and Jeffery O’Neill got up an hour or so before sunrise to check it out, and as soon as we got over the dune, we started seeing these twelve foot waves just freight-training down the beach. It was still dark and you could barely see them, but they were huge. So we went back to get the ski.

So legally you can only launch a jet ski from either Pirate’s Cove in Manteo or from Hatteras Village — both of which involve navigating inlets and driving the ski through miles of open ocean just to get to the spot right off the beach where you

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want to use it. You can’t launch anywhere on the beach because it’s National Seashore and it’s patrolled by the Park Service. But that day, we made the call to just go for it and risk the ticket. I mean, I pay for surf trips to get waves like this. So getting a five hundred dollar ticket or whatever, we figured it was worth it. And besides, we wanted to get pictures. I mean, this is my home turf and the waves were huge — I just felt like we really needed to document it. We could have paddled out without the ski, but if we were going to get good photos there was no way that we could line everything up without it.

I was trying to keep as few people on the ski as possible, but you need at least five or six guys just to push it across the beach. So it was me, Jesse Hines, Fisher Heverly, Matt Munden, and Matt Lusk. Joey Crum and Cash Barris were at the next ramp waiting. So seven of us. That’s a lot of people to tow around. The shorebreak was shoulder high and breaking right onto the beach, so just launching was an ordeal in itself. Then I had to wait for guys to paddle through before I could pick them up. Then I’d drive them like a mile north — way out of sight of anybody — and then go in and get the next guy. And by the time I got one guy out there, the guy I’d taken out before would have drifted almost halfway back. So then I’d have to take him back out. Then I’d have to go back to the beach and pick up the next guy. It took forever just to get set up.

It was every bit of ten to twelve foot with fifteen foot face sets and just going top to bottom, and blowing hard offshore. Matt and Jesse were the first to score. They both caught insane waves.

Everyone got some waves. Even Dana Quinn, who’d had paddled out on his own, on a 6’6”. We figured if he’d gotten out on his own he deserved a ride to get

into position. And he scored this monster.

Then things kinda faded for a while and we were worried it was going to die on us, but then sometime after midday it turned back on, and I managed to get a couple myself.

I remember seeing this one in the distance, and it was just about the craziest, most perfect wave of that size I’ve ever seen here. It was at least fifteen foot, maybe eighteen, and every bit as wide as it was tall. Nobody was in position to catch it, or even photograph it. All we could do was watch. It just threw and ran and blew its guts out.

Towards the end of the day Fisher took the ski so I could catch a couple more on my own. So there’s like twenty minutes of light left, and literally, within three to five minutes of us all getting in position, this wave came that was like — probably the best wave I’ve ever caught here. I think. Just one of the biggest, juiciest top-to-bottom waves you could ever wish for on this side of the Atlantic.

I kicked right out and switched with Fisher. And we just kept doing step-offs until the light faded.

Drew and Raven, those guys had kinda followed us out and they were out on their skis too. They had three of them, which made four skis out in the water. So when it came time to beach it and get the trailers and haul the skis up the beach, it suddenly became this huge production. All these trucks running and the skis all loud in the shorebreak and all these guys hauling them up the beach. I was thinking, this is a good way to get caught. So I dropped Fisher off and told him and Matt to go get the trailer and we’d beach the ski at a different ramp.

While they were gone I was sitting out there behind the shorebreak waiting, and I was watching these two big trucks on the beach with trailers, with all their lights on, and I just knew somebody was gonna see all this. And right at that moment a

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ranger truck came up the beach, turned his lights on, and pulled up next to Raven.

And even though I’d been totally fine with getting a ticket, in that moment I thought, well, maybe I can dodge them. So I took off, going north to the next ramp, and on the way I called the guys, to tell them I was relocating. But no one answered. I beached the ski by the next ramp, pulled out the phone to send a text, and right when I pushed send, the phone died. Not because the battery was dead, but because it was too cold. So I grabbed my radio. But it had shorted out from all the water that flooded into the crotch compartment when we were launching.

So there I am, on the beach, in the dark, and I can’t get in touch with anybody, and nobody knows where I am. But I figured they would be looking for me and they’d find me soon enough, so I just decided to hang tight.

The beach was long and flat, and the tide was coming in. There was no way for me to just pull the ski up to a safe spot on the sand by myself. The best I could do was tie a tow-rope to this old shipwreck that was on the beach, and every time a big set came in, I’d pull the ski with all my might, a few more inches on to the beach, and then I’d tighten up the slack. I only made it like four feet and about got a hernia. But the sets were so solid that if I hadn’t been holding the ski it could easily have been taken out to sea. And still I’m thinking, I’m only one ramp away, somebody’s gonna come.

