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An endangered red-cockaded woodpecker flies in to his nesting cavity with a spider in in his beak for the awaiting chicks inside. Red-cockaded woodpeckers are an endemic species of the longleaf pine forest and were placed on the endangered species list due to the destruction of nesting habitat. Longleaf pine forests once covered an area the size of the Amazon across the southeastern United States. But today, less than 10% of this forest remains. Photo: Jared Lloyd

The assignment seemed simple enough: Go check out Bennet’s Millpond outside of Edenton and create some photos. There was an algal bloom. It was spreading. And Coastal Review was doing a series on water quality issues in North Carolina.

Little did I know that the experience would leave me sitting on the side of a country road with a blinding headache, lungs on fire, throat burning, and haunted by a young family that was just found dead in similar circumstances.  

When it comes to algal blooms, this wasn’t my first rodeo. Growing up along the coast of North Carolina, where wastewater ponds from hog farms pockmark the landscape like so many dimples on a golf ball, and the fields of King Cotton can spread to the horizon, you become accustomed to these sorts of things — especially during hurricane season when the rains help spill all these extreme loads of nutrients into our waters.  

I knew these blooms were the result of intensive agriculture, development and other human activity. I knew they typically resulted in countless thousands of dead fish. I knew they smelled bad. I knew climate change was intensifying it all. But I didn’t know it could kill you.

Pulling up to the boat ramp of the old millpond, the first thing that struck me were the fumes. Well, that and the fact that there was no life, no birds, no dragonflies. It was hot. The gasses emitting from the bloom were overwhelming. In the moment, I chalked it all up to the fact that trillions of tiny algae were living and dying, and dead, rotting masses of stuff tend to stink. But it was all made that much worse because of the humidity, allowing me to breathe in what I would come to learn was a potential cocktail of toxins deep into my lungs where it would be absorbed into my blood.

I yanked a neck gaiter up around my nose and mouth to help cut down on the smell and began to explore the area.

When you want to capture the essence of a thing, you never just walk up, snap a few photos, and call it a day. You explore, both with your eyes and your feet, and you size up the situation. You start to pick apart the who, what, where, when, why and how of it all. And you start working your way through the thought experiments of how best to tell a story in a photograph.

To do this, we have what photojournalists call the holy trinity of lenses: a 14-24mm lens for capturing big-picture stuff, a 24-70mm lens that is the workhorse, and a 70-200mm lens for distance or details when you can’t get close. These are the tools we can’t live without. And for me, I add a drone to that list as well.

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, UAV, have revolutionized visual communication and storytelling. Sometimes a thing cannot be understood by looking at its parts. An algal bloom is one of those things.

Green water next to green trees. It could be a reflection. It could be duckweed. It could be a mat of milfoil. It could be a spot 10 feet wide and nothing more than some floating vegetation. Who amongst us has not seen all these things before?

But to rise above it all, to climb into the air and look down upon the world reveals the bigger picture. It gives us perspective.

And so, with my trusty drone in the air, a piece of kit I’ve dragged all over the Western Hemisphere, I took a gods’ eye view of the state of things.

In under 20 minutes of standing by the edge of the millpond, my throat began to burn. Not like strep throat, however. This was different. More like inhaling bear spray, something I have experience with. And within minutes, it was my lungs, they were on fire. I began coughing. Hacking. Spitting. Before long, the headache set in. At times I couldn’t catch my breath — also like bear spray.

Have you ever heard of Very Fast Death Factor?

Me either.

But it’s a thing. And it’s way worse than murder hornets.

Which does leave me wondering, who comes up with these names?

Despite sounding like the name of a college metal band, Very Fast Death Factor is serious stuff that does exactly as the name implies — it kills things very quickly. This is the nickname that researchers have given a peculiar little toxin that blue-green algae can emit called Anatoxin-a. Very Fast Death Factor is one of many neurotoxins that a seemingly harmless little algae in our ponds and rivers can pump out. Another is saxitoxin. Its nickname is paralytic shellfish toxin — also bad, also deadly, also here. And it killed a water-skier in Wisconsin who inhaled the aerosolized version of this toxin.

Clearly, I survived. I traded out the neck gaiter for an N95 mask. But the damage was done. Minute after minute, my symptoms intensified. And eventually I realized the severity of the situation. In under an hour, I went from healthy energetic me to coughing, headache, burning lungs, dizziness, and outright awful.

A half-gallon of water made my throat feel better.

An hour of fresh air while driving with my windows down made my lungs stop burning.

And within a couple of hours, the headache was gone.

All I was left with were questions. So many questions.

There had been no signs, no warnings, no “Beware of the Very Fast Death Factor,” and no “stay away from the algal blooms burping clouds of death.” Nothing.

On Aug. 17, the bodies of John Gerrish, Ellen Chung, their 1-year-old daughter, Miju, and their family dog were found dead along a trail that hugged the banks of the Merced River in California. This is a strange one. No weapons. No obvious cause of death. Even the baby and dog were dead. All there. All together. All at once. The National Forest Service had just issued a warning along the very same trail about a harmful algal bloom.

While the world and I wait for that toxicology report, the leading hypothesis behind the death of this family is neurotoxins from that algal bloom.  

We know very little about these toxins and their ability to be aerosolized — how they are made airborne. Even though these neurotoxins are known to be some of the deadliest on the planet (hence Very Fast Death Factor), it wasn’t until 2019 up in Nantucket, Massachusetts, that anyone decided to test the air around algal blooms for this stuff. Low and behold, there it was.

I reached out to Haley Plaas, the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences researcher who took samples from Bennet’s Millpond to study the toxin concentrations present in both the water and air, about my experience. I ran down a list of my symptoms, the circumstances, and the timeline of recovery.

“This kind of anecdotal evidence is fairly common, but under-reported”, she said. “(These) reports are super important for my work …” However, it will still take another month before the sample results come back from the lab.

Given that we are just now beginning to learn that toxins are at times hanging in the air around these algal blooms, anecdotal evidence is largely all we have to go by. Meanwhile, the algal bloom continues to spread. There are still no warnings or closures. And now there is another one building up on the Pamlico River.

Alienation: the state or experience of being isolated from a group to which one should belong, or in which one should be involved. Estrangement.

I’m on the winter beach, wide, flat and cold. Cobalt-blue skies reign overhead. A biting wind rushes in from the northwest.

It’s all so different up here on the northern Outer Banks, compared to the southern islands. The Labrador current and cold-slope waters create a dramatically different climate here, compared to those sandbars governed by the Gulf Stream. Seals will be showing up again soon enough. Mostly young harbor seals, but a few fat greys and even some harps, if we are lucky.

The New England blues have already made it to town, and I can only assume stripers are in their mix. I’ve watched a parade of humpback whales migrating south past this beach for a month now already, their dark, shadowy masses drawing in birds for miles around, occasionally rolling over to lift a great wing of a fin out of the sea like a friendly neighbor waving hello, or goodbye, or maybe just flipping me the bird.

Flip-flops hang from my feet as I sit on my tailgate. I could tell you this is by design, that my choice of footwear was a personal form of protest against the changing season. Or I could say that flip-flops have always been the official footwear of philosophical thinking. Just ask Plato, if you don’t believe me. But let’s be honest here: They were sitting by the door and, well, that was easy.

Seeing me with a pair of binoculars in hand, an SUV pulls up and the windows roll down.

“Is it a whale?” the man asks.

His kids lean forward from the backseat, scrambling to peer out the starboard side window toward the ocean, hoping to see what I see.

“No sir. Gannets and great black-backed gulls over the outer bar,” I reply.

“Birds? Who cares about stupid sea gulls!?”

The kids laugh. He laughs. His wife laughs. They drive away and I just stare.

When I look out over the ocean, I don’t see “stupid birds.” I see northern gannets, an elegance I wait all year to return. Gannets are the lords of the wind in the northern Atlantic, more albatross than not, with 6-foot wingspans. Here, along the Outer Banks, they will at times gather into flocks by the hundreds of thousands during the winter to create a giant white squall of birds that fills the horizon. The noise of nearly half a million strong is deafening. The never-ending cycle of birds falling from the sky and lifting off again is hypnotic.

Tipping over mid-air, some 150 feet above the ocean, a gannet pulls back her wings and thrusts out her neck as she begins to plummet toward the sea. She becomes like a lightning bolt hurled by Zeus toward Earth.

Now, imagine tens of thousands of these birds all piercing the water simultaneously like arrows loosed from the heavens. You know that moment in movies where the archers along the castle walls collectively fire their first barrage of arrows into the sky? That moment when time stands still, when the music stops, when all eyes are on the impossibility of the thing? That’s what it’s like watching a white squall of gannets when they have found big shoals of herring.

No. I don’t see stupid birds, I see great black-backed gulls – one of the greatest avian predators that patrols our coastlines in the winter. I have watched these birds snatch puffins out of the air to our north. I have watched these hunters catch black skimmers in Oregon Inlet, the fighter jets of our coast with 4-foot-wingspans, and pick them clean in minutes. Wolves with wings they are.

Whereas most beachgoers think of gulls as little more than a bird that begs for French fries and potato chips, the great black-backed gull is the species that would fly over, snap the neck of that begging gull, and proceed to rip it to pieces at the edge of your beach towel while you and your children looked on in horror.

Staring out over the sea, I see familiar faces. I see stories.

Of course, the family of tourists on the beach know nothing of these stories. But what if they did know? Would they still see “stupid birds?” Would they look out and find themselves captivated by the swirling vortex of evolution that hangs in the air above the ocean before me? And if they did see THIS instead of “stupid birds,” would that change the way they saw or thought about other things?

Would it change the way they made decisions if they knew those decisions affected those birds?

Botanists speak of what they call plant blindness in our culture. We hurry about our lives never actually seeing the rich tapestry of plant biodiversity all around us. If people see anything, it’s as simple as grass, or trees, or maybe flowers – but only if they are large and brightly colored.

Do people realize North Carolina has more species of orchids than any other state in our country except for Florida? Or that one single meter of ground in the Green Swamp has more species of plants growing in it than any other place in the world? Do we know that one quarter of all modern medicine is derived from plants, and that many of these plants grow in our own backyards?

Or more to the point, do we know the life history of yaupon holly? How that it contains caffeine, how that it was consumed as a social drink for thousands of years like coffee is today, how that it may have been the foundation of Native transcontinental trade networks that reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, how that it completely replaced “tea” after the Boston Tea Party for a while, and that it is a common shrub growing all over the coastal plain from Virginia to Texas?

Probably not. They’re just plants.

But what if you did know about yaupon holly? Would this knowing change the way you looked at it? Would you have an altogether different experience when you noticed one of these growing at the edge of your yard? What if you had warmed you belly with a steaming cup of its “Carolina tea,” would that create familiarity and make it more than just some “stupid plant?”

And if this did make a difference, could the same thing be said for other plants, insects, birds, or amphibians?

The problem at hand is bigger than plant blindness. It’s a blindness toward everything around us that is not us. It’s nature blindness. And it comes at the cost of alienating us from every other living thing on the planet.

From the perspective of psychology, alienation creates the feelings of isolation and disconnectedness. It creates the sense of powerlessness and of meaninglessness. It creates a longing for real relationships. And this experience paves the way toward the darkness of mental illness.

It’s fascinating how long we have been beating around this bush – no pun intended. Jews and Christians alike acknowledged this alienation as punishment for original sins, when humans were cast from the Garden of Eden. Karl Marx claimed that instead of spiritual downfall, it was capitalism that alienated us from nature by reducing the natural world to nothing more than commodities to be bought or sold.

In “Civilization and its Discontents,” Sigmund Freud offered up his own take on the matter, suggesting that this great big experiment of civilization itself was the root cause of so much mental illness due to the alienation it created. For more than 2,000 years, we have stared the problem in the face, shrugged our shoulders and then neurotically went on with busying ourselves with whatever we busy ourselves.

When someone becomes disconnected from their community, from their neighbors, their loved ones for long enough, they begin to normalize the experience. Their baseline for reality shifts. Their worldview shifts. The prefrontal cortex begins to shrink, and the amygdala begins to enlarge. They lose critical thinking while gaining emotional reactionism. Their situation becomes rationalized in some way. And the person turns further inward. Interest in community dissolves.

Studies done in regard to social alienation in mammals – that is to say, people, mice, dolphins – reveal grave consequences. We see an increase in aggression toward the unfamiliar, persistent fear and hypersensitivity toward threatening stimuli.

Does this all sound vaguely familiar? Fear of wolves. Fear of snakes. Fear of sharks. Fear of storms. Fear of nature encroaching, of trees falling, of weeds strangling, of getting lost in the woods, of rabies from racoons. Hatred of coyotes. Hatred of great horned owls. Hatred of gulls. Hatred of everything around us that is not us.

Aldo Leopold once said that there were two inherent dangers in not owning a farm. The first was assuming that food came from grocery stores, and the second was that heat came from a furnace. Owning a farm means working closely with the land and its other inhabitants. This demands that, at least on some level, there becomes a familiarity with the systems you are working within. Sometimes these systems are a simple as cause and effect: “If I fell a tree and cut wood today, I can warm my shins this winter.” Other times those systems are more complex. And if we are not exposed to these things, how are we to know they even exist?

Take salamanders for instance. North Carolina plays home to more species of salamanders than any place else, and yet most have no idea the importance of the salamanders here to the entire world. Sometimes we struggle to understand the importance of a thing do its scale in comparison with ourselves. Salamanders fit this bill.

Despite their size, despite their secretive nature, salamanders are actually apex predators in the ecosystem. Although they might not take down a whitetail deer anytime soon, each salamander consumes around 20 insects a day. So veracious are these amphibians that they have been dubbed the wolves of the forest floor by some researchers.

Twenty insects might not sound like much, but when those numbers are extrapolated for the estimated number of salamanders in a given area, this is tremendous. Especially in terms of carbon sequestering.

A large chunk of the carbon that is emitted into the atmosphere is taken up by trees. Trees shed their leaves throughout the year and that falls to the ground with those leaves and slowly becomes part of the soil. That is unless a host of different insects feed on those leaves and release that carbon back into the atmosphere. This is where salamanders and their 20-bug-a-day diet comes into play.

It all sounds so small, so insignificant – again, from the perspective of us and the size of our diets. But just like the impacts that our daily lives have on the world, we can measure the amount of carbon that a single salamander is ultimately responsible for keeping in the soil. When such numbers are scaled to account for the estimated population of salamanders, we find that these little creatures have such a large impact on carbon cycles that they actually help to regulate global climate. Remove salamanders and carbon dioxide levels would increase.

All this from a salamander.

Will you ever be able to look at one the same way again?

Experiencing and engaging with the natural world is only the first part of the equation. We have to know the world in which we live as well. Without this knowing, it’s like living in a neighborhood where you see your neighbors everyday but have never so much as stopped to talk to them. What would life be like living next to people for so many decades and never getting to know them?

There is a reason we surround ourselves with dogs and cats and house plants. We have an innate need for connection with the natural world. But it is not until we allow our minds to move beyond the confines of our own homes and begin to come to know the native denizens of our community will we ever truly feel at home in a place.

And maybe this is the point of it all. Feeling at home.

Do you care about your house? Do you long to upgrade your kitchen? Do you fix the roof when it leaks? Do you take the trash out and vacuum and dust? Do you take pride in where you live?

Of course you do. This is your home. You feel a responsibility to care for it, to keep it up.

Can you imagine what would happen if we began to truly see and know the forest and beaches and coastline and estuaries as our home?

The first time I ever traveled to Panama, I found myself posted up on the north coast and purposefully lost in the labyrinth of islands and mangroves and coral reefs that cause waves to break big and heavy. Splitting time between photographing poison dart frogs on deserted islands and red-billed tropic birds nesting on a giant rock in the ocean, it felt as though I had discovered a new world.

Not even Columbus suspected as much when he stumbled upon this archipelago in 1502 and named the whole of the place Bocas del Toro. For me, however, I might as well have been on the heels of Percy Fawcett. Engulfed in the explosion of life that is the lowland tropics and associated coral reefs, every turn was a new discovery, new islands, new species.

As we threaded our way down a river toward the ocean in a mighty little panga during the heat of the day, I set back on the floor of the skiff with sweat drenching a scarf around my already sunburnt neck. Staring up into the canopy of the passing rainforest, I watched as impossible numbers of three-toed sloths floated past in cecropia trees. We were in a notoriously remote stretch of Panama’s coast. Narcotics traffickers frequented this place, using the island as a way station when moving up the coast from Colombia. The Panamanian government’s reach did not extend to this region. It was effectively ungoverned. Natives still pulled themselves along these waters in dugout canoes. This was the real deal.

Nearing the mouth, where the river spilled her secrets into blue waters of the tropical Atlantic, we wound our way around shoals to slide the bow of our boat onto the sandy backside of a spit that demarcated river from ocean. If ever I felt as though I was moving through a literal Garden of Eden, it was now, it was here. I had no idea how far from civilization I was at this point. There had been no sign of humanity the entire day. No gringo fishermen on expensive charters garbed in synthetic everything. No random native farmer tending their odd little stands of banana trees or scraggly and emaciated cattle. Climbing up and over the berm of the spit, I expected a postcard. What I found was a trash heap.

Bleach bottles and old toothbrushes and flip-flops and the refuse of our disposable world in all shapes and sizes and colors littered the beach. Everything plastic you can conceive of was washed and tossed in with the natural flotsam and jetsam of the wrack line. Most conspicuous of all were the strange rubber shoes called Crocs. They were everywhere – a veritable rainbow. I had reached the edge of the world only to find myself drowning in rubber clown shoes.

I turned to my guide. “It washes up,” he said. “Most of it is probably from cruise ships and sailboats. Maybe the narcos, I suppose. Everyone’s trash seems to make its way on to the beaches here.”

Trying to find a bit of levity, he attempted to make light of the situation. “You know, sometimes there are smashed up crates of drugs. Everybody knows somebody who has found stuff on the beaches of Panama. Hey, you know what we call it when we find marijuana? Seaweed!”

This is the state of our coasts the world over. Flotsam and jetsam no longer look like Sargasso weed and driftwood. Today, it’s Styrofoam and plastics, parts of boats, trash washed down river or overboard and onto shore, or most nefariously, garbage that was just flat-out dumped into the ocean – out of sight out of mind, the philosophy of cruise ships the world over.

