Featured Image
Fishing lines, sunshades and beachgoers crowd an Emerald Isle beach while two seagulls fly overhead, with another in the foreground searching for food. Photo: Robert Watkins
Supporter Spotlight
Emerald Isle resident and student at University of North Carolina Asheville, Watkins submitted last week this photo he took in October 2024 because he was thinking about how coastal North Carolina changes throughout the year.
“It is summer now, and the beaches of North Carolina are packed with tourists, especially now with the approach of the 4th of July. Fall will return, and some tourists will go back home, but not all. Some, like the ospreys, gulls, and pelicans, are here for the year,” he wrote in his photo submission.
When he took the photo, he had returned home to Emerald Isle because the university he attends in Buncombe County had shut down temporarily due to the damages caused by Hurricane Helene.
“Coastal North Carolina offered a strange reprieve from the stress and damage that Western North Carolina had been riddled with; I was lucky to have a home here, for many in WNC lost their only home. I sat down on the beach for several hours that day, loving where I was, shocked at the irony of the situation: I was a refugee from a hurricane, yet the refuge itself had been ravaged by a hurricane just six years prior,” he wrote.