So twenty minutes went by, and then forty-five, and around that point I started to panic. It was dark and freezing, I knew that my wife would be freaking out, the guys would be freaking out. I was pretty much safe and I wasn’t cold because I was so amped up, but nobody knew that. I’d see headlights hit the telephone pole, and think, sweet, somebody’s here, but it was

just cars passing on the road.

I was only a hundred yards from the ramp. I could have just said to hell with the ski and walked up to the ramp and out to the road or something. But I wasn’t thinking like that. I really thought that somebody was going to find me.

Then an hour went by, and then an hour and a half, and still nobody. So I started praying. At that point I didn’t care who found me. If it was the police, or the Park Service, whatever. Give me a ticket, I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was to call my wife and tell her I was fine. That’s when I started thinking that I’d give back that whole day, if only I could call my wife right then and let her know I was okay.

About two hours into it I saw headlights coming over the ramp, so I started running up, waving my arms, to make sure they didn’t leave. It was Jeffrey O’Neill, Billy Cruz, and a couple other guys.

They were like, Hey, everybody’s looking for you! And I was like, Can somebody call my wife right now? So Jeffrey called her, and I saw she was telling him something. Then he hung up and said, Dude, she says the Coast Guard is looking for you.

Apparently the rangers had actually seen me out in the water, and since they didn’t see me come in, they thought I was missing.

We called them and they called the search off, but by this time they’d already been doing fly-overs with searchlights, the whole bit.

My dad showed up with the jet ski trailer, and when he saw me, he just broke down. He started hugging me like he’d never hugged me before, because he’d thought I was gone.

When I got home, my wife had kind of decompressed because her sister had come over, but it was a good two weeks before she got over the whole thing.

They let me go that night, didn’t

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ticket me or anything, but I knew I had to go make a lot of amends the next day. The ranger gave me the opportunity to call and confess, so I called him. I was really tore up, and he knew it, so he said, Look, I know you’ve already been through a lot and you’ve learned your lesson, so I’m just gonna give you a warning. But if you could just make a public apology, I think that would be the best thing, because in your position you’re setting an example for everyone else. I had already posted a big apology the day before online, but I said sure, of course.

It seemed like for the next week or so I was apologizing to everybody. You get so amped up sometimes over a swell, it’s like it blinds you or something. You don’t think it through past how you’re gonna score the big wave. You forget about other people, about how they might be affected.

After all was said and done, the head ranger at the Park Service told me, look, we do make allowances for people who need to use the park for work.

Researchers, biologists, we let them launch boats when they need to. And since you surf professionally, you were basically doing your job, so you might be able to apply for a permit. No guarantees, but it’s possible you could do this legally next time.

So I’m working on a letter to the head of the permit office. Hopefully we’ll be able to work something out.

I guess, as messed up as everything got, that’s potentially a silver lining to the whole fiasco. Lesson learned. Bad things happen and you figure out how to minimize the damage next time around.

If I had to do it over again, I’d have beached that ski when I saw the ranger and just turned myself in. I’d have done lots of things differently. So, I’ll say it again, to all involved, I’m sorry. I really am.

But we did catch some amazing waves that day.

MICKEY

On the morning of December 23rd 2016, the Outer Banks lost its most iconic and prolific surf photographer, and one of its best-loved individuals. Mickey McCarthy, one-time shaper, glasser, painter, surf shop owner, surf reporter, contest photographer, writer, historian, long-distance trucker, and all-time friend to anyone and everyone who paddled out from these beaches, died unexpectedly of complications following heart surgery. As the surfing community gathered to mourn his loss and share stories and memories, it became apparent to all that Mickey’s legacy and influence on the Outer Banks surfing world was probably greater than any other individual’s to date.

Mickey is survived by his loving wife, Betsy. What follows are a few reminiscences from his protegé and friend, Rascoe Hunt.

So, this was like ’81, ’82, something like that. Me and my friend Eric Driebelbis, we were riding our BMX bikes up the beach road, just past Nags Head Pier — we were like thirteen, fourteen ­— and there was this sign on a building written in magic marker on a piece of cardboard that said, Coming in April: New Sun Surfboards and Surf Shop.

And we were like, No way, there’s gonna be a surf shop here! The closest surf shop was miles away at the time, so to have one right there in our neighborhood, that was huge for us.