The hard-hitting reality of life on Earth today is there are exceedingly fewer places where one can escape the side effects of our civilization in the ocean world. On the one hand, we all kind of know this already. From shipping traffic to commercial fishing to garbage patches, we have spent the last century tightening our vice-like grip on the world’s oceans.

Industrialization has allowed us to spread out across our blue planet chasing fish stocks and expanding global trade in ways that were simply unimaginable two centuries ago. But to say that there are few places in the oceans not impacted by humans has always been anecdotal at best. I can tell stories of trash-heaped beaches in Panama, of picking up Aquafina bottles on remote coastlines in Alaska, or of the “bay barf” that comes spewing out of the Chesapeake and onto the beaches of Carova after every nor’easter. But stories are not data. Statistics are not built this way. There has never been any sort of quantitative facts to back up these anecdotes – until now.

Meet Kendall Jones. He is a doctoral researcher at Queensland University in Australia, and as a conservation biologist, also happens to work with the Wildlife Conservation Society. Jones and a team of other researchers decided that it was high time for someone to answer the question of just how much “wilderness” is still left in the sea. The results of which were published this summer in the July edition of the journal Current Biology.

This was a sizable task. Poring over the results of countless studies, in what is known as a meta-data analysis, Jones and team began to compile what we might call a 10,000-foot view of the state of the oceans. But to do this, researchers first had to identify what exactly constituted as wilderness to begin with.

In 1964, Howard Zahniser put pen to paper and crafted what would become the Wilderness Act. In this, he defined wilderness as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” On the one hand, we can see this as being the “natural” state of nature. On the other hand, it really has everything to do with “modern” humans and the general lack of impact we have had on a place. Zahniser’s definition goes on to elaborate that a wilderness area “generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable.”

With a working definition in hand of what constitutes wilderness, Jones and crew set about to identify 19 markers that constitute as “the imprint of man’s work” by having a substantial impact on marine habitats. These markers, or really stressors, included things like fertilizer run off, heavy shipping traffic, and intensive commercial fishing – especially demersal fishing, which is done on or near the bottom. Any one of these stressors makes a big difference on the health and wealth of the world’s oceans.

We should probably note here that climate change was NOT included.

Once these 19 stressors were identified, the team of researchers were able to set about analyzing the known data on these things. Where are the primary shipping lanes? Where are the garbage patches? The dead zones? Where do fleets of commercial fishermen hit hard? Poring over the data, Jones identified those areas that sit within the bottom 10 percent for being impacted by each of these individual stressors, and then the bottom 10 percent for all those stressors combined. This part is important. The areas that Jones and his team identified as being marine wilderness are not necessarily free from human impact. They are simply those areas that are the least affected by our modern civilization. Let’s face it. When plastic bags are being found at the bottom of the Mariana Trench – the deepest place on Earth – looking for a place with zero human impact today would be pointless.

The results of Jones’ study revealed a dismal picture of the world’s oceans: only 13 percent could be classified as marine wilderness today.

“Almost all of that wilderness is located in the Arctic, the Antarctic or around remote, Pacific Island nations,” said Jones. These are distant places. Places where human impact is at its minimal due to the logistics of access. In coastal areas of the Northern Hemisphere, you know, where most people live, pristine waters are practically non-existent.

But to add insult to injury here, of the total area identified by Jones and his team to be wilderness, only 4 percent of that has any sort of marine protections – none of which can be found anywhere near North Carolina. It’s important not to misunderstand this point.

Technically, we do have a few “no-take” zones around the world, where all fishing is banned in places like the Bahamas’ Exuma Cays. However, when all no-take zones are combined worldwide they only protect a total of one-ten-thousandths of a percent of the world’s oceans according to the American Natural History Museum. None of which fall inside of those areas identified by Kendall Jones. Meaning, our no-take zones are a fabulous idea, but they are still being degraded by one or more of the other 18 stressors to the point of humans having a significant impact otherwise.

When I stand on the foreshore in Carova Beach, early enough in the morning so I am not dodging wild horse tours and the battalion of tourists in their four-wheel-drive vehicles of course, I spy dolphins hunting along the edge of sandbars and maybe “rain minnows” being chased by young bluefish in the emerald green and phytoplankton rich surf. This looks good to me. I breathe deep, filling lungs with briny air. Negatively charged ions enter my bloodstream, facilitating oxygen to my brain, peaking serotonin levels, winching a smile across my face. Better life through chemistry. Pelicans fly by. Sanderlings flutter about. To the south is Cape Hatteras National Seashore – eventually. To my north is False Cape State Park – immediately. Protected tracks of prime barrier island real estate. Life is good, and all appears right in the world. Wilderness you say? It is all a big and vast and beautiful blue wilderness out there.

And yet, this is the illusion. When viewed from the shore, we stand apart from the sea, above it all, as removed as we are from the moon. The same goes for when we float upon its waters, trolling for mahi, trawling for specs, and making an infinite number of assumptions crafted around our own interpretations of a view that extends little further than the length of our nose. But let’s be honest here, my blue mind bliss in the morning is based on six pelicans, 20 sanderlings, the fact that I was able to order a rare tuna steak with Kimchi the night before, and the memory of that one time at Teach’s Hole when I caught a hundred speckled trout from a kayak in a day.

But this is not science. This is not even a grainy and slightly out-of-focus Polaroid snapshot of the big picture. This is the anectodical that all us, from naturalists to commercial fishermen, craft our world views around. And it is all based on what? Memories? An emotional response to a moment? We need more than that.

The hip thing to do here when justifying wilderness is to bog ourselves down in scientific minutia. “Protecting wilderness areas will help preserve large, biologically connected ecosystems; species with large home ranges; and hotspots of functional traits and endemic species. It will also directly benefit humanity by preserving the carbon mitigation and adaptation values of intact marine ecosystems” as Jones’ paper dryly explains.

Translation: Want to keep ordering those tuna steaks? We need marine wilderness as refuges for species like tuna, and other animals with massive home ranges, to safeguard at least a small part of their range and population for them to keep breeding and spreading out like a watershed – the same argument that was made for the creation of Yellowstone by George Bird Grinnell in the 19^th century, minus the part about tuna.

Do we all agree that the world is a better place with whales in it? Their ranges overwhelmingly overlap those areas that can still be considered wilderness for a reason: resources. You and I call it food. Science calls it species richness and rarity, and they back it all up with mathematical equations that make me throw up in my mouth just a little bit when I look at them.

But I don’t believe that wilderness needs scientific justification. Why shouldn’t it exist for the sake of existing? Life is better on planet Earth knowing that it does exist, that somewhere out there we haven’t messed everything up, that the mystery of life and wildness and the unknown still unfolds absent of our lusty commercial interests, safe from commodification, protected from the petroleum byproducts the rest of the world is awash in, and without the deafening roar of city sized ships. I think this is something we all want to believe regardless of occupation or political orientation. And it is this final 13 percent that we should all be working toward safeguarding.

Is it a “sea star” or a “starfish?”

For marine bio nerds, this is kind of like a Ford-versus-Chevy argument, like Land Rover versus Land Cruiser, or vinegar versus no vinegar on your barbecue. Actually, that last bit about barbecue is not up for discussion. This is eastern North Carolina, to suggest that anything other than vinegar, cold slaw and hot sauce belongs on our pulled pork would solicit a mob of angry villagers storming your house in the night with pitchforks and torches in hand.

Somehow, the debate over what to call these iconic little echinoderms surfaces in my world on at least an annual basis. I’m not so sure as to what this says about the company that I keep. Given all the things happening in the world of politics and science and pseudoscience that can be argued these days, it seems almost trivial, dare I say pedantic, to get sucked into the “sea star” versus “starfish” debate. And yet, I just can’t help myself.

I’m not going to beat around the bush here. If we were being completely honest with ourselves, neither starfish or sea star would be the real name of our five-legged friends – though not all of them actually have five legs and some have as many as 40. Technically speaking, scientifically speaking, we should probably just look toward the name that their class was given in 1830 by the French zoologist Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville. Studying the shape and form of various starfish, Ducrotay brought together the Greek “aster” and “eidos” in the classical manner of giving animals a descriptive name from ancient languages. “Aster” simply means “star,” which, it would seem, everyone has picked up on already. “Eidos,” on the other hand, means “form” or “essence” or was used to suggest similarity. When combined, “aster” and “eidos” mean “star-like,” and the class of echinoderms that starfish reside in is the Asteroidea. Thus, starfish are really asteroids! Problem solved. Everyone is wrong.

But as much as I would love for the name asteroid to catch on, I hear it’s already taken. I can understand not wanting to confuse people any more than they already are. Just think about it: In the chance of an extinction-level event from space, we wouldn’t want the public thinking that a giant starfish was hurtling toward Earth. Although, that could be scarier.

So, I digress. Asteroid is off the table. Though technically correct, we must leave this title to rocks and ice floating around in space. But if not asteroid, then what? This just brings us back to the original question at hand, and for this it may be best to turn toward history.

Anytime we get into the historical use of words, we risk wading into murky waters. Language is alive. It changes. It grows, evolves. Meanings drift over time. Take the word “fish,” for instance. Today, we have a very well-defined definition of the word “fish.” Consulting with Lord Google on the matter will bring up a variety of definitions as to what a “fish” is, but at the heart of it all is a cold-blooded vertebrate with gills and fins and a two-chambered heart. But this is a purely modern-day understanding of the word. If we go back to the 16^th century, for instance, the word “fish” simply meant any animal that only lived in water. In this understanding of the word, whales and dolphins were both fish and so were crabs, for that matter. So, a starfish was simply a star-like animal that lived only in the water.

The earliest documentation of the word “starfish” that I could find is from 1538 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Really, it’s the word “starfyshe.” If the word made it into the dictionary by the early 16^th century, this means that “starfyshe,” had been part of the common vernacular for a long time.

When we look into the origin of the name “sea star,” however, we find that the earliest definition in the English-speaking world was actually a star that guides mariners at sea. Fair enough. I can get down with celestial navigation. But it’s not that simple. Just 30 years after our “starfyshe” appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary, Edward Fenton, an English sea captain, translated the French Pierre Boaistuau’s immensely popular “Histoires Prodigieuses.” in to his native tongue. “Histoires Prodigieuses” was collection of stories and common-knowledge explanations of the natural world. Though that’s really the polite way of saying it. A more accurate explanation is that it was a collection of myths and stories that surrounded the freaks of nature, which, it would seem, all echinoderms qualified as freaks of nature at the time. Thus in 1569, the phrase “sea starre” enters the English version of this conversation “bycause it hath the figure of a painted starre.”

The fact that “sea starre” first entered the English vernacular thanks to the translation of a French book says a lot about the two terms. You see, “starfish,” it turns out, is a distinctly English word. The rest of Western civilization, from Germany to France to Spain, called these things sea stars. At least, that’s how their names translate.

In America, use of the word “starfish” ultimately betrays our English roots. I find this funny. After the Revolution, America entered into a phase of cultural anxiety. Read: identity crisis. We had fought for and won our freedom from England, and in every way possible we tried to cast off our artistic, literary and even scientific ties to the Old World. However, language persisted, such as “starfish” and “buffalo” and “antelope.” But hey, there are far greater ironies in American culture than something as trivial as this really – such as the fact that we celebrate our independence from an empire by reveling in the fruits of that empire: Chinese-invented fireworks.

Come the 1990s, a bandwagon rolled into town telling us all that we were wrong to use the term “starfish.” All the cool kids in Europe were saying “sea star.” We needed to get with the program. Starfish were not fish, they said. We were using the word incorrectly. We were confusing people. Maybe this was why countries from Vietnam to Estonia far outranked our own students in their knowledge of science, according to the Pew Research Foundation. It’s all the starfish’s fault, right? Oh, the power of language!

But, jellyfish are not fish. And sea urchins are not really poor street kids that live in the sea. What about crayfish? Horseshoe crabs? Sea cucumbers? Brain Coral isn’t really made of brains. Flying lemurs are not really lemurs and they certainly do not fly. And if we are really going to ride this train, it can also be pointed out that the name “sea star” is also incorrect, given that they are not actually stars.

Furthermore, to argue that the proper term for these echinoderms is “sea star” ultimately invalidates much of the rest of the world. Though we like to think we are special, Europe and it’s political offspring like the U.S. are just a small group of countries with very big egos. In Japan, for instance, they are called “hitode,” meaning “palm.” In Malay, they were known as “tapak sulaiman,” or “Solomon’s footprint.” And the Korean word, which I can’t type because I don’t know how to create all the cool symbols on my keyboard, means “immortality.”

“Starfish,” “sea star,” “seastar” or “Solomon’s footprint” – call them what you will. All are correct. And yet, none of them are correct.

Really, they are asteroids: star-like.

Deal with it.

Mornings like this find themselves permanently etched into our memories, teetering on the edge of reality and dreamscape. Though it seemed as if I might drown in humidity, the stillness of the atmosphere was arresting. And the result? Sea and sky were one as heaven and earth joined at the horizon in perfect mirrored reflection. Clouds above, clouds below.

I was plying the shallows around a place called Middle Marsh, a tangle of spartina and oysters and mud and periwinkle snails with a small egret rookery thrown in for good measure. This wetland sits at the mouth of the North River between Beaufort and Harkers Island, and from the air it looks like some sort of cubist painting by Pablo Picasso that has begun to wash away. Strange lines, angles and patterns make up this salt marsh. The whole thing is laced with various tidal creeks and a proper dusting of duck blinds. The tide was high and the place thoroughly flooded thanks to the new moon that day. I was looking for tailing redfish, but what I found was something altogether very different.

Sunning itself in the lime green cordgrass that so dominates these salt marshes, was a dinosaur – otherwise known as an alligator. With my outboard raised high on its hydraulic jack plate, I eased my way in for a closer look. This wasn’t my first Carolina crocodilian. I have spent countless hours kayaking and photographing these ancient creatures along the blackwater recesses of our inner banks and knew they showed up in our estuaries from time to time, even occasionally being spotted on the beach. But this was my first chance encounter with one in the salt. Bottlenose dolphins worked their trade in the channel just beyond this marsh and I had stirred up a green sea turtle with tell-tale sunburst pattern on its shell as I first began to ease across the flats. Now here I was, leaning over the side of my skiff peering into the prehistoric eyes of an alligator where oyster beds and stingrays should be.

This could be considered a chance encounter, a fluke if you will. Up and down the Southeast coast, whenever an alligator shows up on the saltier side of things, we generally assume they were flushed out of rivers by heavy rains or the ebb of king tides. We have a century’s worth of biology to go by, which has told us this is not where alligators are supposed to be.

But we humans are a funny lot, big-brained and all tangled up in the stories we tell ourselves. We try to catalogue and classifying everything under the sun and pass off our understanding of the world to posterity. Wading through this collective knowledge, we scrutinize the past and craft euphemisms like “change is the only constant.” But knowledge and belief are two very different things. And so we become resolute in our assumptions, believing deep down that everything has always been, and always will be, exactly like it is right now.

In the realm of the life sciences, we have come to call this “shifting baseline syndrome.” Sound scary? You should probably be afraid. It’s contagious, life threatening and reached pandemic levels a long time ago.

A hundred years ago, we had the world of American crocodilians neatly organized. Alligators belonged in freshwater swamps, while only the American crocodile could be found in the saltwater – though confined to the Gulf Coast of south Florida. This makes sense. It’s where they were found at the time, albeit after 300 years’ worth of persecution. We also thought they were both just dumb reptiles that were better off exterminated to make way for the new top dog in town.

At that time, nobody knew that alligators could drink from a lens of freshwater that can be found floating atop of saltwater. Nor did we know that both alligators and crocodiles collect sticks on their noses to lure in wading birds who are searching for nesting material – a little behavior we like to call tool use. And it wasn’t until the late 1960s that Robert Paine discovered the concept of keystone species through his work with sea stars on the coast of Washington, right when alligators were being placed on the Endangered Species List.

Today, we talk of concepts like shifting baselines syndrome in regards to our perception of what is and what is not normal. The whole idea was first put forth by the fish biologist Daniel Pauly and was in reference to the state of fisheries. Granddad’s stories of the good old days of fishing were just that: stories, nothing more. Hauls were never that big. Fish, never that numerous. At least that is what we believe – based on our own personal experience. And thus, we fail to grasp what the population of fish once were before our generation’s turn at catching them and especially before commercial fisheries developed.

The world that we are born into is what we accept as reality and assume that on some fundamental level reflects the way things have always been. And so, in Massachusetts for instance, Nantucket natives and the old salts of Cape Cod argue that the presence of 30,000-plus grey seals is unnatural, that great whites shouldn’t be in those waters and the whole ecosystem and that all their fisheries are going to fall apart because of it. Yet, we know from historical records that this is exactly what the place looked like when European fishermen first arrived and could fill a boat with cod by simply dipping baskets into the water – when fishing was at its all-time best. We now know that abundance begets abundance.

What is to say that when science first began to level its gaze at alligators in the early part of the 20^th century, that those biologists themselves weren’t already suffering from shifting baseline syndrome? By that point, Europeans and their descendants had spent about 300 years working on the wholesale destruction of all things predator. Long before such things as wildlife biologists and ecologists ever existed, our civilization had been hard at work remaking the world to its liking.

Brian Silliman, a marine science and conservation professor at the Duke University Marine Lab in Beaufort, argues in a new paper published in the journal Current Biology (download pdf), that this may be exactly what happened. As we enter this new era of conservation success, a time when we are finally beginning to witness real results from such legislation as the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act, a lot of those rebounding animals aren’t exactly doing what they are supposed to.

Today, we are watching as alligators become a regular fixture in salt laden estuaries from Texas to North Carolina. Studies are revealing that species like sharks and rays are regularly making up the diets of these reptiles presumed to be strictly freshwater in nature. Seals, once thought to be a denizen of the far north, are showing up with clocklike regularity on the Outer Banks and the subtropical waters of the Crystal Coast. Sea otters in California, a species associated with Pacific kelp forests, are also beginning to populate salt marshes – a habitat they were ever known to occupy. It’s like Nature Gone Wild out there.

Silliman refers to these species as the ghosts of nature’s past. His argument is not that alligators are really a saltwater species, of course. Crocodiles have specialized glands for expelling salt, whereas alligators do not. Instead, he argues that maybe, just maybe, what we are seeing is not accidental at all, but could very well be a matter of species re-inhabiting old haunts that they were driven from long before we started paying attention.