Later that spring Eric showed up at school and said, Dude, I went into that surf shop and met the guy, his name’s Mickey! He’s so cool! You gotta come with me and meet him, man! So after school, we went over there. We walked down the back driveway, and we were tapping on this plywood door, going Hello! You could hear him inside walking around on the tar-paper floor…and he opens up the door and says,

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What’s up guys! Come on in! And we step inside and look around and we’re just all bug-eyed like stoked grommets watching him and he’s slinging resin around and talking to us and saying, Stand back guys, ya gotta stand back!

That’s my first memory of Mickey.

Just in there, working away, covered in dust and resin, with all these cool-looking boards with checkerboard rails and crazy airbrush designs against the walls.

Back in the 70’s Mickey had started an independent label with Mike Hamill called Sun Surfboards, and they were down in Buxton. At that time the surf scene in Hatteras was going off. It was pretty much the epicenter of East Coast surfing experimentation, and guys were moving there from all over, mostly coming up from Florida for the waves. So Mickey got to know Scott Busbey and Greg Loehr and Pete Dooley, all the guys that were forming the Natural Art brand, shaping and surfing their own boards. He just soaked it all up.

But he was pretty much broke all the time, I think.

Then he got offered a job working for the Wave Riding Vehicles factory in Virginia Beach. Since he was originally from the Tidewater area, and he needed a steady job, he moved back up there for a few years. That’s when he and Betsy got married. And then shortly after they got married, they moved back down to the Outer Banks. Betsy got a job as a nurse at the old Medical Center behind Ace Hardware, and Mickey, well, he just decided he was going to open up a surf shop and make surfboards. And damn if he didn’t do it.

So yeah, we were like Mickey’s little grommets, hanging around the shop all the time, and he was always really cool to us.

Sometimes if the waves were good he’d go out on the beach and take pictures of us while we were surfing. And then when he asked me to be on the New Sun surf team, man, that was one of the greatest days of my life.

Mickey was always taking pictures.

From the moment I knew him, he was always taking pictures. His dad was a photographer, so it was something he grew up with, but he was serious about it. I mean, serious.

Mickey pretty much documented my entire teenage life. I’ve got an album somewhere that’s just all Mickey’s photos.

Around the shop, at the beach, in the water.

Bunch of sunburnt kids with crazy bleach blonde hair and OP shorts. What a gift he shared with us.

Then every few months we’d have slideshows. That was the cool thing back then before digital. Mickey shot everything on slide film, and then he’d have to take the film to Jim’s camera house, and they’d ship it off…It would take so long after we had a surf session to ever see the results, it was like Christmas or something when the slides came back. So we’d set up the slide projector in the airbrush room, we’d pull down the screen, we’d call everybody, Come on over, we’re doing a slideshow!

And we’d all sit in there and watch the shots. It was like back in the day when the surf movies came to town. Everybody came, it was a big deal.

I was hanging around the shop so much they started teaching me how to glass boards, and once I got good enough, Mickey gave me a job. And I’ve been doing it ever since, inside the shop that he built.

So I owe a lot to Mickey McCarthy. A whole lot.

The original New Sun shop

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eventually had to shut down, because the site wasn’t zoned for manufacturing. And the Town of Nags Head started getting complaints from neighbors about the noise from sanders and planers buzzing all night long, so they told Mickey he had to move to an industrial zone.

It took us forever to find a spot on the beach that would work, but they were just finishing construction of Ocean Commerce Park where we are now, and they managed to squeeze one more bay on the end for us.

So Murray Ross, who’d been his partner at New Sun — and who still shapes here at Gale Force Glass — helped him out with the mortgage, and just about every surfer on the beach who was in the construction trade — framers, electricians, sheet-rockers, plumbers, carpenters — they all pitched in with free labor in exchange for a free board, and we built ourselves a factory.

It took Mickey over a year to shape all the boards he’d promised to all the guys who’d helped out, but he got each and every one done. It was a real community effort. Even back then you could tell how much everybody loved Mickey.

The best part working for him all those years was, whenever the surf was firing, like midday or something, he’d be like, Guys, we gotta hit the beach and take some pictures! Get to a stopping point and let’s close up and go down to Pea Island!

So we’d load up the van, head out, go surfing, and Mickey would shoot. Those were the good times, for sure.

But Mickey started getting burnt out trying to run this place. So he got Murray and me to buy him out. That’s when he started focusing a lot more on his photography. He was shooting a lot more

for the magazines and did ads for some of the surf brands, stuff like that. But it wasn’t enough to pay the bills, so he took on odd jobs, got back into construction for a while.

He even drove a truck for a couple years, but he missed the beach and being home with Betsy so much, he had to quit.