Studies dating back to the late 1970s reveal that gators were readily found in our state’s salt marshes at a time when their population was at its lowest. Down south, around Cape Canaveral, research shows that gators are found in dense numbers across seagrass beds and in mangroves – places that we once assumed to be the exclusive domain of sharks, sea turtles and American crocodiles. Other studies have identified alligators inhabiting full-blown marine ecosystems for up to a week straight before returning to the slightly less-salty waters of estuaries.

But here’s the thing: When it comes to alligators and saltwater, there is a solid correlation with protected habitats. Back in the early 1980s, here in North Carolina, salty gators were three times more common in the protected salt marshes of our national seashores than elsewhere. Alligators living in the Florida Keys do so only in those mangroves and creeks that fall within National Park lands. And all those seagrass beds at Cape Canaveral that alligators are making their living around, have been protected by the Kennedy Space Center. Simply put, it would appear that alligators are only beginning to occupy saltwater environments where people do not. Even my saltwater alligator falls into this category as Middle Marsh is a part of the Rachel Carson Estuarine Reserve.

All this begs a question about North Carolina then. When we find alligators hanging out in Middle Marsh, or on the beaches of Brunswick County, should we continue to assume that it’s all accidental? The official story is that they were probably just flushed down river by heavy rains. But what if that is not the case at all? What if we are beginning to witness the return to old estuarine haunts?

All of this could have very real consequences for the continued success of species that are beginning to make a comeback. If legislation is written to protect habitat for endangered species, then what does it mean when their habitat extends well beyond the boundaries we once presumed they functioned within?

The idea of conservation success is new to us. Since the 19^th century, when Americans first began to wake up to the impact that we had on the ecosystem and neighboring species, the story of doom and gloom has remained the same. More habitat loss. Populations continuing to dwindle. Another species pressed over the edge of oblivion. Though all is not yet right in the world, hard work is beginning to bear fruit. And this is something that nobody is ready for. We don’t even know what success really looks like. Is it 30-50,000 gray seals and a thriving population of great white sharks? Alligators lounging around on National Seashore beaches? This has not been part of the national conversation.

What does it truly mean for a species to be recovered? Is it when a population reaches a magic number pulled out of a geneticist’s hat and fits nicely into the sterility of legislation? Or is it when a species has re-occupied its home range and has resumed the ecological role it once played there? What if we don’t even know what that home range really was? And, given the fact that each and every one of us alive today suffer the delusional fevers of shifting baseline syndrome, should our assumption of what “recovery” looks like automatically trigger a hunting season?

So many questions yet to be answered.

I never did catch any fish. So taken by my discovery of that alligator laying up in the salt marsh, I lost track of time. As anyone with much experience in tidal creeks knows, you are always working on borrowed time in there. Everything is planned according the ebb and flow of tides – when you can enter, when you should leave. As both time and tide slipped by under the hull of my boat, I found myself overtaken with that sickening feeling that occurs when you suddenly and unexpectedly feel the sharp jolt of solid ground beneath your boat. Hopping into what water that was left, I grabbed my bow line and took my boat for a walk on its leash back to deeper water. Glancing over my shoulder, I watched 6 feet of alligator slip out into the gin-clear waters of the shallow channel and disappear into an estuary where it is probably supposed to be, but we are not yet ready to admit.

With the sun high overhead and days of easterly winds, the ocean here is donning a more tropical hue. Azure blue beyond the outer bar, and clean and green in the surf. It’s days like this that Poseidon begs us to come stroll along the edge of his kingdom. And so, I find myself walking the foreshore, sun drunk and hypnotized, taking advantage of both low tide and high noon.

A large wave stands up on a sandbar. The sun sends light streaming through the water, emerald green with phytoplankton, and revealing the ghostly shapes of dolphins surging forward with the waves. These little cetaceans have herded a school of fish overtop the bar. When a wave rolls in, the fish are swept upwards in the wave, an aquatic prison, albeit momentarily. The dolphins rush in, snatching fish. The wave breaks, fish scatter and the dolphins begin corralling again. Masters of their universe.

The beach remains littered with the remnants of recent storms. Flotsam and jetsam wash the playa. Much of it “bay barf,” as my wife calls it – the discard of America’s great cities spewed from the mouth of America’s great estuary, the Chesapeake Bay. Some of it is of pelagic origin, like the dead leatherback sea turtle.

I’m walking the wrack line of the storm in search of treasure. My definition of such may vary from yours. Whelk shells, shark’s teeth, 17^th century Spanish silver, I’m not picky.

The great waves of storms churn the ocean floor. Old shipwrecks wash up, secrets of the deep are rolled out of their tombs. I’ve yet to experience a storm in which I did not stumble upon something of interest. And so, I walk, and think, and sift through the Bay barf, and flotsam, and jetsam, and pieces of trees, and trash and plastic. We all live downstream.

My eyes que in on something black in the surf. With water temperatures still in the 40s, and me wearing jeans, boots and a long sleeve, I do the only sensible thing of course and wade out into the ocean. The water is cold, but the prospect of discovery makes it bearable. Reaching down into the water up to my shoulder, I grab an obsidian like object.

Walking back up to the beach, I hold the thing up into the air for a better look. Oxygen bathes it for the first time in a long time. The whole thing is only about 5 inches long. It’s jet black. Shiny. Pocked with a few almost microscopic holes. Hollow-ish on the broken side. Unmistakably the distal end of a humerus bone. And it’s extremely heavy for its size.

This is pay dirt. A fossil. Only that Spanish silver would have been a better score in my book. I head straight back to my truck.

The blackness of this bone can mean different things. On the one hand, a bone trapped in decaying plant matter can be stained black relatively quickly. The beach is littered with bay barf. So, God only knows what’s washing around in our surf right now. On the other hand, a bone trapped in mud can undergo a fossilization process known as mineral replacement.

Mineral replacement occurs when mineral-rich water slowly begins to seep into the bone and dissolve the organic calcium and such. As the bone is dissolved, the mineral load of the water doing the dissolving is left behind. As the name implies, the bone is thus replaced by minerals and becomes a fossil. The whole process takes time to occur – at least 10,000 years.

To tell the difference between a black-stained bone and a black, fossilized bone, there is a quick and dirty test used by amateur fossil hunters the world over. All I need is a needle and a lighter.

If you heat up a stout sewing needle until it turns red, you can get a rough idea as to what you’re dealing with. You can’t actually date the thing this way of course. That would require some amount of organic material to be left inside of this bone, and if the bone itself was less than 100,000 years old, radiometric dating to analyze carbon-14. But, you can at least figure out if this is a fossil or not.

Back at my vehicle, I rifle through the center console in search of these tools. Lighter, needle, flame, heat. What I am paying attention to here is the smell. If it smells kind of like burning hair when the needle is applied, it’s bone. If it doesn’t, then it’s a fossil.

Pressing the red-hot needle tip to the object in question, I lean in close to sniff. If anyone were to pull up right now and see me doing this, well God only knows what they would think. I can only imagine one of the sheriff’s deputies easing up beside me out here on the beach. “Sir, just what in tarnation do you think you’re doing?” said, of course, in a long Southern drawl, assuming they caught me in the act of some new-fangled way of getting high. Kids these days.

“Pressing the red-hot needle tip to the object in question, I lean in close to sniff. If anyone were to pull up right now and see me doing this, well God only knows what they would think.”

I breathe in deeply, millimeters away from the needle. No smell. I try another spot. And then another. I further heat up the needle till its glowing red and burning my fingers. Nothing. This is a fossil. But then again, I knew that already. The weight of the thing gave all that away. Fossils are a whole lot heavier than bone because the calcium has been replaced, and this thing weighs about 10 times what you would expect it to.

From about 2.5 million years to around 10,000 years ago – probably more like 11,700 years – Earth was locked into the age known as the Pleistocene Epoch. This is what people mean when they say the “Ice Age.” During the last glacial maxim, the Laurentide Ice Sheet, a humungous continent-sized glacier that towered 2 miles high and carved out the Great Lakes, came as far south as what’s now New York City.

This was a much colder time. This ice sheet stretched clear across the continent. Everything north was frozen solid. Everything south was, well, different than today.

The Pleistocene was the time of the wooly mammoth, giant ground sloths, short-faced bears, dire wolves and sabretooth cats – whole all lived right here. The world’s freshwater was largely locked up in glaciers, lowering the sea level, and placing the coastline out near the edge of the continental shelf – some 40 miles east from where I plucked this fossil out of the surf. The estuaries of what is now the Carolina coast would have looked more like those in Alaska or the Canadian Maritimes. Atlantic walruses for instance lounged on our beaches, where now they cannot be found south of the Labrador Coast. Arctic species of pelagic birds like auks, puffins and dovekies nested here, as the fossilized remains of gigantic colonies found along our coastal plain reveal. This bone, this black fossil, is from that time.

As to exactly what kind of Ice Age animal this may be, it’s extremely difficult to say. There is not much left of the bone. Its medium in size. Definitely mammal. Definitely humerus. And most likely terrestrial – given the color.

The reason that the black of the fossil suggests a terrestrial species is because of the mud it would have been buried in to create this. Just as our estuaries are ringed in boot-sucking mud today, so too were they during the Pleistocene. Animals that die in the mud, get covered up and remain buried for many thousands of years stand a good chance of being fossilized through mineral replacement. It’s unlikely a whale would have died in inland mud. But then again, many of the fossilized sharks’ teeth found around these parts are also black from mineral replacement.

The shale beds that lie off our coast are the remnants of this. In essence, shale is fossilized mud and the type of rock most likely to have fossils in it. Big storms churn up these shale beds. Breaking loose things sticking out of them and hurling them toward the beach to be found by me.

Given the size, this could be a horse – yes, horses lived here then. It could be a moose. It could be a young bison. A young ground sloth. It could be a dire wolf. Or a sabretooth cat. Or an American lion. It’s probably not a cheetah, as they lived further west. It could even be human, from the Clovis culture that went extinct at the same time as all those other animals. In other words, there were a lot of big-to-medium-sized mammals living here at the time. A lot of big-prey species and a whole lot of big predators. Pleistocene America would have made Africa of today seem tame by comparison.

Finding the fossilized remains of these animals is pretty common stuff along our coast. It might be safe to assume that almost daily someone finds a fossil on our barrier island beaches. And this is the beauty of living at the edge of the sea. That vast expanse of Atlantic that stretches out to blue horizons and beyond, is one of the greatest wildernesses on Earth. Most of us think of places like Yellowstone or Alaska with their wolves and bears and mountains. But it is here, right at our feet, that we can find more super predators that any place on Earth – sharks and whales and great fish like blue fin tuna and marlin. Great treasures lie hidden here, such as that carried by the still-unfound wreck of the El Salvador. New species are still being discovered like the Carolina hammerhead. And it is here, in this blue wilderness, that mysteries and discoveries are still to be had on a 19^th century-sized scale.

DEEP IN THE NATIONAL FOREST — I feel like this is cheating. I’m drinking coffee, sitting in my truck, watching what I am beginning to think of as owl TV on my tablet. Technically speaking, I’m working – technically speaking. My camera sits about 50 meters away. A 600mm lens is mounted to camera, mounted to tripod. Pretty standard setup for me. Only tonight there is a new accessory: the Camranger.

Writing this real-time if you will, I find myself glancing back and forth between screens. Two owl chicks shove their heads out of an old, abandoned red-cockaded woodpecker cavity in a longleaf pine. A mix of curiosity and impatience with the parental figures keeps them animated and me entertained. My tablet rests on a holder attached to my dashboard. Laptop is, well, sitting atop my lap. Owls. Words. Repeat.

The Camranger is a Wi-Fi transmitter that plugs into the camera via an HDMI cable and gives me complete control over settings remotely. I watch the world happening real-time seeing everything my camera sees through a dedicated app on my tablet. Two heads pop out? Adjust the focus by tapping the owlets on my tablet. Click. Dad comes flying in? Adjust focus again. Click. You can’t tell me that this isn’t a great time to be a photographer. With so many gadgets ranging from drones to this Camranger, the only thing holding us back are the limits of our own creativity.

The eastern screech owl graces the forest with a couple different color phases. The standard across most of its range is gray, making them one of the most perfectly camouflaged birds in the Americas when sitting in a tree – especially at the entrance of a cavity. The only other owl that comes close to this camo in the U.S. is the great gray owl. This is what makes the eastern screech, especially in the southern parts of its range, a peculiar bird though. If camo is paramount to survival, then the other color morph raises a few questions because it’s red.

We know two things about the red-colored screech owl that may help explain things. First, they are much more common in the southeastern U.S. than elsewhere. Secondly, there seems to be a correlation between this color and pine forests.

Today, the landscape of the Southeast is quite different than it once was. When Europeans first came stumbling through the forests of this place, what they encountered in the south was not the great deciduous forests we now think of, but instead, some 92 million acres of longleaf pine savannas. The global shipping industry would change all of that. Naval stores, that odd phrase collectively referring to forests products used in the maintenance of wooden ships, quickly became a leading industry across the South. Through the 1700s, more than 75 percent of the world’s supply of pitch, tar and turpentine was produced from North Carolina’s longleaf pines. Once the trees were “used up” and dying, the forests were clear-cut for timber. By the 1800s, the industry had laid waste to North Carolina’s longleaf pine forests and began moving south across the coastal plain. By the beginning of the 20^th century, nearly 99 percent of this unique ecosystem that once stretched from Virginia to East Texas was no more.

The scale of this destruction may be historically unsurpassed. Not even logging in the Amazon has come close. An ecosystem that spanned the entirety of the southeastern coastal plain was wholly eradicated. And because the longleaf pine savannas both promoted and depended upon fire for its existence, once removed, it was replaced by other species and an entirely different ecosystem grew back in its place. Most people in the U.S. don’t even know this occurred. Today, oak, hickory and loblolly pine exist where once there was sweeping grasslands with longleaf pines spaced some 50-100 feet apart in an open and park like setting. Some ecologists believe that the complete destruction of the longleaf pine ecosystem is the greatest environmental disaster by our hands in our known history. I can already hear the gnashing of teeth by followers of the Pleistocene overkill theory.

So what does any of this have to do with red morph screech owls?

Disclaimer: what follows is only a working hypothesis of mine and does not necessarily represent the views of the editor, their housekeeper, or the mechanic at your local Toyota dealership. Before deciding to join a mob proceeding to my house wielding pitchforks and torches (I hate it when they bring the pitchforks), please remember this thoughtful disclaimer.

The longleaf pine is a particularly reddish-colored tree. Its bark is often a beautiful display of rufus-colored tones mixed with patterns of gray, especially those old trees infected with a type of fungus known as red heart rot. The fungus is important to the story because trees infected by this stuff are sought after by the red-cockaded woodpecker to excavate their cavities. Bear with me here.

The red-cockaded woodpecker is the only species aside from us that can create cavities in living longleaf pines. Because the composition of the longleaf forest promotes fire, there are very few dead standing trees at any given time in this ecosystem. For this reason, more than 40 different species of vertebrates are dependent upon this one woodpecker for their survival in this particular habitat that once spanned 92 million acres across the Southeast. The eastern screech owl happens to be one of those species.

When we look at a red morph screech owl, we may very well be looking at something of a genetic fossil. Genes that arose during a time when the longleaf pine forest was the dominant habitat type across the Southeast continue today even though the composition of those forests has been dramatically changed. Overtime, those same genes have spread northward into the population at large. But due to the lack of selective pressure working to promote this genetic characteristic however, the rufus-colored morph continues to be a minority outside of the South.

Back to photography, the situation in front of me is a simple one. I’m shooting straight-on at the cavity. There are three owlets inside. And mom and dad fly in and out from time to time with food, starting about an hour or so before sunset. The only problem is that I’m working remote, deep inside of a national forest. These are not suburban owls. This is the deep woods. I’m in a four-wheel drive vehicle, now covered in mud, required to even get back here.

Chances are, I’m the first human these owls have seen. And they are far less excited to see me than I am to see them. Let me get anywhere near the nesting cavity and both the chicks and parents stay hidden. Once I walk away, life returns to normal in a matter of minutes. It’s a sensitive situation. I’m working by the owls’ rules. No humans allowed.

Thus, in this situation, working from a remote device is better for the wildlife. It’s less stressful. Parents feel confident in coming into the cavity to feed their chicks. It’s the ethical thing to do. These owls have a tough time as it is without me playing wildlife paparazzi. I found a great horned owl nest earlier today only a quarter-mile away. These guys eat screech owls. And peregrine falcons. And, just about anything they can catch off guard. For the screech owl, odds are already stacked against them.

The sun has set and the colors are beginning to wash out as details become featureless. Lacking the requisite Tapetum lucidum in my eyes that give nocturnal species their characteristic eye shine, I have reached my limits of usefulness out here and prepare to give over the forest to those creatures of the night. The gray morph female flies back into the cavity one last time and disappears with her young for a few minutes. In the last bit of fading light, she climbs back up to the entrance of the cavity where she peers out into the forest with amber-colored eyes. Somewhere in the distance her mate, a red morph, begins to trill, joining the chorus of whip-poor-wills and the symphony of amphibians already beginning to crescendo.

I remember the first time I watched a sea turtle dying from a plastic bag it had ingested. Its desperate attempts to breathe, how it fought for life. I remember watching it surface, awkwardly, with more than a foot of plastic hanging out of its mouth. The other turtles were nearly silent when they surfaced for air. But the sound that this loggerhead made as it labored and gasped for oxygen spun me around on the deck of my boat to be visually confronted with the heartbreaking story unfolding in the water beside me.

Schools of menhaden darkened the waters like blobs of purple masses whirling around just below the surface. An oil streak had developed some 50 yards away from me, no doubt the aftermath of the bottlenose dolphins working their way through this oily fish. And there were turtles everywhere.

In our minds, loggerhead sea turtles are not typically associated with finfish like menhaden. Historically, these oceanic reptiles have been more closely connected with horseshoe crabs. But these turtles are often referred to as the junkyard dogs of their family. They are opportunistic. And as shown in one study published in 2007 in the journal Copeia, the primary diet of these turtles is in a state of flux as it learns to adapt to human impacts on the items that were once listed on its menu.

Examples may be in order here. Historically, horseshoe crabs were the go-to source of food for loggerheads. And in the early 1980s this 450-million-year-old species continued to make up the bulk of contents found in the guts of these sea turtles. But as we began to destroy the horseshoe crab population for bait and the biomedical industry, by the mid-1980s, common blue crab became the prominent contents of their bellies. This was not to last however, as we all know what has been happening to blue crab populations since then. And so, by the early 2000s, croaker and menhaden were showing up more and more, according this study.

Another favorite food of loggerhead sea turtles is jellyfish. Though these guys may not be the epic jelly connoisseurs like their leatherback cousins, loggerheads rarely pass up one of these squishy ghost-like creatures when the opportunity presents itself. And as jelly populations continue to surge as a result of climate change, this is one food source that these turtles can count on.

But in today’s world, expecting wildlife to be able to count on anything is a tall order. Especially when human-made pollution begins to look a lot like food sources such as jellyfish, and as hundreds of millions of plastic bags drift tantalizingly along out coastlines. Which all brings us back to my boat and a suffocating sea turtle.

I wish I could say that this was the only time I had to witness something like this, but I cannot. A year later, while paddling my surf kayak out to a break off Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, I watched yet another loggerhead suffering a similar fate. With what could have been either a plastic bag or balloon hanging out of its mouth, this one surfaced only once near me before diving beneath my kayak. I watched it slip into the depths, plastic streaming through the water beside it.

Turtles lack the ability to regurgitate, thanks in part to a papillae-lined esophagus. These papillae are like spiky little fingers, all pointing toward the belly of the beast. Once it goes in, there is no turning back. This is an evolutionary adaptation that has served these ancient reptiles quite well for more than 100 million years. That is, until now.

Then, there are all the dead sea turtles I have seen. The ones necropsied on the beach with plastic clogged inside of throats, or partially inflated with air in the guts in such a way that it would never pass through the other end. Too many sea turtles die from plastic. Welcome to the Plasticene era.

It was scenarios like the ones above that play out on a nearly daily basis along our coastline and helped drive policy back in 2010. Back then, the Outer Banks had a real problem on its hands. You see, over 7 million people visit our coast each year. The lion’s share of these rent houses on the beach, houses that need to be stocked with food. And as any local on the Outer Banks knows, come tourist season, you simply do not go grocery shopping on the weekends.

So, imagine now, 7 million people all needing groceries for a week. And all these groceries being served up in lightweight, disposable plastic bags. And all of it in one of the windiest places in the country.

If you weren’t around back then to witness the plastic bag fiasco, you might have a hard time understanding the magnitude of the problem. Imagine a biblical plague of locusts, but instead of grasshoppers descending upon Egypt, it was plastic bags on the Outer Banks. Plastic bags littered our beaches. They collected in trees after a stout southwest wind, creating what looked like some redneck Christmas tree decorated with a hundred-plus bags all bearing Food Lion’s logo. They piled up against the sides of buildings. They inundated our marshes. And many of these bags found their way into our ocean.

The main problem here was never deliberate littering. Of course, there was that too. But mostly, the problem was created from the amount of trash that one of these rental homes would accumulate throughout the course of a week. Come the end of that week, trash overflowed from nearly every can at the road. It piled up around the cans into mountains of trash sometimes. And on the Outer Banks, one thing is always certain: The wind will blow.

In his epic novel “East of Eden,” John Steinbeck wrote about the collective amnesia of Californian famers. Drought is commonplace in the Central Valley of California. It comes in roughly 20-year cycles. It devastates growers. Farmers go bankrupt. They are forced to kill off some of their crops to save water for other crops. They default on debts and lose everything. And the result is a cyclical shrinkage of the farms that survive as everyone tries to weather the hard times. But then the rains come again and the growing gets better. And after about 10 years or so, the collective amnesia sets in. The farmers forget about the drought. They expand. They borrow more money. They overextend themselves, piling on debt as they bank and speculate on next year being even better than this one. But then drought returns. The bubble bursts, and more farms go under.

So here we are, inching our way towards the 10-year mark after the ban on plastic bags along the Outer Banks was first put into place. And I have to wonder if, like the farmers depicted by John Steinbeck, a collective amnesia is beginning to set in.

The arguments we hear are that the plastic bag ban is strangling small businesses, that the law is overreach by government and that everyone should have a choice to do as they please. We hear that the government should look out for the little guy in this – never mind the fact that not so little petroleum companies have been bankrolling opposition to such bans wherever they pop up across the country.

The ironies of such arguments are endless, but at the end of the day, if the ban is repealed, it will be the small businesses that are affected by the repeal. If given a choice, the big chains will follow their orders from corporate and switch back to the cheaper plastic bags. The small businesses are the ones owned and operated by the locals, the ones who have a vested interest in the health of the Outer Banks, their home. No wonder so many of these Outer Banks businesses have already come together through the chamber of commerce to oppose this collectively. Yet, despite local businesses shouting that they want to keep the ban in place, political momentum continues to build with politicians who do not have a vested interested in the Outer Banks. It really makes you wonder: Who is the man behind the curtain pushing for this?

The Outer Banks is an outdoor recreation destination. The experience is quite unlike going to places like Virginia Beach, Myrtle Beach, or Charleston for that matter. The popularity of our beaches surged after the plastic bag ban was put into place – despite the recession – and numbers continue to grow. People want clean beaches. They need clean oceans. The world needs sea turtles. The Outer Banks lives or dies by the health and wealth of its coastal environment, which is why we must fight against the collective amnesia. We must keep the ban on plastic bags.

Residents called it Roanoke. Virginians called it Rogues’ Harbor. And one particular governor claimed it was a land populated by nothing more than “a very mutinous people.” All of these names and claims have merit, and each sums up a different aspect of its history. It was the first permanent colony to exist in the Carolinas, and was the most egalitarian and rebellious society in all the English world at the time. A society of escaped slaves and runaway indentured servants, of pirates, and debtors, of religious dissidents, and those politically charged with the spirit of Cromwell’s revolution. These were a people who would bow to no man, recognize no political authority above the ones that they freely elected for themselves, and threaten imprisonment or death to anyone who dared try to collect a tax for the crown – all of this, more than a century before the so-called new and radical ideas of the American Revolution. This place was Albemarle.

It is no coincidence that such a colony would come to exist in between our country’s two largest estuaries. To the north was the Chesapeake Bay and the Virginia colony, with its rigid hierarchy, giant plantations, and slave markets; a society of great wealth and great poverty. To the south was Carolina, with its distinct lack of everything Virginia had to offer, and the Albemarle – Pamlico estuary with its untold possibilities, and treacherous shoal waters. What lay between these two great inland seas was a half-drowned peninsula, laced by black water rivers and creeks, hemmed in by the Currituck Sound and Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Chowan River to the west. And at its heart, a great and dismal swamp that engulfed some 2,200 square miles that stood between these two vastly different worlds.

The Great Dismal Swamp of the 17^th and early 18^th century was still a howling wilderness in the minds of most Virginians. A place of darkness. Where alligators hunted, and panthers haunted. Black bears and red wolves roamed this semi-aquatic forest. Cottonmouths held up on cypress knees, and timber rattlesnakes laid claim to those few hammocks of high ground that could be found.

And then there was the malaria. Of course, back then no one had drawn the connection between this disease and its mosquito vectors. Instead, it was believed that this sickness came from breathing in the miasma of the swamps themselves – hence the name malaria, mala aria. Italian for “bad air.” The dreaded “fever and agues” that was associated with this illness, turned the region into a hospital from August until October. A fact that only reinforced a notion that this was no place for the likes of civilized man. The Dismal was just that, a dismal place of sickness and death to be feared and avoided.

But, if you were a slave who had escaped your shackles on a Virginian plantation, or an indentured servant who watched as the courts steadily added years upon years to your sentence of servitude, then the Dismal Swamp offered more than malaria and soggy feet. It offered freedom.

Freedom is one of those words that seems to hold different meanings for different people. Freedom for a slave was something different than freedom for an indentured servant for instance. Such definitions were themselves altogether different from the meaning of freedom for a follower of Quaker beliefs escaping persecution and even execution in the Massachusetts colony.

Then there are the political ideologues. The sons of the English Revolution. Those Levelers and Diggers who dared to believe that all men had been created equal, that social classes needed banishment, and the only government that ruled should be a government freely elected by the people it governed. Freedom to these men was, again, something different.

Regardless of each refugee’s personal brand of what freedom meant to them, what they shared in common was a need to escape the structure of the English system. What they shared in common was a want of refuge beyond the tentacles of law and culture, where class and titles had no meaning. These were a people seeking safe harbor outside the folds of the Anglican church, and out of reach from a society that had institutionalized torture and mutilation as the foundation of its economy. What they shared in common, was Albemarle.

Before King Charles II handed over ownership of the Carolina colony to eight Lord Proprietors, for their loyalty to the crown during the English Civil War, scores of settlers had already begun to colonize what would soon be known as the Albemarle settlement. Establishing close relations with native tribes such as the Yeopim, Poteskeet, and Chowan, these families pressed beyond the Dismal Swamp to forge a world for themselves, free from crown, church, and Virginia to the north.

As so many had come to the Carolina sounds under dubious circumstances, flying under the radar became something of a survival strategy. The first generation of these families established no plantations, farmed only small subsistence plots of land, lived in the flood plains of the sounds, and built only clapboard shacks that were regularly washed away during hurricanes and then rebuilt. As something of a hat tip toward the known history of the region, these people called their new home Roanoke out of respect for the colony England somehow misplaced on an island inside the nearest outlet to the Ocean.

When in 1664 the charter for Carolina was drafted, these people found themselves at a crossroad in history. On the one hand, the establishment of Carolina meant that they were now free from the legal reach of Virginia. On the other, they found themselves once again subjects of the king. This world was already a functioning society. These families had no need of the good graces of the Lord’s Proprietors for their survival as other colonies had. And for that reason, they could choose to capitulate under whatever Colonial structure the proprietors saw fit, or they could stand their ground, demand their right to exist by their own set of laws, and to play by their own set of rules as part of the agreement for them accepting the terms of this new charter.

Harbored by the safety of the vast and shallow water estuary, and the treacherous shoals and inlets of the Outer Banks, these colonists found themselves in a unique position to make such demands. No ship in the royal fleet could reach them to try and coerce by threat of canons (think: Siege of Boston in 1775). A 2,200-acre swamp offered a barrier to approach from Virginia as well. And besides, given the nature of the swamplands in which these people existed, there was little hope for this region to turn much of a profit for the proprietors. The proprietors’ real interest lay with the newly established Charles Town on the southern end of the colony, which was beginning to look like a new Barbados. For Albemarle, geography beget security.

So, in 1677 when a declaration came from the banks of the Currituck Sound claiming “Wee will have noe Lords noe Landgraves noe Cassiques we renounce them all,” the citizens of Albemarle were making a stand against forms of government they did not believe in and the social norms they had fought their way into the southern frontier to escape. Such a statement could get your neck stretched elsewhere. But this was Carolina, and for the Lords Proprietors it was one they felt forced to accept.

Truth be told, the Lords Proprietors didn’t really have much of a choice in the matter. It wasn’t so much that they were being backed into a corner though. It was the fact that in short order, Charles Town, which was established in 1670, had begun to pay hefty dividends, making Carolina a highly profitable venture for the proprietors. If news of a rebellion in Albemarle ever reached the king, these lords risked losing control over the colony and its profits.

And so, this circle of lords who theoretically saw over the fates of the Carolina colony diligently worked to suppress and destroy any possibility of the king learning of the political situation while at the same time seeking to appease those residents of Albemarle. As long as they were getting what they wanted, they weren’t really rebelling, right?

Furthermore, given the treacherous nature of the coastline, this region of Carolina would never develop a thriving commercial market like the one springing up on the southern end of the colony or those to the north. Norfolk and Charles Town were the only suitable areas for such enterprise, leaving a vast region of Carolina a social and economic backwater. Therefore, to help convince others to settle here in spite of the lack of economic incentives, the proprietors realized that the personal liberties being afforded Albemarle could also help to draw people to other regions of the Carolina colony as well. That, and 50 acres of land for every white male in your family.

Thus is the origin of so many of North Carolina’s families. Lured in by the promise of personal liberties afforded nowhere else in the English world, the people came. Pirates took pardons. Socialist agrarians like the Levelers came in droves. Even more radical ideas flooded into the region with the likes of the Diggers, who believed in an ecological interrelationship between man and nature and of a society composed of small autonomous agrarian communities. And religious dissenters followed with like-minded ideals in the form of Quakers preaching equality amongst classes and the sexes.

These people fought hard to establish and maintain their unique ways of life. When challenges against them came, they took up arms. When the HMS Swift grounded on the Currituck Banks while carrying the crown’s orders for tighter governmental control over customs, residents of the Currituck Precinct stormed the beach, stripping the ship of all valuables, setting fire to all its papers, and finally blowing a hole in the side of the ship to keep it from ever sailing again. Wracking, the practice of scavenging and salvaging ships, was a common practice along the Carolina coast that rarely so much as raised an eyebrow, but the degree to which the HMS Swift was set upon and destroyed was labeled an act of treason.

Inevitably though, the dominant culture began to close in around this 17^th century-styled utopia of Albemarle. Greed began to ooze down from Virginia along the Chowan River, which unlike the swampy expanse of Carolina directly south of the Dismal Swamp, was quite suitable for large-scale, Virginia-style plantations. Farmers became envious of their aristocratic counterparts to the north, and began to eye Indian lands to the west of the river which had been placed off limits in various agreements with neighboring tribes.

In the Western World at this time, there was no such thing as the separation of church and state. The Anglican Church and the state were the left and right arms of the ruling elite. Government was shaped by interests of aristocrats. The dogmatic ideologies of various churches were in turn established to help reinforce the wants of those same aristocrats. Whereas the state functioned to control the body, the church could be wielded to justify it all in the minds of the faithful. None of this is an attack upon religion, only a statement toward the level of corruption that was so pervasive at the time – the same corruption that our own Constitution sought to keep in check through the separation of these two institutions. None of this was lost on the Chowan farmers.

If the Lords Proprietors would not allow for them to break away from the principles of Albemarle that had been written into law barring them from creating large scale plantations, and they could not oust the Quaker mentality of equality and Leveler beliefs of popular sovereignty, then Chowan would find help elsewhere in the form of the Anglican Church. Conspiring with the “Goose Creek Men,” a string of recent families and plantations to pop up along Goose Creek in what is now South Carolina with direct family ties to the barbarous yet fabulously wealthy Barbados, the Chowan clique of would-be aristocrats began petitioning for the Anglican Church to move into Albemarle.

Ironically, when Anglian missionaries and preachers did begin to answer the call to come to Carolina the reality of the situation was immediately apparent even to them. Several ministers complained that those purporting to hold Anglican beliefs seemed to have little interest in religion at all and that the Quakers appeared to be the only real Christians in the whole of the colony.

With the introduction of the Anglican Church came the supreme will of the crown, an expectation of class and hierarchy, of landed gentry, of deference to one’s social betters, tithes to the church paid in the form of non-negotiable tax on ALL citizens, and a means to an end for those who longed for more “English” days. The encroachment of the Anglican Church changed everything for northern Carolina and Albemarle. Conflicts arose. Rebellions broke out. And a power struggle ensued as religious and political dissidents fought to protect their way of life from the Anglican Church and its wealthy backers. The whole situation became so incendiary that in 1729 the majority of the Lords Proprietors decided to wash their hands of the mess, selling their grants back to the crown and effectively turning Carolina into a royal colony. An act that would bring about swift change to Albemarle.

Looking around eastern North Carolina today, it is hard to imagine that this place was once the hotbed for revolutionary ideas in the New World. Socialists. Anarchists. And Quakers? That’s a brand of oatmeal, right?

This society of malcontents that sprung up along the edges of our sounds, has been largely overlooked by history. Prominent names across the coastal plain can be traced back to this time – names like Gibbs, Jarvis, Durant, Sawyer, Dawson, Davis, Mann, Balance, and Swann, to name just a few. Understanding who these people were, and what drove them to settle the Albemarle – Pamlico estuary when they did, is important to understanding who we are as a people.

This is our story. A history of rebels and rogues, of Blackbeard and Gov. Eden doing business together, of Quakers, and Levelers, of the largest free population of black folks in the New World, and a giant swamp and estuary that made it all possible.

When I was in college, my father was stabbed three times in the back with a pair of eight-inch pruning shears by his brother. Both lungs were punctured. The shears missed his heart by a single millimeter. He was airlifted to a hospital in Virginia where he was brought back to life twice en route. The following day he slipped into a coma, for which the doctors had no explanation as to why. There he lay, neither dead nor really alive for two weeks. My daily routine consisted of alternating between his bedside and the hospital chapel.

My father made it, but the event took an extraordinary toll on my family and his psyche. It took months of physical therapy for him to fully recover. As soon as he was able to get around on his own he packed a duffel bag of clothes, climbed in his truck and drove to my family’s house on Carova Beach just below the Virginia line on the Currituck Banks. With no roads, no pavement, with the Currituck Sound on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, my dad spent the next year wrestling with his own mind, trying to come to terms with what had happened and trying learn how to forgive his brother. Every evening, he would just sit in his truck on the beach, staring out at the ocean. His mind began to heal.

Years later, I found myself in the grips of my own psychological turmoil. Everything in my world was unraveling. To top it off, I had a degree in hand from Appalachian State University, but I was broke — stuck in the seasonal economy of the Outer Banks right as the global economy collapsed. What good was a degree in environmental history when the world was falling apart? Winter can be a long and dark time on the Banks in a recession.

As I began to discover my own personal brand of rock bottom, a certain obsession took hold of my mind. I needed the ocean. But I needed more than what simply driving out to Avalon Fishing Pier could offer. I lived on Colington Island in Dare County at the time, but it wasn’t enough. The storm was getting darker.

The Restorative Ocean

On a cold December day, beneath a steel-gray sky that was spitting snow, I found myself locked in four-wheel drive on the sand with a trailer full of my belongings, grinding my way up the beach to Carova. Somehow, I had managed to convince my parents to let me and my new bride move into the family cottage, for a price, of course, but just until we could get on our feet.

Life in Carova is quite unlike life anywhere else on the Outer Banks. This is beyond the pavement. Where the beach is the only way in and the only way out. Where each day is planned around the ebb and flow of tides, the phases of the moon and coastal storms. The ocean is the orchestrator of life. The alpha and omega. And like my father before me, I found that in short order, the storm within my mind began to calm.