At some point he went back to WRV and started doing some work in their NC factory. That’s when he started shaping boards for Jeff Myers, cause Jeff had started surfing for WRV, and Mickey had already been shooting him a fair bit. Anyway, Jeff was over at the factory hanging out with Jesse (Fernandez) and (Bob) Yinger, and Mickey offered to shape him a board and Jeff said, Yeah man, I’ll try one of your boards!

So Mickey made this experimental thing for Jeff called the EXP. And Jeff loved that thing. So they started coordinating a lot. And this is coming from Jeff himself, between shaping those boards for him and getting his photos into all the mags, Mickey probably deserves as much credit for boosting Jeff’s career as he does for getting me started in the early days.

I think pretty much all his life Mickey struggled hard trying to make money and keep doing the things he loved to do. He was just such a generous guy, he’d sooner give you something than sell it to you. I mean, his photos were published all over the world, but you know how it is, forty bucks here, a couple hundred there, maybe a few hundred more if you land a cover or something. Barely enough to by groceries with.

But still, even up til the very end, he always was out there shooting. Every single swell, he’d be at the best spot, before anybody, before even half the surfers were out. He was so on it that Surfline hired

him to do the surf reports for the Northern Outer Banks. And if you saw him on the beach, he always had time for you. He’d just keep shooting and chatting. And it didn’t matter who you were, if you paddled out and got yourself on a wave, he’d take your picture. And then he’d share it online, and wouldn’t ask for a penny.

I don’t know how else to put it, Mickey’s death came as a huge shock to everybody. A lot of people didn’t know he was even in the hospital. He made it through his surgery just fine, was all set to be dismissed — he even posted a photo of his MRI with a caption saying, doing great, ready to go home! Hell, Myers talked to him for like an hour on the phone the night before he was supposed to get out. Said he sounded great, laughing, cracking jokes.

Knowing Jeff, the conversation probably ended with I love you, buddy, or some Myers-ism, but I think what Jeff mostly remembers is Mickey saying, See you in a couple days, okay?

It’s just left a huge hole in the community. Mickey played so many roles.

He contributed in so many ways. He wrote history articles for local magazines. He shot all the contests. He’d be there at Surfrider events, political meetings. He was always there. And he spanned so many generations. He knew the youngest groms, all the way up to the oldest guys who’d ever surfed here. Everybody knew Mickey. And everybody loved him too. Tons of people have been posting old photos online since he passed, there’s been such an outpouring of memories and love. It’s just too bad he’s not around to see it all. He’d get a kick out of it.

I keep thinking I’m gonna see him out there at Avalon or somewhere next time the swell gets good...

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The last Wave I could not help concluding This Man had the Most Supreme Pleasure while he was driven so Fast and so Smoothly by the Sea.

The last wave

The howls begin sometime around dinnertime, on any summer evening the swell is over two feet. Three notes, the pitch of the last rising and then falling in a long sustain. Just one more!

It’s round-up time for the groms, and they are not going quietly. Moms and dads stand ankle-deep at the shoreline, waving, whistling, or just standing crossarmed in their sternest parenting pose.

Regardless of their tactics, they all know it could well be a half hour before they can get those little mongrels out of the water and off the beach.

But Mom and Dad, likely being surfers themselves, know the feeling well enough not to push too hard. Groms may be the most vocal in their reluctance to get out of the water, but every surfer, bodyboarder, stand-up paddleboarder -— even the most casual vacationing bodysurfer — knows the feeling. That end-of-day desperation for one last wave. Most of us lose the wail sometime in adolescence, but we never lose voice inside our heads. Just one more.

For most surfers It’s not just a question of desire or greed. It’s a matter of honor. You always take one last wave.

Nobody paddles in. You only paddle out. To get in, you must ride in, triumphantly.

Chances are the surf has deteriorated, your arms have turned to jelly, and the next few waves you take off on are all closeouts, or they dissolve into mush before you get a good ride, or your nose sticks on the bottom turn. Those waves don’t count. It has to be a good one, or at the very least a respectable one, to count as the last wave. Something that will wrap

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up the session on a good note. Because despite all the war stories of epic rides from the past, or even post-session discussions of the wave of the day, you’re only as good as your last wave. And the only chance you’ll have to better that is on your next wave. To live a life of surf is to navigate the continuum between rides, living high on the rush of the wave you’ve just ridden, and living through the intervening minutes, days, or weeks on the stoke you’re building for the waves to come.

But there are times in life when the stoke wavers. Life happens. Duty calls.

The winter water feels colder, the aches from previous wipeouts and worn-out joints start to assert themselves. Responsibilities beckon — the kids, the yard, the job — and the regularity of settling into your duties becomes comfortable, even enjoyable. And before you know what’s happened, the surfversus-work dilemma has reversed itself in your mind. You begin to find yourself feeling guilty for not going surfing. It’s a beautiful day, the swell is pumping, and you’re making excuses as to why you can’t paddle out. You’re not up to it, you’ve got things that need getting done, you’d rather feel the satisfaction of accomplishing something than paddle around in the infinite ocean waiting for a wave to ride.

Still, all day it oppresses you. You may even drive out to the Lighthouse or Avalon Pier, watch the guys out, mind-surf a few waves, search inside for the get-up-andgo to suit up and get on it. But instead you keep watching, and eventually you head back to your truck, and get back to work, or go to the post office, or pick up the kids, or whatever your routine calls you to do.

It doesn’t happen this way to everyone. There are holdouts, buff greyhaired gents who will brag that they’ve never missed a swell in their life. The only thing that will take them out, they boast, is the death-bed.

Too, there are those whose interests simply pivot elsewhere: to art, to politics, to birdwatching, maybe even to an actual career. As exciting as surfing can be, it’s not the only pursuit in the world that inspires passion and obsession in its practitioners.

There will still be days, of course, even for those who have strayed from the flock. A late-summer Sunday with friends and family at the local beach access, boards scattered about in the sand, the surf a solid four feet. Be a crime not to paddle out for a couple on a day like that. Maybe a few afternoons in the fall, after a big swell when the size has dropped to something manageable and work trucks with longboards hanging out the back line the side streets of Kitty Hawk and the parking lots of Nags Head. Your old board, yellowed from age but still watertight enough to float you for a few hours. Maybe next year you’ll get back into it for real. Call up Scooter and get yourself a new board shaped. Maybe it’s your retirement plan: sell the house, collect your Social Security, surf, surf, and surf.

But surfing is a vocation that requires a great deal of physical effort. Even those who stick with it through middle age and beyond lament that they can’t surf like they used to. Their moves become slower.

They need thicker boards to hold their weight. Even putting on a wetsuit becomes an ordeal — all that twisting, stretching, pulling. You’re exhausted before you even get in the water. But even if it’s only a few

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times a year, every step onto the deck for a veteran surfer reaches back along a trail of rides that goes back decades. And with all that history to look back on, you just don’t need as many waves. Just one more, maybe, and then one more after that. And with any luck, one more after that.

Has anyone ever kicked out of a wave and said, that was the last wave I will ever ride in my life? Ever?

Most of us will never recognize the last wave when we ride it. It’s just the last wave of that day, and we fully expect there will be more. And, because at the time it didn’t seem significant, we might not even remember it with any clarity. But life is unpredictable. A shoulder injury, a move inland, or sheer entropy: your surfing life could end any number of ways, most likely before you want it to. And you’ll wish you’d payed more attention to that last wave.

Honored it. Consecrated it somehow.

Looking back on a lifetime spent chasing water-walls, most will find that individual waves lose their import in an impressionist movie filled with sunlight, stormclouds, salt spray, laughter, and tears.

Maybe a handful stick in your mind; clear memories of especially significant rides, the particular feel of a certain wave on a certain swell, the shape and color and dynamics of the board you were riding at the time, maybe even the quality of day and the friends you were with when you caught it. You hold on to these moments of mnemonic clarity like old photos, snapshots in your mind of seconds when you crushed it, when all was pure bliss, whether you were nose-riding on an infinite pointbreak or rocketing through the jaws of a gnarly spitting dragon-barrel.

None of those waves exist anymore.

At best they only ever lasted half a minute; most of them only a few seconds. They were lost to the world as soon as you launched off the last ramp, or kicked out with a flair, or bailed into the whitewater. Only memories of them live on, and memory is an unreliable and capricious storage device, a stuttering half-lit replay machine of moments vanished into the netherworld we call the past. It skips and grinds and scratches in its grooves; like a folktale it gets transformed in the telling; details are exaggerated, lost, changed. History becomes legend.

Years from now you’ll run into an old surf buddy and he’ll recall a session you’ve totally forgotten, or dispute the particulars of your favorite story. Once you’ve passed on and the mind that holds those memories no longer inhabits this world, there will be nothing more than secondhand accounts of your exploits, maybe a few photos, perhaps some video footage, to recall those waves of yore, those seconds of perfection.