Looking back, I am forced to wonder if any of this should really be a surprise? At what point and time have we not placed value on the sea for its healing properties? But to experience this first hand, to feel the unexplainable pull, to be able to look back and realize that the ocean saved my life, this sparked an unquenchable thirst for understanding what mysterious powers the ocean really holds over us as a culture or species.

Victorian age doctors routinely prescribed sea air as a remedy for all sorts of both physical and psychological maladies. Then again, doctors also used leeches. But as I began to entertain my curiosities and dive into the academic literature on the healing effects of the sea, it became apparent that far from hocus-pocus, there was very real science at work to back it all up.

Sea Smells and Census Data

Mathew White, an environmental psychologist, published in 2013 the results of a study on the effect of the ocean and health. In this peer-reviewed work in the journal “Health and Place,” White found that in the United Kingdom, there was a direct correspondence with health and proximity to the ocean. Census data indicated that the closer people lived to the sea, the healthier they were reported to be. The effects of this could be found up to 30 miles away from the sea. But, there was a statistical increase, when plotted out on a graph, the closer to the ocean one lived.

One of the reasons why we are able to see a direct benefit with proximity to the ocean comes from all the “stuff” floating around in the air near the sea. You know this stuff, its dimethyl sulfide. Ok. Well maybe you don’t know it by that name, but basically that is what you smell when you smell the sea. It’s a gas emitted by phytoplankton in the ocean. As you breathe it in, you are also inhaling negatively charged hydrogen ions pumped into the air from crashing waves.

Negative ions seem to be all the rage these days, but there is science that, too. For starters, negative ions help with oxygen absorption. Oxygen has a calming effect on the body. You, for instance, sleep better with more oxygen. Negative ions also both boost and balance serotonin levels – the happy hormone. The medical website WebMd claims, quite simply, that negative ions create positive vibes. There is more, but you get the point.

Negative ions are just the tip of the iceberg however. Today, the big questions being asked about the ocean and human health is its effects on our brain. Neurobiologists have even coined a term for this – Blue Mind.

Blue Mind

Anyone who has ever spent time near the sea, and so probably everyone reading this, can attest to the calming effects of the ocean. In a nutshell, blue mind is a calm and meditative state of mind that is associated with our brains around water. This is opposed to “red mind,” which is characterized by anxiety, stress, fear and even despair – exactly the mental state that most modern Americans find themselves in on a daily basis.

Wallace J. Nichols, a marine biologist and Duke University alumni, has worked tirelessly to bring about an interdisciplinary approach to understanding this concept of blue mind. Each year, he organizes a conference of experts ranging from anthropologists to neurobiologists that he calls the Blue Mind Conference. In 2012, this conference was hosted on the Outer Banks. Nichols is also the author of the New York Times bestselling book “Blue Mind,” in which he brings together the cutting edge science happening on this topic to the masses.

This science, however, really is in its infancy. At the moment, we are limited to measuring responses right now. The “why” part of how our brains react when in the presence of the ocean is up for debate. But what we do know, thanks to gadgetry such as EEGs and MRIs, is that sitting beside the ocean produces the same stress reducing effects on our brains as meditation. What we do know is that the electrical activity of the brain is at its lowest state when looking at the water. Which seems to be exactly what millions of overworked, over-stressed, over-civilized people who spend their savings and flock to the ocean every year already understood. And exactly what my father seemed to have understood instinctively on a subconscious level after coming home from the hospital.

Wallace Nichols inspires us to engage in a deeper relationship with nature. Using our oceans as the prime example of how insignificant humans can feel while also being unmistakingly connected to the spirit of nature, Nichols urges us to embrace our natural surroundings in order to live robust and full lives.

The Watery Bond

Since reading Nichols’ book, I have had the opportunity to speak with my father about the ocean’s impact on his recovery after leaving the hospital. Like my own experience, the pull of the ocean was something that was completely unexplainable to him at the time. All he knew was where he needed to be. And once there, the ocean simply took care of the rest. It didn’t matter to him if it was day or night. He found himself called out to the beach in a routine he would repeat for nearly a year where he would just sit, breathe, listen, relax and heal.

Because my uncle did not actually kill my father, he was only given probation and community service for stabbing him. My father forgave his brother. But jealousy and mental illness have taken a toll on my uncle, who refuses to speak to my dad to this day.

Though separated by years and circumstances, I told my father of my own story of how I found myself desperately making my way to Carova. He sat and listened. He told me that he could never explain it, but he understood. They say there is no such thing as an ex-Marine. So when I saw the light in his eyes as we talked, his excitement over this shared experience and his real understanding of this sort of healing we had both found from the ocean, I knew I was witnessing something extraordinary in this Vietnam vet before me. I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to say that the ocean saved both of our lives. And this will always be a bond that we share.

OCRACOKE — Our story is inextricable from that of pirates. The birthing pains of our colony were eased by services rendered from those sea dogs that once took harbor in places like Beaufort, Wilmington and Ocracoke Island as Gov. Charles Eden practically institutionalized the revolving-door relationship between them and the colonial government.

It is for this reason that any self-respecting North Carolinian knows at least a little something about pirates. And so in order to set the tone here, how about a pop quiz to test your swashbuckler savvy.

Let’s start with an easy one. Who is the most famous pirate in the world (Johnny Depp does not count)? 

That would be Blackbeard, of course.

Can you name one pirate that hailed from North Carolina?

Chances are, you answered Blackbeard – unless you’re a pirate nerd and didn’t say Blackbeard just because it would be too easy and cliché.

Who partied with Charles Vane on the beaches of Ocracoke like it was 1799 (although it was actually 1718)?

Blackbeard again.

Which pirate was beheaded in Ocracoke Inlet, whose body is said to still be seen swimming around on full moon nights in search of its missing head?

Blackbeard.

Who stole the largest treasure ever pirated in the Atlantic Ocean from inside of Ocracoke Inlet, was chased by five different countries, buried the treasure on a remote Caribbean island and stands as the foundation for nearly every single pirate story ever told from “Treasure Island” to “Pirates of the Caribbean?”

John and Owen Lloyd.

Who?

Wait a minute. You have never heard of John and Owen Lloyd? They only stole 52 chests of Spanish silver in 1750, worth around $20 million in today’s dollars – far more than Blackbeard ever dreamed of capturing. This was the most famous act of piracy in history. Owen lived on Queen Street up in Hampton, Va. He did the whole buried treasure thing in the Caribbean. John Lloyd was from Church Street in Norfolk. He was the guy with the wooden leg who owned a 150 acres on the Pasquotank River. Doesn’t ring a bell? Maybe you know John by a different name he was given many years later: Long John Silver.

I’m underneath a thick canopy of live oak trees at a place called Springer’s Point on Ocracoke Island. Some of the live oaks are pretty old in here and more reminiscent of places I’ve been along the coast of the other Carolina to the south. Yaupon holly, that coastal shrub with its caffeine-infused leaves, is ubiquitous. A flash of red, blue and green flits passed me and I pause because I have never seen a painted bunting on Ocracoke Island. The air hangs thick with humidity and salt, and I can’t help but think of some of the other pirate haunts I have explored along the coast of Belize, Honduras and Panama.

Up ahead, the wall of dark and green opens to Ocracoke Inlet. An old rock jetty extends into the water where a few years back I sat in a kayak, pulling in both gray and speckled trout with every single cast until my arms shook from exhaustion and I had to weigh the options of catching more fish or being able to physically get my kayak back to the ramp and on top of my truck. At the end of the jetty is a hole. Surrounded on all sides by shallow water on an ebb tide, this slough still bears the name of Edward Teach – the man we call Blackbeard today.

Teach’s Hole, as it is known both here on Ocracoke and on official navigational charts of the inlet, is probably the site of the two biggest things to happen in the world of piracy during the 18^th century. It was here that Blackbeard slept off a hangover in his sloop when Capt. Maynard, the man who would separate him from his head, sailed into the inlet. And it was here where a couple of sloops where stolen by John and Owen Lloyd, separating Spain from an immense treasure larger than anything ever stolen in the Atlantic.

On Aug. 18, 1750, the legendary Flotas de Indias, Spain’s treasure fleet, set sail from Havana toward the Florida Straights and the Gulf Stream. Late August really isn’t the best time of the year to be sailing the Gulf Stream without advanced weather forecasting. Though hurricanes can technically pop up from June till the end of November, hurricane season is a lot like basketball season in that only four of those weeks really matters.

The weeks between Aug. 20 and Sept. 20 is when the likelihood of a hurricane more than doubles. Since 1851, when records began to be kept on such matters, there has been 34 hurricanes to affect the coast of North Carolina in the month of July, 101 in August and 142 in September. Every major hurricane to hit North Carolina has occurred in this late August through late September window of time. And so when on Aug. 25 Capt. Bobilla, of the Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe, the flag ship of this year’s treasure fleet, first took note of darkening skies to the east as they rounded Cape Canaveral to the west, the hurricane season of 1750 was shaping up exactly as we have come to expect.

The hurricane deposited three wrecked Spanish galleons onto the list of North Carolina’s Ghost Fleet. On Aug. 29, the NS de El Salvador was dashed to pieces on a sandbar somewhere between Beaufort Inlet and Cape Lookout, the Soledad ran aground near Drum Inlet, and the Guadalupe came to rest near Ocracoke Inlet at Portsmouth Island and broke apart.

Only a small amount of silver that washed ashore was recovered from the wreckage of the El Salvador. As for the Soledad and Guadalupe however, all treasure and cargo made it through the storm to be unloaded onto the beaches of Core Banks – including the 12 tons of silver aboard the Guadalupe.

The Spanish Treasure Fleet was not the only ships to turn up at Ocracoke Inlet as a result of this storm. John and Owen Lloyd were in route to St. Kitts down in the Caribbean when the hurricane drove them into the inlet in desperation. The Lloyds ran a shipping and ferrying business around Hampton Roads but both brothers had suffered at the hands of Spanish privateers during the recently ended King George’s War. John, the older brother, had found himself short one leg thanks to a Spanish cannonball before being captured by another privateer and stuck inside of a Havana prison. Owen himself did a short stint as a privateer and successfully captured at least one wealthy prize around the Virgin Islands before his ship was captured by the Spanish near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, for which he fell into financial ruin.

The particularities of exactly how two Spanish-hating brothers from Hampton Roads came to be commissioned by Capt. Bonilla to ferry his “cargo” to Norfolk for shipping back to Spain has been lost to the shifting sands of the islands history. But, in short order John and Own Lloyd found themselves working aboard two sloops anchored in Teach’s Hole as a skeleton crew of Spaniards that had survived the hurricane loaded 52 chests of unknown contents into the cargo holds of the small shallow drafting boats. Can you see where this is going?

It did not take long before word spread as to exactly what was in those chests. On the heels of a war with Spain, with a bunch of people who had either directly or indirectly suffered at the hands of Spanish privateers standing around as eyewitness, on an island as remote as the moon is for us today, in a colony that had long embraced and harbored pirates in order to benefit from their tax free services, here was a king’s fortune laying around on the beach in a bunch of boxes. This was a powder keg waiting to explode. And by now everyone was trying their hand at a plot to grab the silver.

The North Carolina council argued the chests should be seized because they were illegally landed on N.C. soil. Custom officials were busy doing what custom officials did at the time trying to ransom part of the treasure for themselves. As for the Bankers who inhabited Ocracoke, these folks had long made their living by scavenging shipwrecks and as the story on the Outer Banks goes, there had always been a blurred line between law-abiding citizen and outright pirate on the Outer Banks. This fact alone was enough to prompt Eden to try and dispatch the HMS Scorpion to protect the silver from the locals on the island.

John and Owen’s plan was pretty simple. While Bonilla was busy fighting with the N.C. government to procure customs papers in New Bern, they would simply hack the anchor lines and slip out the inlet with the falling tide. While everyone else was busy trying to find legal loopholes that allowed them to lighten Spain of this burden of silver, the Lloyds would simply steal the ships it sat upon. And what a fitting place for the whole thing to transpire: on Ocracoke, where Blackbeard and Charles Vane had plotted to create another Pirate Republic in Nassau like fashion, and in Teach’s Hole to top it all off. It took little convincing to pull together a small crew for the job.

On Oct. 20, 1750, as the Spanish soldiers left the two sloops loaded with silver and boarded what was left of the Guadalupe as they did every day for lunch, two sets of anchor lines were cut. Sails were quickly raised, and crowds of onlookers, both on land and on surrounding ships, erupted in cheers as John and Owen Lloyd raced out of the inlet and into the open waters of the Atlantic. Their destination: St. Kitts, in the British Virgin Islands.

In the 1750s, if you spoke English, Spanish, or French, you knew about the Lloyd’s heist on Ocracoke. Pirates, pirate hunters, treasure hunters, royal navies and many others were all on the lookout for the Lloyds. People sat around in aristocratic parlors of just about every country that ringed the Atlantic discussing the latest newspaper stories regarding the matter. Down on St. Kitts, where the silver was headed, well, the Lloyds practically became folk heroes.

There is a certain amount of irony in the fact that the author of “Treasure Island,” Robert Louis Stevenson, was born on Nov. 13, 1850, exactly 100 years to the day of the anniversary of Owen Lloyd, according to his own testimony, burying the treasure on Norman Island, a short sail from St. Kitts. But it is neither irony nor coincidence that the Stevenson family ran a sugar-production business on the island. It was here that one Alan Stevenson would arrive in 1773 to work for his uncle’s sugar business, where the legend of John and Owen Lloyd was still alive and well. Alan was Robert Louis Stevenson’s great-grandfather. The rest is history.

Learn More

• Spanish galleons of 1750
• Long John Silver
• Treasure Island: The Untold Story

It is a fascinating thing how history morphs into legend. The sands of time shifting back and forth across a topic tend to weather it down, polish it up and make it sparkle. Like stones in a rock tumbler, the end result barely resembles the raw material that originally went in.

Early American history is like that. Quests for gold become searches for Fountains of Youth. And piratical intentions become glossed over and repackaged as lofty goals of colonization. In today’s world, to understand the why of a thing we know to simply follow the money trail – as the saying goes. The 16^th century was no different. We are but the next chapter of the same book.

During the Age of Exploration, to follow the money trail one had only to seek out a great current in the ocean of unimaginable proportions. It wielded the power to control the weather and shape the lives and cultures that fringed both sides of the Atlantic. It was a current on which empires would rise and fall. Fortunes would be made and lives would be lost.

When it comes to the story of the Americas, of the meteoric rise of the Spanish empire, of the founding of Roanoke, and the birthing pains of our own nation, we find that this so called money trail drifted like so many toy ships upon the back of the Gulf Stream and our history is inextricable from it.

The Arrival of the Spanish

Star Date: 1513.  A Spanish conquistador by the name of Juan Ponce de Leon was setting sail from Puerto Rico where he had resided as governor until a falling out with Christopher Columbus’s son lost him his title. Now, with a new patent from the Spanish crown in hand to head north in search of gold and glory, Ponce de Leon’s expedition plied the coralline blue waters of the north Caribbean toward an unknown world.

The results of his voyage would add new lands to the empire to be named La Florida for the Spanish Pascua Florida, or “Feast of Flowers.” Although history has remembered this conquistador as the Spanish fool swatting mosquitoes and stumbling blindly through the swamps of Florida in search of the mythical Fountain of Youth, such legends are historically ungrounded and were created only after his death. Like all other expeditions of the day, this one had but two purposes: discover new lands and bring home gold to recoup the costs.

Although he didn’t discover the Fountain of Youth – he probably wasn’t even looking for it – Ponce de Leon did stumble upon something that would get his name into the history books. In his journal, dated April 22, 1513, Ponce de Leon wrote that his ships had entered “a current such that, although they had great wind, they could not proceed forward, but backward and it seems that they were proceeding well; at the end of it was known that the current was more powerful than the wind.”

In all of its awkwardness, this is the first written acknowledgment of the Gulf Stream in history. Yet, despite the magnitude of this discovery, neither Ponce de Leon nor the Spanish Crown paid heed to it. Back in Spain, the only thing that came of this expedition was the acknowledgment that Ponce de Leon had failed to find gold.

North Atlantic Gyre

Pumping tropical 80 degree waters past our coast year-around, the Gulf Stream is one part of a four-part system of currents swirling in a clockwise fashion around the Atlantic Ocean. This vortex of currents is what we call the North Atlantic Gyre. Made up of the Gulf Stream in the west, the North Atlantic Current in the north, the Canary in the east and Equatorial in the south, this gyre is a never ending cyclone of water drifting round and round. It is itself part of even greater systems, like the thermohaline circulation, of complexities that we’ll save for another day.

You really can’t live on the coast of North Carolina and not know something about the Gulf Stream. It’s an important part of life here. From the weather we enjoy, the fish that we eat, to the history buried beneath the sand and limestone of our coastal plain, the Gulf Stream is a river of life gently embracing our coastline like a romantic lover, before casting off toward blue horizons at Cape Hatteras.

In the early part of the 16^th century however, when charts still warned of sea monsters, and scholars debated whether or not the ocean boiled at the tropics, knowledge of such currents was in its infancy. For Ponce de Leon and all other would be adventurers risking life and limb for gold and glory, the region of the Gulf Stream, and what would become North Carolina for that matter, was still oceanum incognitus.

The true significance of this discovery would remain unrealized until Anton de Alaminos, the navigator of Ponce de Leon’s Florida expedition, was outfitted with a ship of his own by Cortez, the butcher of Mexico, some six years later with orders to transport a cargo of treasure back to Spain. The Spanish empire in the New World had been a financial loss up to this point. Huge sums of money had been poured into exploration and colonizing with little returns, save for the sugar plantations established during Columbus’ second voyage. Cortez would change all of that when he landed on the coast of present-day Mexico and stumbled upon the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs were fabulously wealthy, adorning both their bodies and city in gold. But instead of repelling Cortez when he was found trespassing, the Aztecs welcomed him and his men into the capital city with the mistaken assumption that they were the return of Quetzalcoatl as prophecy had foretold. In response, Cortez acted in typical psychopathic conquistador fashion and set about slaughtering every man, woman and child in the city.

Momentous Change

With this moment in history, everything changed for the empire. Spain found itself in possession of mountains of New World gold. Yet before a single ounce could translate into real wealth, it had to traverse several thousand miles of open ocean back to Spain at a time when up to half of all ships attempting a transoceanic voyage were lost at sea.