Eventually, even these bits of archaeology will fade, crumble, or simply corrode inside ancient hard drives.

Nothing was ever accomplished by surfing. At least, nothing that can be measured by the metrics of industrial productivity. Sure, one can argue that it’s good for the soul, good for the body. And it’s beautiful to watch. And surfers as a group have banded together to advocate better stewardship of the oceans, to help children with autism, to give wounded warriors a pathway out of post-traumatic despair. The surfing community has done great things in the world.

In itself, however, the act of

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paddling through heavy crashing waves, and then riding one back in, often holding on for dear life, seems almost Sisyphean in its pointlessness. But anyone who has ever soldiered through the steep learning curve just to get one good dance astride a careening liquid wall of pure elemental force can tell you, there’s nothing else like it in this world. Given the ephemeral nature of existence, need there be any better reason to go catch waves than to know that feeling?

It’s a question that few surfers will waste time pondering. Philosophers can debate the whys and wherefores. Meantime there’s a wave out.

We cannot know what the future will hold, just as surely as we cannot hold on to the past. And the present is an ever-shifting panoply of actions, reactions, situations and sensations, some good, some bad, some indifferent, but none of them constant.

Our time on this earth will pass, as will our children’s and their children’s, and on an on into an uncertain destiny. Cycles within cycles, births and deaths within a timeframe the measure of which is impossible to predict.

One day, one of those children will ride one last wave. And then, one very bright day, eons hence, the oceans will vaporize in the gaseous expansion of a red sun burning itself out in a blaze of hydrogen glory. Our turquoise water-swaddled planet will be subsumed in a giant wave, pulsing out into the far reaches of a universe made up of countless other waves. Wave upon wave, expanding outward, forever. And ever. And ever.

And upon that wave, we all shall ride.

Community Jeff Myers David Rohde Shane Alexander Chris McDonald Bryan Harvey Kim Diggs Barry Price Matt Pruett Sterling King Brittany Diggs Duffy Billy Moseley Lynn Shell Matt Beacham Brett Barley Jesse Fernandez Chris Hess Brett Owens Eric Dreelin Julie Dreelin Tim Nolte Richard Byrd Jesse Hines Leanne Robinson Noah Snyder Wolfgang Blackwood Russel Blackwood Jonathan Dail Matt Walker Dana Quinn Bob Holland Marcus Pratt Curtis Cromwell Mike Rowe Billy Hume Nigel Haynes Shawn Deane William Deane Lance Marler Fran Marler Scooter Raynor Delbert Melton Dallas Tolson Owen McCall Maddy Wagner Stephen Muglia Peyton Savage Miles McCall Stefan Turko Wyatt Ward Anthony Leone Jessica De Los Reyes Matt Ingram Evan Foster Evan Foster Jr Rusty Midgett Nathan Robinson Craig Watson Matt Price Dave Elder Biggie Vaughn April Vaughn Mary Schmaeder Todd Wolff Mike Remige Colby Gardner Quentin Turko Esther Faith Rachael DeGabrielle Christian Nophsker Mike Basilone Bob Hovey Kim Franks Dawn Gray Moraga Scott Busbey Matt Joyner Brian Zongolowicz Ryan Rhodes Bob Yinger Jon Carter Perry Pruitt Rascoe Hunt

*References to quoted material:

Page 3: H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines

Page 35: William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

Page 105: William Butler Yeats, To a Child Dancing in the Wind

Page 135: Elizabeth Enright, The Four-Story Mistake

Page 177: Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Page 217: From the journals of Captain James Cook My deepest gratitude goes to:

The Outer Banks surfing community, for breathing life into this project. Your collective love and pride in this place have always been an inspiration.

Matt Walker, for keeping me in batteries and seltzer, hours of great conversation, countless fun photo assignments; for going above and beyond with editorial help, assistance rounding up the crew for portraits; for positive reviews of After the Storm in ESM and Surfing before we really knew each other; for leading by example in the community; and for your friendship.

Jeff Myers, for too many good sessions to count, nights on the town I don’t fully remember, and for always picking up the phone and getting me out of bed when it’s good.

Shane Alexander, soul-brother, for the pierto-pier swim, the late-night lounge, and for helping me to take the plunge into the project with the first few keepers.

Daniel Pullen, for the warm welcome in Buxton, fun with cameras, great conversations; for always being willing to lend a hand or do a favor, and for being a good friend.

Jesse Fernandez, for all the boards — bought, borrowed, broken, or bartered; for keeping the Campfire Legends alive, and for showing Myers how to play a D chord.