Anton de Alaminos was hand picked by Cortez for the job because of his well-known exploits as a navigator.  He had shown an ability to read the waters in novel ways throughout both the Gulf and the Caribbean. Who better to captain the very first Spanish treasure fleet to set sail from Nuevo Espana?

Alaminos, also a veteran of Columbus’s final voyage, remembered well the impossible power of the great current’s pull northward through the Florida Straits. He had already sailed south down the coast of Europe and Africa along the Canary Current. He had experienced firsthand the westward pull of the North Equatorial Current that Columbus had discovered. And so instead of simply tacking his way back east toward Europe, battling trade winds, risking his ships being becalmed in the Sargasso Sea that makes up the middle of the Atlantic and languishing for weeks on end as they waited for a breeze, he did the unthinkable and sailed north. This was a gamble of course. One that placed both his life and the crown’s gold in the hands of the unknown, risking everything on the idea that this new current he helped discover would prove to somehow connect with the Canary some several thousand miles to the east. Upon reaching the vicinity of what is now Cape Hatteras, one can only imagine the relief that swept over the entire crew as their current turned east.

Digging up the exact amount of time that it took Alaminos to swing Cortez’s gold back over to Spain on the Gulf Stream is like modern-day marine archaeologists trying to find the shipwrecked galleon El Salvador off the coast of Cape Lookout. But the hard facts we know of the Stream today do allow for certain assumptions to be made.

By the time the Gulf Stream reaches Cape Hatteras, that point in which it breaks free of the shackles imposed by continental land masses and heads in a more easterly direction, some 150 million cubic meters of water is jetting past the cape every second. This translates to an increase in speed of between two and four miles an hour for a ship caught within the tropical embrace of the current. Columbus’ return voyage was set on a direct heading back to Spain and took a solid three months after departing Hispaniola on Jan. 16, 1493. With the aid of the Gulf Stream, that voyage could have been reduced to as little as one month.

Alaminos voyage set a precedent. By working with the physical properties of the Atlantic and its northern gyre of currents, a modicum of efficiency and predictably could be applied to a notoriously unpredictable venture. Well, that, and it was just a whole lot faster.

For the next 200 years, every one of the Spain’s legendary treasure fleet, Flotas de Indias, would retrace Anton de Alaminos route through the Florida Straits north past Cape Canaveral, Cape Fear, Cape Lookout and to the diamond shoals of Cape Hatteras from which both Gulf Stream and galleon peeled away from North America toward the open ocean and, eventually, Europe.

The Aztec gold floating along the Gulf Stream that Alaminos delivered to Charles V of Spain was soon followed up with Pissarro’s theft of the Incan empire in Peru. But although every pirate story worth its salt would have you to believe the treasures of the New World left in the form of gold doubloons, it was in fact silver from the great mines of Potosi, which became the global currency for hundreds of years to come in the form of Spanish silver pieces of eight, that truly catapulted Spain into the realm of world superpower and placed a target on the hull of every leaky boat flying the Spanish flag.

England’s Perilous Slide

For a place like England, a third-rate nation on the fringe of Europe, it was difficult to sit idly by watching as Spain’s wealth and power soared. For decades, the silver and gold filled Spain’s coffers while the island nation’s power slowly dwindled. Yet, sit by and watch is exactly what the English did.

Wars of conquest raged across the European continent. Alliances were formed, broken and amended. But not until a man by the name of Martin Luther wrote down his Ninety-Five Theses would England unknowingly find itself on a trajectory at odds with Spain and on the verge of its own brand of empire entangled within the Gulf Stream.

Thanks to his love affair with one Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII of England denounced the authority of the pope. Claiming that he spoke for God in his country, Henry annulled his legal marriage with Catherine of Aragon to marry whatever girl he happened to fancy at the time.

This break with the Catholic Church would lock Spain and England into a tumultuous relationship that, as any high-schooler will tell you, can be confusing to keep up with. We can skip over all the wives, the various children, diplomatic marriages, the parts about Bloody Mary, how England became ruled by Spain for a short while, and get to the good stuff – that part of the story that would spill off of the European Continent and into the Atlantic Ocean, where it would come washing up upon the shores of Roanoke.

The Pirate Queen

Queen Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was left with a shell of a country when she assumed the crown in 1558 at the age of 25. The country was broke, internationally powerless, with a continent of enemies across the English Channel and no real navy to speak of — a bad position for an island nation. Elizabeth turned to a council of trusted nobles who would suggest she seek out fame and fortune for England much the way that Spain had done so many decades before – by stealing it.

Since men first set sails to the wind, piracy became an occupation of choice for the lower castes that knew their way around the ropes. And in Elizabethan England, privateering became one of the only means of social upward mobility for those of a common birth. History would come to know Queen Elizabeth I as many things, but it is the name that she was given by both Spain and the Catholic Church that is most relevant here: la Reina Piratas – the Pirate Queen.

With immense fortunes floating across the ocean each year just asking to be preyed upon, Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Admiral set about signing letters of marque for any captain who could muster up a ship to sail. Though acts of privateering did occur along the Canary Current off the coast of Europe, the real action would take place closer to the source in the original wild west of the Caribbean and outflowing Gulf Stream. These Elizabethan privateers would come to be known as the queen’s Sea Dogs. Francis Drake, John Hawkins, Humphrey Gilbert, and Walter Raleigh topped the list. The ranks of Elizabeth’s privateer navy grew with the escalating tensions between Spain and England.

We are not sure who suggested it first – Richard Hakluyt, Gilbert or Raleigh. But we do know that all three of these influential men in the court of Elizabeth lobbied for the creation of a fort along the coast of what would become North Carolina for the express purpose of launching raids against the Spanish treasure fleets. Such a location was far enough away from Florida so as not to be attacked by land, yet it was situated where the Gulf Stream came the closest to land after leaving the Spanish-controlled Florida Straits.

Queen Elizabeth, for her part, had already begun to consider the possibility of expanding her reach into the Americas, much as Spain had done so many decades before. All empires start with the twinkle of new lands in the eyes of would be emperors. As Spain already learned, the business of colonizing is an expensive one. Using the new the colony on the edge of the Gulf Stream as a base to launch for raids against the Spanish was exactly the bait that was needed to persuade the wealthy merchants of London to help back such a thing.

Up until the 1580s, the hostilities between Spain and England were more of a cold war than a hot one. Ships were being attacked, and tempers flared, but it was not until the early part of that decade that the so called 80-Years War would devolve into full scale warfare. It’s not a coincidence that Walter Raleigh was given a patent by the crown of England for exploration and the establishment of a colony and military fort in 1584 – the time when the war with Spain was escalating.

Roanoke Expeditions

Everything about the Roanoke Expeditions came to look like privateering. On Grenville’s first trip in 1585, he scribbled into the log book on Aug. 31  that he “tooke a Spanish ship of 300. Tunne richly loaden.” His following voyage in 1586 was no different. Sir Richard Grenville had long been one of Elizabeth’s famed Sea Dogs. Prior to the Roanoke Expeditions, in 1575 Grenville had received a patent from the Privy Council to become the first Englishman to round Cape Horn so as to attack the Spanish along the Pacific Coast of the Americas and to then continue westward to the Cape of Good Hope and back to England. This is worth noting, as it means that the first Englishman to sail around the world was to do so on a privateering mission. The patent was rescinded during diplomatic negotiations with Spain’s King Phillip II, but was then given to Sir Francis Drake three years later who became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe, in the process capturing one of the greatest fortunes ever taken on the high seas by a privateer.

When Ralph Lane and his men, whom Grenville had left on Roanoke to build the new fort, were rescued in 1586, it was non other than Sir Francis Drake who plucked them from the island. The most notorious of all Elizabethan privateers, Drake had completed his circumnavigation of the globe six years earlier, laying siege to the entire Manila treasure fleet in the Pacific for good measure. When he stopped at the Roanoke colony, Drake was on his way back to England after his famous Great Expedition. He controlled 21 ships and 1,800 men, attacking villages on the coast of Spain; plundering Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands; sacking the port of Santa Domingo; capturing the city of Cartagena de Indias in Columbia; raiding and burning down the Spanish fort at St. Augustine; and still making time to swing by Roanoke to check in on Lane. It should be noted that his list of exploits roughly follows the route of currents that make the grye.

As for the fabled Lost Colony itself, technically speaking, the Roanoke Colony was not actually supposed to be the Roanoke Colony. It was intended to be the Chesapeake Bay Colony and Roanoke was to only be a fort. Simon Fernandez is largely to be blamed for this. He had been chosen to pilot John White’s colonists to the Chesapeake and it was his fateful decision to kick his passengers off the ship at Roanoke instead of sailing north. Fernandez was Portuguese. He had sailed for the Spanish for many years before thumbing his nose at the emperor and slipping away into the murky waters of piracy.

Naturally, Fernandez partook in what seems to be the obligatory privateering of all expeditions heading to Roanoke, capturing several ships along the way. Once at Roanoke, his excuse for dumping the colonists in the wrong place was simply that it was too late in the summer for him to continue north. It was July. The Spanish treasure fleets sailed at the beginning of August. The Chesapeake was too far north of the Gulf Stream, and the timing was too close. For Fernandez, it was either sail south now to try and intercept Spanish ships, or sail north to the Chesapeake with the colonists and miss out on the Spanish flotilla all together. Once a pirate, always a pirate.

The story goes on. And quite conspicuously, each character that makes an appearance in this story of Roanoke, save for the colonists themselves, were all engaged in the occupation of privateering for England. From the queen who sanctioned it, the merchants who backed it, the men who plotted it and the captains who piloted it, the purpose of Roanoke was to lighten Spain of its burden of wealth. And it was the Gulf Stream, the great river in the ocean that runs through the heart of this story, and England’s first attempts at scratching out a place of its own on foreign shores.

Would England have stretched its fledgling wings of empire across the Atlantic if it had not been for the Gulf Stream? Most likely. It was the fashionable thing to do at the time. Yet, if it had not been for the Pirate Queen and her Sea Dogs, the Lost Colony, that mysterious connection that North Carolina holds to the Age of Exploration, would have looked a whole lot like Jamestown, which was established after a peace treaty with Spain had been signed. Or more likely, it never would have existed in North Carolina to begin with, given the treacherous nature of what the late historian David Stick coined the Graveyard of the Atlantic – with hull-splintering shoals and no deep-water port to speak of.

The Spanish Empire was built, in part, on the Gulf Stream. With the realization of its power to propel ships departing the Caribbean to the shores of Europe, it became a conveyor belt ushering wealth stripped from the Western Hemisphere. As for the rest of Europe, ships hailing from every country with a port came to line up along the edges of this current like so many highwaymen waiting for the chance to steal a slice of the pie. England was no different. And Roanoke was the lovechild of such piratical intentions.

ATLANTIC BEACH — The date was April 23, 1862, and Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s Union army watched as a white flag was finally raised above the old fort. What had first seemed like a battle won in less than 24 hours had turned into a month-long ordeal trying to get Confederate troops to vacate the premises.

Fort Macon had been a strategic target because it guarded Beaufort Inlet and North Carolina’s only deep-water port. When the 400 men defending the place finally surrendered that day, the Civil War, for all intents and purposes, was over in this part of the Confederacy. The Yankees occupied the fort for the rest of the war, and the harbor it guarded became an important coaling and provisioning port for the blockading Union navy.

Almost 60 years after the war’s end, the restored fort and the beaches and marshes that surround it became a key addition to the state’s nascent park system. Millions of people have since walked the parapets, swam the beaches, fished the inlet of Fort Macon State Park. It is now among the busiest of our parks and last year was named the best of them.

Built for War

A place that so many now find beautiful and peaceful started life as an instrument of war. Construction began on the fort in 1826, in response to the realization that America’s coastline was largely helpless during the War of 1812. The Army Corps of Engineers built the fort over the course of eight years and according to Brig. Gen. Simon Bernard’s design. It was named after North Carolina’s eminent statesman at the time, Nathaniel Macon, according to nonprofit Friends of Fort Macon.

For the first 150 years of its existence, it seems like Beaufort, the town just inside of the inlet that Fort Macon protects, was always in need of protection from something. First, there was the Tuscarora Indians who for some reason didn’t like trespassers brutalizing them and forcing them off their own land. One Blackbeard the pirate in 1718 literally abandoned 300 of his men here who descended upon the town to do as they please. Then on Aug. 26, 1747, Spanish privateers sailed into the harbor, offloaded and invaded the town like Henry Morgan sacking Panama. The British did the same thing in 1782. Of course, the war of 1812 wasn’t much better as the Brits came sailing in repeatedly, demanding supplies for which Beaufort’s only defense was the homegrown privateer Otway Burns and his ship the Snapdragon.

Even Mother Nature had its eye on Beaufort when she spun the hurricane of 1825 that actually swept into the inlet a pathetic excuse for a fort that was Fort Macon’s halfheartedly built predecessor.

From Beaufort’s inception, every generation that lived anywhere near the town was forced to endure war, invasion, threat and privation. Fort Macon was built to change all of this.

The old five-sided brick and stone fort, with outer walls measuring some 4.5 feet thick, has had a long and interesting history standing guard over Beaufort Inlet and the surrounding coastline. However, after the Civil War, things kind of quieted down, and its roll of protectorate of this region began to change. There was a brief hiccup we call World War II of course, when the feds leased the old fort from North Carolina for a few years, but by and large, the real treasure that Fort Macon would come to protect is the natural world – in both direct and indirect ways.

There is a certain kind irony to be found, undeniably poetic, in a military fort coming to protect fiddler crabs and piping plovers. But for the grand old fort at the east end of Bogue Banks, that is exactly the role that this defensive structure has played the majority of its life. Though warfare may have been its intended use, the sands of time had other plans for Fort Macon.

The Complaining Dr. Coues

Elliott Coues complained a lot. He complained about the fort. He complained about his sleeping quarters. He complained about the hospital, the salt, the humidity, the malaria and the mold. He especially complained about the mold. Moldy books. Moldy papers. Moldy everything.

But Coues was also an ambitious man. He was as a doctor for sure. But he was also trained as a naturalist by none other than Spencer Baird, the founder of the Smithsonian Institution. His calling in life was never to be just an army surgeon. Coues had dreams. He had goals. But he was no Humboldt or Darwin, with the inheritance and financial means to explore the world. And so like many an early 19^th century member of the intelligencia without the means to see the world, he joined on with the army as a surgeon hoping they would foot some of the bill – which is how he ended up stationed on Bogue Banks.

Arriving at Fort Macon in February of 1869, Coues set about trying to see past the squalid conditions that he was expected to work in and headed straight into the boot-sucking salt marsh to have a look around his new home. What he was to find was an island quite unlike the one we know today. In all, there were only a handful of people living on Bogue Banks other than the soldiers at Fort Macon, and most of those were seasonal whalers. Maritime forest, with gnarled old live oaks dripping with the vines of wild grapes, covered much of the banks that would lead to the modern name of Emerald Isle.

Bogue Banks was in an almost pristine state. There were no marinas, no hotels, no bridges, no roads, no developers. All of that would come later. What there was, was a seemingly endless stream of migratory birds in the springtime. Oysters so plentiful that a bushel sold for just 30 cents in Beaufort. Nets full of mullet. And from foreshore to salt marsh, the whole place was a 19^th century naturalists’ dream come true.

Coues was a Smithsonian protégé, a trained naturalist skilled in the arts of skin collecting. He was educated in the methods of detailing observations of the natural world. And so Coues, the whiney army surgeon began to write – prolifically. He wrote about birds. He wrote about reptiles. He wrote about bugs. And over the following two years, he completed the most extensive biological survey of any place in the American South. The whole lot would be compiled and published in a five-part series in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia titled “Notes on the Natural History of Fort Macon.”

Coues was not the first naturalist to write about the area. That honor would go to another Smithsonian naturalist, William Stimpson, who had already published his “Trip to Beaufort N.C.” in The American Journal of Sciences and Arts. However, Coues’ writings were quickly putting this place on the map for serious naturalists, and he actively sent out invitations other likeminded scientists to visit his Fort Macon and Bogue Banks. The result was a steady influx of bird nerds and fish experts to the little town of Beaufort. And within 10 years, John Hopkins University was running what may be the first marine science laboratory in U.S. history out of the Gibbs House on Front Street in Beaufort.

Evolution of a Science Center

After John Hopkins opened up shop, the University of North Carolina followed, renting Duncan House just down the road. UNC, Hopkins, along with the state universities of Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina, all pitched in money to buy land on Pivers Island, between Beaufort and Fort Macon, to donate to the U.S. Fisheries Commission for construction of their new laboratory. Three decades later, Duke University would also join by establishing its own marine laboratory. Today, three university marine laboratories and a federal fisheries lab combine to make the Crystal Coast one of the largest hubs of marine science in the country. Not a bad legacy to leave behind for an eclectic army surgeon hunkered over pen and paper by candlelight while stationed in that moldy, old fort.

As for Fort Macon, that pentagon-shaped sentinel that has watched over Beaufort Inlet since it was first constructed in 1826, the whole place was turned into North Carolina’s second state park, after Mount Mitchell, in 1926. But the creation of the park would encompass more than just the physical structure of the fort. The boundaries of Fort Macon State Park would reach out to encompass 424 acres in all, ultimately protecting some of the most important and productive habitat on the island. Though this is today the smallest of all our state parks in North Carolina, it is twice the size of the Roosevelt State Natural area on Bogue Banks, making Fort Macon the largest permanently protected swath of land on the island.

Thus has been the legacy of this old fort. Once defensive sentinel standing guard over this stretch of otherwise unprotected coastline, Fort Macon sparked the marine science industry of the Crystal Coast, inspiring countless biologists who now ply waters the world over.

As a state park, the fort now plays home to nesting sea turtles, migrating shorebirds, storm-battered pelagic seabirds and a long strand of undeveloped white sandy beach, unmolested by the blight of development. These walls have protected a way of life, a rich and diverse ecosystem, and the psychological wellbeing of those who recreate (re-create) on its beaches. With such a history, with such a legacy, it is for these reasons that Fort Macon was named North Carolina’s No. 1 state park recently, as this red brick fortress continues to stand guard some 190 years after it was first built.

Learn More

• Notes on the Natural History of Fort Macon, N.C. and Vicinity
• Fort Macon State Park
• Friends of Fort Macon

Last of two parts

BEAUFORT — In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin famously declared that it was “So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.” Such was the driving ideology behind Manifest Destiny. The rise and fall of empires are hinged upon these words. As is the lengths to which we will go in order to rationalize our pursuit of money and profit.

America, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, was seen as a ripened fruit ready to be plucked. With maps that still contained the phrase Terra incognito scribbled out across blanks spots, this was a land of seemingly inexhaustible resources. Great forests stretched further than a man could walk in a month’s time. Schools of fish leaped into boats on their own accord. Waterfowl along the coastal marshes blackened skies during the migration. And it was such images of America’s low hanging fruit that ultimately drove the colonization of and immigration to this New World.

Take a moment to consider this. If it was inexhaustible natural capital that was a driving force for the creation of America’s colonies, and the ambition to exploit and profit from such resources fueling the motivations of those who risked everything to travel oceans to reach these shores, then what does this say about the ideological seeds from which our culture and civilization grew?

Such notions are not lost to the primary sources of history. Upon returning home to his native France, Alexis Tocqueville compiled a book that today continues to stand as one of the most important historical accounts of pre-Civil War American society – Democracy in America. In discussing the general mindset of the people that he met on his travels in 1831, Tocqueville observed, “the American calls noble and praiseworthy that ambition which our medieval ancestors used to describe as slavish greed …” He explains that “This love of money has, therefore never been stigmatized in America and … it is held in high esteem.”

This was the ideological underpinnings from which natural resources were exploited and profits were made. And it was this backdrop from which the commodification of nature would become rationalized, institutionalized, protected by the fullest extent of the law and practiced with religious fervor. To commodify nature effectively turned everything from fish, fowl, forests and rivers into inanimate lifeless items for sale. To think of such things as resources or capital effectively shrink wraps and sticks a smiling label on such “products” and “goods,” to borrow a modern-day concept, forever severing their connection to a once living, breathing member of this world. Fish becomes seafood. Forests become lumber. And all of it is for sale in the land of milk and honey.

Then Along Came Rachel Carson

When Rachel Carson first came to Beaufort in the 1930s, it was on the heels of a paradigm shift in American culture and politics. The wanton destruction of 19^th century had not been without its detractors. Emerson and Thoreau helped bring about an American romantic movement in the early part of that century, followed by artists such as the landscape painter Thomas Cole. In 1864 George Perkins Marsh published his groundbreaking book Man and Nature that for the first time rationally and scientifically detailed the effects of America’s fire sale of nature. And all of this would culminate at the turn of the 20^th century in Theodore Roosevelt, a self-taught ornithologist and naturalist and then president of the United States, declaring that “The United States at this moment occupies a lamentable position as being perhaps the chief offender among civilized nations in permitting the destruction and pollution of nature.”

Of all the hidden worlds that Carson reveals to us in her first book, Under the Sea Wind, of all the species that she details the daily dramas of life and death, the American shad stands as an important example of how the whims of the market can have a ripple effect through entire ecosystems and human communities that depend on them. Ironically, nearly every species that she depicts in her books can stand in as an example of this, but it is the decline of shad that had the greatest impact on North Carolina.

In Under the Sea Wind, Carson paints a picture of an emblematic moonlit night in the month of May, where fisherman of various sorts fought both nature and each other for access to the annual spring run of roe-filled shad moving into the estuaries and up the rivers. Mobile gill netters argued bitterly with the workers of stationary pound nets for a piece of the action each night. The west bank of the North River in eastern Carteret County was chocked so tightly with impoundment nets that navigation itself was nearly impossible, and to set a gill net meant to sabotage other fisherman in the process.

Yet, what is not revealed in her story, is that these watermen were fighting for mere scraps left over from the great feast that was once the spring shad run in North Carolina.

The great spawning runs of fish across North America are by and large a thing of the past now remembered only in accounts from a time before markets got a hold of them. The one notable exception, of course, is salmon, and only in British Columbia and Alaska due to some of the most austere commercial fishing regulations on the continent. Whether we are speaking of American shad runs on the Roanoke River or Yellowstone cutthroat trout on the Snake River, the scenario was quite similar to the picture we have today of salmon in coastal Alaska with both man and beasts lining the riverbanks to reap the harvest of one of nature’s most extraordinary bounties.

The Founding Fish

In North Carolina, the American shad was the lifeblood of the land, driving both ecosystems and settlement patterns of natives and colonists alike. A hundred miles from the coast, the density of these shad runs meant that little more than a basket was needed for scooping fish from the rivers and packing barrels with a year’s supply of protein. This was a subsistence way of life that stretched all the way to the foot of that Appalachian Mountains where shad were once harvested as far west as Wilkesboro – a run of 450 miles upriver from the coast.

All of this changed when shad become a commodity, a marketable resource. More shad meant more money and in short order commercial fisherman began stretching seine nets across entire river mouths effectively cutting off entire shad runs to all points west. Whole ecosystems struggled to function. Upriver, poor farmers and wealthy plantation owners alike banded together to declare that shad was the “common rights of mankind” for which they were being deprived of by the greed of the few.

What had once been a free and natural bounty that most of the North Carolina colony had come to depend upon, was now a commodity for which most of the colony was forced to purchase. Some historians have argued that it was the destruction of the shad runs by the likes of commercial fishing operations along the coast that helped force a market economy on North Carolina, pushing the colony toward large-scale agriculture and dependency on the slave trade.

By the mid-1700s, the writing was already on the wall as to how all of this would ultimately play out. In 1764, North Carolina’s colonial assembly began the first attempts at putting reigns on the coastal fishery when they tried to ban the use of double seine nets by “avaricious persons.” Gov. William Tryon, the same governor that crushed the North Carolina Regulators, claimed this to be “destructive of the spirit of industry and commerce” and set about vetoing any bill that attempted to ban, limit or regulate the commercial seine netters. Coincidentally, the famed Tryon’s Palace sits along the Neuse River in New Bern, where many commercial seine netters hailed from.

Political positions wax and wane, and the natural lifespan of politicians necessitates change to some degree. In 1787, with the free-market evangelist Tryon out of the picture, North Carolina enacted a general statute authorizing counties to appoint commissioners for the purposes of inspecting rivers and streams to make sure that at least a quarter of the channels was left open for runs of fish during the spawning season.

Try as the state may however, such measures had already come half a century too late. Between over-harvesting at the coast and the mills damming up creeks and rivers inland, populations of American shad began to plummet. Half of the state had long turned away from its dependency on spring shad runs and even coastal markets were beginning to look to other species of fish such as mullet, given the sad state of shad populations.

By 1852, the Select Committee on Fisheries reported that North Carolina’s rivers which were once overflowing with shad in the springtime were now virtually empty. The fishery had been abandoned on most of the principle rivers. Only the Chowan River and Albemarle Sound could the commercial shad fisherman still be found, according to the Select Committee’s report “where seins are used of more than a mile in length and thousands of drag and set nets dot over the waters in every direction” – all desperately clinging to a fish and a way of life that they had come to destroy.

The story of North Carolina’s shad fishery is not unique. Similar stories played out along the Eastern Seaboard from Florida to the Canadian border. And it was the overfishing and complete collapse of certain fisheries like shad that would lead to the creation of the U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries in the Department of Commerce in 1871 for the purpose of investigating why fish stocks were declining. Shad populations, it was discovered, had declined 99 percent by then.

It is said that drastic times call for drastic measures and by the following year, a fortune was being spent on the construction of fish hatcheries in order to artificially stock rivers to keep the fishery alive. In 1873, North Carolina’s first hatch of some 45,000 shad were released in the Neuse River from the site of the new federal fish hatchery in New Bern, ironically near Tryon’s Palace.

Feds to the Rescue

Federal tax dollars went toward building shad hatcheries near the mouths of most of the major shad rivers in North Carolina. For about a decade even the state itself got into the business of trying to help rebuild the shad population, but gave up in 1885, washing its hands of responsibility for artificially stocking rivers.

Over the coming years, some 4 billion baby shad would be hatched and released in waters up and down the East Coast in a desperate attempt to save the species from oblivion. Yet even now, after 142 years of annually raising and releasing shad into the waters of North Carolina to compensate for the fire sale that once took place here, the shad population is “stable but low,” according to the latest assessment. North Carolina is one of the few states that still allows for a commercial fishery for shad and two hatcheries continue to operate for this reason – one in Edenton, the other in Watha in Pender County, which dump millions of dollars and shad into trying to keep this industry artificially alive.

The U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries underwent a name change to the Bureau of Fisheries in 1903, which employed Carson when she arrived in Beaufort. And it was in Beaufort, or more specifically, Piver’s Island, that the second-largest bureau laboratory was located – established as the southern counterpart to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and strategically located for its proximity to what was the most important commercial fisheries in the South.

Shad were not the only species that toed the line of extinction by the end of the 19^th century. Nearly every single species described in Under the Sea Wind came a hair’s breadth away from never making it into Carson’s book for the simple fact that they almost didn’t make it to the century.

At the time that Carson arrived to the area, a team from the bureau in Beaufort was studying local population of diamondback terrapin, a species of turtle that Carson so elegantly described in her book. Throughout Colonial times and into 1800s, terrapins were seen as a nuisance species by commercial fisherman in North Carolina’s estuaries as they were so numerous that nets would oftentimes break under the weight of so many turtles. For this reason, an entire wagon load of these beautifully colored turtles of the salt marsh sold for a single dollar. By the 1920s, however, terrapins were so rare that a dozen of these turtles fetched $90 on the market in North Carolina and significantly more elsewhere. For a brief time, the bureau attempted to establish a diamondback terrapin hatchery in Beaufort, but by the end of World War I, the wild population was so low that the hatchery was closed and the idea abandoned.

Such destruction was not limited to life under the sea of course. Even the birds found themselves at the fate of the market. Looking back into the pages of history, we find that the first wave of outside interest along our coast was not for the fish but for the waterfowl. As Union soldiers filtered their way out of North Carolina and back north again after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, they took with them tales of inexhaustible numbers of ducks, geese and swans that blackened the skies over the sound country during fall migration.

Punt Guns and Ladies’ Hats

The first gunners who came south to confirm such stories were the wealthy captains of industry. Names like Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan and the Roosevelt family took great interest in the sport hunting opportunities along the barrier islands and sounds. But soon followed the market hunters, who employed the use of disastrous weapons called punt guns. These guns were little more than homemade cannons. Technically a shotgun, punt guns were often 10 feet long and so heavy that they had to be mounted to the front of the boats that gave them their names. These guns were loaded with enough shot that it was not uncommon to take out 50 – 100 birds in a single blast. Nets were strung between boats to scoop up the thousands of dead birds floating on the water’s surface at the end of a morning’s hunt.

The nuptial breeding plumes of egrets were once worth more than their weight in gold, leading to only a small handful of breeding colonies that survived the insatiable women’s fashion industry. Brown pelicans were shot and sold with such fervor that their entire eastern population had been reduced to one single breeding colony off the coast of Florida for which President Theodore Roosevelt protected as the first National Wildlife Refuge. Black skimmers, who figure prominently in Under the Sea Wind, to this day are still a threatened species in North Carolina thanks to egg harvesters that would annually raid every nest they could get their hands on – colony sizes were once officially measured in the number of bushels of eggs that it contained.

From red wolves to red-cockaded woodpeckers, if it were not for a paradigm shift in America around the early 20^th century, so much of the incredible diversity of this state and nation would be little more than sketches and watercolor paintings in obscure notebooks of 19^th century naturalists.

This was the world in which Rachel Carson began her nature writing career within – one where stories like those detailed in the report from the first expedition to Roanoke describing natives stopping to fill multiple canoes with fish in a matter of half an hour to offer as gifts to the English ships were now a thing of the past. By the 1930s these stories were just that – stories. Such depictions were pure fiction, abstract words and concepts scribbled upon paper documenting a fantastical world of plenty that could only be dreamed of. But this was also a world in which the words of John Muir had been taken to heart, where giants like Teddy Roosevelt could come to power and bring about sweeping political change toward the natural world.

Rachel Carson waded the shallows around Bird Shoal when America’s culture had just pass through a great crossroads. Our society had been left with a decision to make at the outset of the 20^th century: Would we allow for species such as the American shad, great egrets, diamondback terrapin, and black skimmers to slip over the edge of oblivion? Was this the legacy that we wanted to leave for future generations – a world devoid of that which both our nation and cultural identity had been built upon? Thankfully, the collective voice of America had cried, “No.”

Rachel Carson began her career as an author allowing her creative genius to drift across the salty waters of Back Sound. The words she set down in books like Under the Sea Wind revealed to the nation a world unseen, largely unstudied, as unknown as outer space, yet as familiar as the old oak tree in the front yard. She would end her career by giving teeth to a movement that stood to shake the very foundation of America’s industry to its core. A smallish, soft-spoken woman, who never married, cared for her aging mother and orphaned niece, who wrote in first person about sanderlings and mackerel, who was entranced by the sea and the natural world, who would be labeled a communist operative in the age of McCarthyism for writing her book Silent Spring, who would be investigated by the FBI, stalked by men in dark suits hired by chemical corporations, and die of cancer – that plague of the 20^th century she so passionately warned about. This was Rachel Carson. And her life and legacy lives on in the descendants of black skimmers, ospreys, and diamondback terrapins of North Carolina that she would bring to literary life in Under the Sea Wind.

First of two parts

BEAUFORT — The ability to weave together poetry and science is today something of a lost art. Yet there was a time when the two were nearly inextricable from each other. In the 1700s for instance, both scientific theory and treatises were written in poetic form, and poets such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, author of Faust, were often as deeply involved in the cutting edge science of their day as the likes of Newton.

In our modern worldview, though, the two pursuits sit worlds apart; one seeking to capture the wonder of nature in words, inspiring the imagination to run wild like Lost Boys in Neverland; the other seeking to take a scalpel to it all, cutting it open, spilling its guts, and ordering its secrets. Maybe the poet John Keats best served justice to this point when he declared that Newton had destroyed the poetry of rainbows by reducing them to mere prisms of light, revealing that even at the height of the Enlightenment, poetry and science were suspiciously seen as strange bedfellows by some.

By the 20th century, this union between poetry and science was in its death throes. Modernization was compartmentalizing all aspects of life. Art and science were collateral damage. Yet there was one discipline if you will, that clung to this union with everything it had. This keystone that held together the bridge between two seemingly opposite intellectual realms was nature writing.

None of this was lost to a young Rachel Carson as she swung her feet over the side of the small wooden skiff and into the shallows at the foot of Bird Shoal off Beaufort for the first time. The year was 1938. Hitler was busy goose stepping Europe toward another World War, and on the home front the United States had just established the first minimum wage. As for Carson, her recent success with a Readers Digest article titled “Undersea,” and the encouragement of editors at Simon & Schuster, had led her to the sleepy fishing village of Beaufort to collect experiences and begin work on her first book, Under the Sea Wind.

Today, Rachel Carson is best known by most people for her fourth and most-famous book Silent Spring, which many credit as the spark that ignited the modern-day environmental movement. But long before Silent Spring was a twinkle in her mind’s eye, Carson had published a series of books about the sea that stand beside the likes of Thoreau’s Walden and Burroughs’ Signs and Seasons, taking their place as some of the most important American nature writing.

The genius of Carson’s writing was the ability to weave together enchanting literary prose with cutting edge marine biology of the day. This was new. This was both style and content unseen and unread by the American public. And her role as a biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, renamed U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the 1940s, gave her access to the intricate scientific knowledge she needed for creating such books. By the time Silent Spring was published, Carson was a known entity, a literary giant in her own right, and one whose books were read on both sides of the Atlantic.

Walking in Her Footsteps

In the gin clear shallows, I find myself wading through both water and the world so vividly painted in Under the Sea Wind. My skiff is being held by a sand anchor on the eastern edge of the reserve that now bears her name in front of Beaufort.

With flooding tide, I am able to cast off any worry about becoming stranded here. And thanks to the full moon overhead, I am afforded the astronomical spring tide and therefore the opportunity to penetrate deeper than usual into the labyrinth of shoals and oysters, and maybe even the murky waters of history, that bisect this little complex of islands. Cautiously I plant my feet trying not to step onto the backs of hidden stingrays or into historical quagmires whose holes pock mark these shallows like so many dimples on a golf ball as I walk in the footsteps of Rachel Carson.

Looking south and to the east, I stare out across a vast expanse of water to a black and white thimble on the horizon. A light flashes every 15 seconds from a first order Fresnel lens, signaling to passing ships both the location of Cape Lookout and the nine miles of shoals that thrust out to sea where countless sailors have met their maker.

It is there, somewhere beneath the breakers that roll over those shoals that the wreck of the El Salvador rests, a Spanish treasure galleon that once sailed as part of Spain’s Flota de Indias. When she came to rest on the ocean floor during a hurricane in August of 1750, she did so with 16 chests of silver and four chests of gold valued at $124 million today, and is acknowledged to be the largest unfound treasure in the North Atlantic.

Following the ribbon of sand that runs west from Cape Lookout Bight to Beaufort Inlet, I trace the contour of Shackleford Banks. This island plays home to wild horses whose origins may very well date back to one of the first English expeditions to Roanoke Island when sir Richard Grenville’s flagship, the Tiger, ran aground in this vicinity in 1585, forcing his men to offload the livestock they had recently traded for in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola.

Across the inlet sits Fort Macon and roughly the site of where a pirate by the name of Blackbeard once had his flagship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, run aground, stranding some 300 of his compatriots as a form of corporate downsizing before he and a small handful of men quickly set sail with the syndicates’ collective wealth.

And to the north and west is the town of Beaufort itself, founded in 1713 and home to the Old Burying Grounds, where the mass graves for those who died in the Tuscarora Indian War and the sailors who perished from the shipwreck of the Chrissie Wright sit next to that of famed privateer Captain Otway Burns. He who once plundered some 2 million dollars’ worth of goods from British ships in a single voyage, and whose grave is now surmounted by a canon taken from his privateer, the Snapdragon.

This is a landscape that literally drips with history – 400 years’ worth to be exact. And these are the borders to the world Rachel Carson would depict in Under the Sea Wind, as well as sections of  later books, The Sea Around Us and Edge of the Sea. Here, time moves slowly. Glacially so. And change rolls in and out with the ebb and flow of the tides.