Jesse Hines, for all the free yogurt, for always having time, and for some great stories and photos.

Noah Snyder, for getting me out to those early (in more ways than one) boot camp sessions that yielded so many great shots.

David Alan Harvey, for afternoons on the porch, nights by the fire, for all you do for the worldwide community of photographers; for being friend, mentor, and inspiration; and for supporting and promoting the project in all its incarnations.

Keith Newsome, for reaching out and coordinating the Jim Bunch interview, for being a strong supporter of the project, and for the Wagoneer

shot we never got.

Jim Bunch, for sharing a little bit of OBX history with me, and for not minding having to tell me the same story twice.

Rascoe Hunt, for talking about Mickey, and for the stomping ground story we had to cut...

David Rohde, for all the stories and all the great talk.

Richard and Claire, for the warm welcome in Rodanthe, for living your lives just the way you do, and for loving and caring.

Mario Gonzales, for getting me back into the water after a decade of landlubbery.

Christian Hillebrand and the 2001 Ocracoke surf crew, for an idyllic summer, and a fall we’ll never forget.

Christian Nophsker, for all the bad Point Break references, bro-rate technical support, weekend sessions at the house, and midweek board meetings.

My brother, David Bickford, for always being up for getting wet.

Matt Pruett at Surfline.com, for giving me a good excuse to get back into shooting in the fall of 2015, and Mark Willis at Surfline for setting me straight on some science.

My fellow water photographers on the OBX — including, but not exclusively, Jon Carter, Evan Foster, Daniel Pullen, Matt Lusk, Anthony Leone, Corey Schaible, Bob Hovey, and dear departed Mickey McCarthy, for the good vibes and high-fives, and for putting the Outer Banks on the map in the digital age.

The local shapers, surf shops, and surf brands that keep the crew in boards, trunks, and wetsuits, including but not exclusively: Wave Riding Vehicles, Secret Spot Surf Shop, Cavalier Surf Shop, 17th Street Surf Shop, Whalebone Surf Shop, Hooked Surfboards, Duck Village Outfitters, Bone Surfboards, Ability, Rodanthe Surf Shop, Fox Watersports, Real Watersports, Kitty Hawk Surf Company, Tim Nolte Surfboards, Banks Surf Supply, Avon Wind’n’Surf, Hatteras Island Board Sports, Hatteras Island Surf Shop, Outer Banks Boarding Company, Mac’s Tackle, Murray Ross, TupperBoards, Evo, Crashley Boards, Notion Boards, Natural Art Surf Shop, In the Eye Surfboards, Hatteras Glass, Corolla Surf Shop, Outer Banks Surf Shop, Coastal Edge, The Pit, and Gale Force Glass.

Kurt Korte and the crew at Surfline.com, for choosing the Outer Banks as its regional headquarters, and shining a light on how good it gets here.

Brent Nultemeier and the folks at OBXSurfinfo.com, for providing a local online resource for the surfing community.

The Outer Banks chapter of the Surfrider

Notes Foundation, for keeping the beaches clean and for fighting the good fight against offshore drilling.

Kellie Kulton at Kulton Studio, NYC, for helping to refine the look, and for opening up the shadows.

Aaron Chang, for answering a random email from a total stranger, and for encouraging me years ago to keep working towards a larger body of images, when I thought I was finished.

Ed Rackley, for encouraging me to take the writing more seriously, and for freely offering editorial help once I did.

Jane Sievert at Patagonia, for being a fan, and for passing on early copies of After the Storm to the Malloy boys.

Jeff Divine at Surfer’s Journal for liking it different and for giving me the time of day.

Miki Meek and Jim Estrin for showcasing After the Storm on the Lens Blog and elsewhere in the New York Times.

Gina Martin at National Geographic, for the early support and exposure of After the Storm, and for letting my late entry slide into Look3.

Ashley Morton at NatGeo, for helping me find the map.

Stephen Alvarez, for being a supporter from the beginning.

Anthony Smallwood, AKA Tony Skater, for the Fight Club show, for all the great ideas, and for stuff that hasn’t even happened yet.

Jonathan Bortolazzi and the staff at EBS for shepherding this book to its final incarnation.

Kathleen Brehony, for helping me keep my head straight and my eye on the ball.

Kelly Merrell, for giving me a soft place to land on my return home, for quietly encouraging me to get back to the book, and for being there.

My parents, Jim and Blair Bickford, for a lifetime of love and support, for being proud of me regardless of success or failure, and for always being available to talk things through.

Additional thanks go to DJ Bruce Jones, Nic McLean, Dan Westergren, Matt Beacham, Brett Barley, Chris MacDonald, Trey Simmons, Billy Hume, Rachel DeGabrielle, Bryan Harvey, Quentin Turko, Kara Consolvo, Jennifer Kolb, Christian Nagle, Greg Bailey, Michelle Madden Smith, Linda Lauby, Dawn Church, Joanne Bolton, Bert Lowdermilk, Jennifer Joyce, Dana Quinn, Brant Doyle, Mary Schmaeder, Mike Rowe, Mine Suda, Diego Orlando, and my dear departed surf-dog, Mona.

My apologies to members of the community I was unable to represent due to limitations in time and space, including but not exclusively, Nohea

Futrell, Roberto Moraga, Jeff Sykes, Jim Vaughn, Lindsey Herring, Jay Bonneville, Christian Kane, Skillet, Steve Pauls, Ben Miller, Coul Consolvo, Vic Berg, Robby Snyder, MarkWhite, Ryan Biggs, Perry Creef, Andrew McCall, Jamie mcCall, John Xenakis, Herman Hall, Aaron McCall, Kenny Savage & family, Ryahn Jones,Seth Barrick, Jeff Lane, Bruce HIlpert, Tony Gray, Ronnie Gray, Brandon Jenkins, the crew at First Street, Josh Everett, Steve Head, Martin Fucci, Justin Fucci, Eric Pruitt, Ben Morris, Chris Morris, Chris Crockett, Erik Schub, Ted Frye, James Joyce, John Joyce,Travis Fowler, Dave Lusk, Jamie Lavier, Chris Hannant, Shawn Deane, Jim Vaughn, Mickey Bednarek, Craig Purkis, Steve the Dream RIP, Matt Price, James Perry, Matty Hitchcock, Eric Drexler, Dan Cera, Jared Cera, Calvin, Bree Vuyovich, Chris Culpen, Jessica De Los Reyos, Ashley Bahen, Meredith Crockett, Benny Crum, Joey Crum, Carol Busbey, Preston Barley, Ryan Langowski, Cash Barris, Ray Gray, Jeffrey del Monte, Bert Lowdermilk, Karl Deter, Eric Dodson, Briggs McEwen, Cheryl Blankenship, Randy Hall, Debbie Bell, Cody Craig, and a whole lot of folks I know only as “Dude.”

Walker Pruden, rest in peace brother.

Many thanks to the sponsors, early adopters, and friends whose financial support has made this possible, including: Pete Marovich, Dola Leslie Young, Tanya Young, Melanie Day, Michael Burnette, Nassim Ghrayeb, Kathleen Brehony, Candace Owens, Nathan Bickford, Margaret Warner, Andrew Brinkhorst, Tanya Young, Wes Gingerella, Jordan Snobelen, Jonny Lindroos, David Bickford, Elizabeth Wood, John Letourneau, Nancy Parker, Gavin Hribar, James & Mati Bickford, Andrew Goldkuhle, Blair Bickford, Joe McGlohon, Gary Cooper, Michael Montgomery, Max Cook, Robin Sistad, Nannette Kallestad, Stephanie Kiker, Tim Julian, Dawn Moraga, Rachel Capel, Sharon Hinds, Shella Kirchner, Phil Watson, Ryan Moser, Tara Casanova Powell, Kristina Jennings, Debbie Turko, Kelly Miller, Paige Alford, Larry Camp, Diane Dilworth, Barry Edgar Wells, Roy Edlund, Evan Foster, Josh & Kriston West, Janet Lott-Mitchell, Jason Fleck, Sara Twiford, Socrates Gliarmis, Leah Harms, Alysa Sakson, Teresa Bonanno,Charles Davenport, Kate and Daniel Pullen, Diane Fields Capozzalo, Marie Russell, Christopher Edwards, Jess Moody, Scott Wonderling, Andy Anderson, Susan Szymanski, Megan King, Thomas Bregulia, Alan Hoffman,Robert Enns, David Huff, Bradley Crittenden, Carlo Pirrongelli, Arnold Zann.

Archival photos courtesy of Jim Bunch, Richard Byrd, and the Outer Banks History Center.

Portrait of Scott Busbey courtesy of Daniel Pullen. Portrait of Ryan Rhodes courtesy of Matt Walker.

Legends of the Sandbar is a publication of Burn Books, LLC. Printed in Italy on Scheufelen Phoenix Motion Xantur Paper at Editoriale Bortolazzi-Stei, Verona.

Book Design by Christopher Bickford Š2017 Christopher Bickford. All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-9837864-8-1