Horses and the Reserve

So much has changed here since Carson waded these shallows waxing poetically about black skimmers, shad fisherman and sanderlings. The wild horses that now roam these little islands were absent when she first came here. It would be nearly a decade before Luther Fulcher of Beaufort would transport six horses from Core Banks across the sound to these little islands and release them to graze; though a map produced for the U.S. Coast Survey by Alexander Bache in 1857 clearly labels Horse Island, which remains on maps today as part of the reserve, giving any student of history reason to pause and consider the possibility that horses have probably long been an off-and-on fixture of these islands.

And why not? During hurricane Isabel in 2003, three of the horses on the reserve were washed off the islands and out to sea where it would appear Poseidon, both god of the sea and horses, took pity and landed them ashore on Shackleford Banks some two miles distant. One of those horses was a young colt named Sugarfoot for his white socks. He can be found today playing out his role as a lead stallion with accompanying harem of mares on the reserve – a living testament that horses can and do both survive storms and mysteriously wash up on the shores of barrier islands.

The old fisherman’s shack described by Carson is long gone. The shack, which reserve Manager Paula Gillikin’s father remembers as being little more than a “glorified duck blind,” belonged to Coot Willis and was at Guthrie Shoal on the east side of the island. And although fisherman still work their trade around the island, pound netters no longer battle it out with gill netters for territory when the shad run up the river, and the great wheel that stands upon the shores of Taylors Creek no longer reels in nets strained by the weight of menhaden – maybe the most important fish in the Atlantic. But at night, the occasional skiff can still be seen with a torch, albeit battery operated, hanging over the water in search for flounder to gig.

Other things never changed, despite what many a blog and local folktale would have you believe. One such instance of this is the naming of Carrot Island. As the story goes, the island was once named “Cart” Island for all of the fisherman’s carts left there. Over the years, outsiders misunderstood the Ocracoke or Down East brogue that so distinguishes the local dialect and mistook the name Cart for Carrot, forever bastardizing the name of this island. Yet a cursory look over the historical maps of the area tell a different tale – namely the Mosely Map of 1733, which labels the island “Carrot” and was drawn up just two decades after the town of Beaufort was founded. Even John Shackleford Jr., for whom Shackleford Banks is named, distinctly refers to the land in question as “Carrot Island.” The distinctive brogue and the nature of southern dialect tends to phonetically smooth out and round off words. Therefore over the years a name such as Carrot would actually come to be pronounced as Cart – similar to how “brown” became “brain” and “tide” become “toide.” And let’s not even get into words like “mehonky.”

But more important than such changes documented through the local annals of history, are the ones that were occurring in the natural world when Carson first came to Beaufort. With over two hundred years’ worth of a world view that suggested America’s so called “natural resources” were inexhaustible, and practices that took from the land hand over fist, unregulated, unrestricted, for greed of the wallet, or the greed of the stomach, it is quite possible that we would not even recognize the living landscape that Carson described.

When Rachel Carson put pen to paper in the small cottage she rented on Atlantic Beach, she was doing so at a time of great change. The currents of history were shifting course both for the good and for the bad. And the very same species that she depicted the daily dramas of in Under the Sea Wind stand testament to this fact today.

I’m sitting on wet sand inside of Cape Lookout Bight. A pair of 10×42 binoculars rest upon my knee, and the sun has just dipped below the horizon. An artist’s palette of pastel color unfurls across the sky with perfect symmetry reflected in the waters below. This is the kind of idyllic postcard moment that marketing wizards conjure up for would-be tourists across the Northeast. Serenity. Romance. Beauty. They would probably have a couple glasses of red wine strategically placed in the composition. But there is one small detail from this scene they would certainly leave out of the story: the fact that I’m watching the dorsal fin of a shark ply the waters just feet in front of me.

Sharks dominated the national news throughout the month of July thanks to a slew of attacks along the coast of North Carolina this summer. Speculation has run wild, of course, and stories ranging from perfect storm scenarios to exploding populations have made it into the media. As one researcher from UNC’s Institute of Marine Science explained to me, however, “most of those reporting on these events are unburdened by actual facts.” Whatever those facts may be, the bombardment of all things sharks in the media has culminated in this moment for me right here, right now, on a secluded beach at dusk hanging out with predators.

In all honesty, I have no idea what species of shark it is cruising these shallows at dusk. I just know that compared to the three others I see, this is the largest. Judging from the distance between its dorsal fin and tail, I estimate its length at about 5 feet. For the uninitiated, this may seem large, but in reality, it’s not.

Along our coast, big sharks, or what researchers call the great sharks, can range from 6 to 20 feet in length. These are the top dogs if you will, the apex predators of our corner of the blue wilderness we call the oceans. Most have names that you know: names like hammerhead, tiger and bull, to list a few. These are the sharks that make headlines, the ones kids go crazy about at aquariums, and the sharks that now face the immediate possibility of extinction – an inconvenient fact that was largely absent from the media feeding frenzy.

For more than four decades now, the UNC Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City has been engaged in the longest-running study of sharks in the United States. From spring to fall, every two weeks, a small team of researchers travel off the coast of Shackleford Banks to catch sharks. Soaking longlines like commercial fisherman, the biologists are able to capture a multitude of different species that are feeding at various depths in the water column. This location is ideal for getting a snapshot of what is going on along the coast as it sits within something of a bottleneck along the sharks’ migratory range. In other words, the data collected here can give us an understanding of shark populations from Cape Cod to Cape Canaveral. And there are 43 years’ worth of data to back it all up.

The results? Harrowing. Populations of great sharks across the board have collapsed: sandbar sharks, 87 percent decline; blacktip sharks, 93 percent decline; tiger sharks, 97 percent decline; scalloped hammerheads, 98 percent decline; and bull, dusky and smooth hammerhead, 99 percent declines. Another long-term study out of Virginia concludes that sand tigers have also declined by 99 percent.

Keystone Species

This a problem for us – let alone the sharks. You see, the great sharks are keystone species. Their presence impacts entire marine ecosystems through a process that conservation biologists call trophic cascades. It’s kind of like Ronald Reagan’s trickle-down economics – only this actually works.

Picture a pyramid. At the top sits the shark, the apex predator. Below that on the next trophic level sits the shark’s main prey species. In this case, along this coast, that would be species including the cownose rays. These are what we call mesopredators. The next level down hosts the prey species of the rays. This keeps going until you make it to the very bottom of the food chain and you reach those species that obtain their energy directly from the sun. This is a trophic pyramid, a simplified depiction of the ecological pecking order. Big sharks eat rays, rays eat scallops, clams and oysters, and the bivalves in turn filter water in our estuaries.

So, what happens when you chop off the top of the pyramid?

Some 2,500 miles northwest of here is the greater Yellowstone ecosystem, and a landscape that has quite famously answered this very question. The national park that makes up the heart and soul of this place has been something of a test tube for scientists to observe and study for well over a century now. Shortly after the inception of the world’s first national park, its new managers waged a full-scale war against the apex predator of that ecosystem – the wolf. And within a few short years, the big canines were effectively wiped off the map.

For the next century, park officials watched as elk populations began to explode. This was seen as beneficial at first. People liked the elk. More elk therefore meant more of what people wanted. Hunters in the surrounding national forests were elated. But then aspen stands began to die. Willow stands that ringed the wetlands disappeared. Beaver disappeared. And the temperature of some streams and creeks began reaching levels that could not support fish in the summertime. In essence, the very fabric of an entire ecosystem began to slowly fray and unravel.

No wolves in Yellowstone equated to an unchecked population of antlered eating machines on the landscape. Favorite meals for this species are aspens and willows which predictably began to disappear. All of those grassy meadows that you see today with lazy creeks running through them are the result of overgrazing by elk. There should be willows in there. There should be beaver ponds, stands of aspens. As these critical species of trees and shrubs began to disappear, so too did the species that depended upon them such as the beaver. And beavers, more so than any other animal in the northern Rockies, create home and habitat for a multitude of other animals ranging from waterfowl to moose.

Sharks are the apex predators of our coastal ecosystem. They are the wolves of the sea. Eliminate these animals from the trophic pyramid and you release the mesopredators like cownose rays from the checks and balances that sharks once placed on their population through predation and fear. As a result, much like the increase in elk populations across Yellowstone, we have witnessed an explosion in the cownose ray population along the eastern seaboard. That population is now estimated at around 40 million. And it takes a whole lot of bay scallops to feed all of these rays.

In 2006, after 100 years, North Carolina’s commercial scallop fishery – the second largest in the nation – was shut down. The reason? There were simply not enough scallops in the estuaries to support it. When the cownose rays migrated through the area, they were consuming almost every adult scallop that they could find. The rays’ effect on the scallops was confirmed by setting up palisades made from PVC pipe around certain scallop beds designed specifically for excluding cownose rays from the area. After a two-year hiatus on harvesting scallops, the fisheries reopened, but barely. And even today, this fishery remains precarious at best.

This is quite possibly just the tip of the iceberg. The population collapse of great sharks in the western Atlantic has occurred primarily within the last 20 years due to commercial longline fishing and the rising demand for shark fin soup. It takes time however, even in a terrestrial ecosystem, for the effects of these sorts of system-wide changes to take shape.

And this is a marine ecosystem we are talking about, one that’s hidden beneath the surface of the water, where we cannot so easily see such changes as they begin to take place. In Yellowstone, anyone could look out across the Lamar Valley and see the lack of willows and aspens. In the ocean and estuaries, it takes teams of specialized researchers working in the water and scores of number crunchers to mine through fisheries data.  And the data does not always point to the same thing.

I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Stephen Fegley, a marine ecologist from the Institute of Marine Sciences about the data that is currently available. Fegley has been pivotal in analyzing all the numbers from the university’s study on sharks, and if anyone could help explain the discrepancies between fisheries’ and researchers’ data that I was seeing, he was the guy.

“The most important thing that you have to understand about the institute’s study is that it is 43 years old. This is the longest-running study of sharks in the United Sates,” said Dr. Fegley. “Populations fluctuate naturally, and with so many variables, it’s impossible to determine a trend in a population without years of data. This is why UNC’s work is unique. It is looking at specific species over a long period of time.”

The N.C. Department of Marine Fisheries recently released its statistics for the 2014 commercial fishing season. Shark catches were up, way up. In 2013, commercial fishermen brought in an estimated 500,000 pounds of shark from N.C. waters. In 2014, it was double that – tipping the scales at over a million pounds. Such information can be read different ways. For some, this 2014 data could indicate that shark populations were getting healthier and species were rebounding along our coast. But when it comes to statistics, the devil is always in the details.

You see, NCDMF published data doesn’t actually differentiate between species of shark except for the two species of dogfish that are caught commercially. That 1 million pounds of shark says just that: shark. What kind of sharks? Black tip? Tiger? Great White? The prehistoric Megalodon? There is no mention.

Much of the shark fishery tends to take place out near the continental shelf – except for those who are targeting sandbar sharks for their fins, which is only illegal in the United States if they don’t bring the entire shark back to the dock. The shelf is the realm of pelagic sharks such as blue and mako (a species found in many fish tacos). These species are open-ocean sharks. They are not the ones that fall under the coastal complex of species that the Institute of Marine Sciences is ultimately targeting. And they are not the species that function as apex predators in our coastal waters.

Commercial fisherman know the species of sharks that are in question quite well. They have to. Their licenses depend upon it. There is a complete ban on fishing for most of these big sharks. For example, sand tiger sharks (down 99 percent) have been banned since 1997. Dusky sharks (down 99 percent) have been banned since 2000. And the scalloped hammerhead (98 percent) is on the endangered species list.

The majority of the great sharks are all now on a commercial “do not touch” list. But longlines are just that – very long lines. Some stretch for miles and contain many hundreds of hooks. This method of industrial fishing catches fish indiscriminately. Though a commercial longliner may be targeting mahi-mahi or tuna, everything from sharks to sea turtles are caught incidentally and then labeled as by-catch. Some species of sharks can be kept and sold on the market. Others, such as the ones above, are tossed overboard. And by the time these sharks have been landed, they are typically already dead. So regardless of federal bans and even the Endangered Species Act, these species of sharks continue to slip over the edge of oblivion.

Back in the estuaries, as scallops become scarce, cownose rays turn to oysters and hard clams — the stuff in your clam chowder. Our estuaries are already in a state of recovery from the over harvesting of oysters, and millions of dollars are being spent on restoration here. What happens when cownose rays begin focusing on these oyster beds? It is this very question that has sparked the “Save the bay, eat a ray” campaign in Virginia.

And the cownose ray is just one species, the one that we know about simply because it has had an immediate and direct financial effect upon the livelihoods of watermen across our coastal plain. What other ripple effects will the disappearance of these great sharks have across our marine and estuarine systems? We simply don’t know yet.

Those of us who live at the edge of the sea, teeter upon the precipice of the greatest wilderness on our planet. Right here, beneath the waves, is the Serengeti. Apex predators stalk the shadows. Food webs here have a 400-million-year-old history. New species are still being discovered on a regular basis and not just strange microscopic stuff. New species of megafauna are still turning up – such as the Carolina hammerhead, which was announced in 2013.

Our world is inextricably linked to the health and wealth of these oceans. From the oxygen we breathe, the climate we live in and the food that we eat. Yet, we know more about the dark side of the moon than we do this blue wilderness.

Sometimes, it’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the argument of conservation based solely upon anthropocentric desires. What is good for us? What do we want? How do collapsing populations of sharks affect us? And all of this without consideration for what may simply be best for the other members of this planetary community we call life on Earth. We are a species that stumbled upon godlike powers, but never learned how to responsibly wield those powers. We make decisions as to which species shall live, and which shall be slated for extinction with only our own self interests in mind.

For most of us, the question of whether or not great sharks will go extinct seems to be beyond our control. With ethics and morality considered, we wrinkle our brows at the notion and feel frustration, maybe even anger, toward those that we assume are the ones that wield such control and yet allow for this to happen. But if we peel back the layers of excuses and look at the issue for what it really is, we find ourselves staring into a mirror. We are the ones who wield that power. Only, we do so with our wallets and how we chose to spend our money. As long as we create the demand, industry will continue to supply. And that demand currently kills 100 million sharks a year.

As Walt Kelly, the creator of the “Pogo” comic strip, so poignantly revealed to us all, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

This weekend is the traditional start of the tourist season along the N.C. coast. Millions of people will flock to the state’s beaches this summer. The first tourists of the 19^th century sought the ocean shore for a different reason. They went to escape death.

Down here, we have an overabundance of three things: sweet tea, sunshine and mosquitoes. Each one has played no small part in shaping our culture and communities – for better and for worse. From the lines etched into our skin that map out the stories of lives lived in the out of doors, to the too sweet iced tea that seems to define the boundaries of the diabetes belt, this is the South and all that that means. But sweet tea and too much sunshine are, to a degree, lifestyle choices that come with the culture. Vampires however, are inescapable.

It was a full day’s sail across the Albemarle for Francis Nixon and his family. Even with the southwesterly blow that filled his sails, traveling this inland sea was often times little more than a gamble with one’s life. Pocked with shoals, oyster beds and remnants of a long ago drowned forest, the Albemarle was a saline gauntlet, and the weather here was notoriously unpredictable. This stretch of water was very much an extension of the Graveyard of the Atlantic — though such a name would wait another 120 years to be coined.

Stepping out onto the amber colored sand of the barrier islands at a little village called Nags Head, Francis drank of the salt infused air that rushed in from the ocean. This was why he was here, the first of his kind really – a well to do Carolina planter on the barren barrier islands in search of refuge for himself and family, in search of the salt air.

As author Karen Blixen would one day write, “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

Season of Sickness

And for early 19^thcentury planters such as Francis Nixon, he was desperate for a cure, for relief, for an escape from the “fever and agues” that plagued the mainland this time of year. The sea air, Francis Nixon hoped, would pick up where prayers left off.

Summer was the season of sickness, an annual event that swept through the towns and plantations all across the South. People spoke of the “seasoning,” that first summer in the Carolinas that would determine if you would live or die. Those that survived their first round of fevers would push on, most likely suffering again in the future but not fully on their death bed. In his journal, Johann Schoepf wrote in 1784 that, “Carolina in the spring is a paradise, in the summer a hell, and in the autumn a hospital.”

Across the Albemarle, back on the mainland, the heat of summer mixed with the oppressive humidity as slaves, servants and those of lower castes toiled in fields of rice, cotton and tobacco. By day, sounds of cicadas could be almost deafening, and eyes burned from sweat in temperatures that could reach triple digits. Most often, only night fall brought relief to the land. But as the sun began to set, and temperatures subside, the dark brought with it another type of hell – the incessant onslaught of mosquitoes.

The year was 1830. Air conditioning was not yet invented. Screens were nonexistent at this time, as was the understanding of mosquitoes as vectors of disease.

The Age of Disease

The age of exploration and imperialism had ushered in a different age, as they always seem to do in the pendulum swing of action and reaction. This one, historian Alfred Crosby christened the Columbian Exchange. As ships hailed from ports from all sides of the Atlantic, animals, crops, insects and diseases jumped oceans and continents. Within a few hundred years a new Pangea was underway as species mixed across the globe in ways that had not been possible for roughly 175 million years. When it came to many of these species, their forced relocation came at the whims of commerce and trade. But others, such as pestilence and disease, stowed away in the blood of passengers and cargo.

Slavery, that most nefarious of institutions, brought with it countless horrors. But of all these horrors, the one that was least expected and goes generally unacknowledged today was the presence of a unique and distinctly African strain of pathogen coursing through the veins of many would be slaves that survived the voyage to the new world; a pathogen that had grown up alongside of humans in Africa, and one that was locked in a deadly race with human evolution. Those unfortunate souls who found themselves in shackles and stuffed deep into the bowels of the hell that was a slave ship, had either survived the seasonings as a child in Africa or had one of several unique genetic mutations found in the genes of their region that imparted immunity to the effects of this disease. But for those of European and Native American ancestry, their blood and livers were virgin territories unequipped for handling the likes of Plasmodium falciparum – the most deadly and virulent strain of malaria on the planet, and a disease that even to this day continues to kill one million people worldwide on an annual basis.

Parasites like malaria tend to coevolve with specific host species for different stages of their life cycle. Basically, this particular strain of malaria needs both female Anopheles mosquitoes and humans to survive. Upon arriving to the shores of the colonial South in the blood of slaves, the Plasmodium parasite found both uninfected humans, and a species of mosquito that fit the criteria. In short order, the disease would spread like a wildfire from Virginia to Florida and west to encompass the Gulf States.

Carolina planters like Francis Nixon had no way of knowing that there was a connection between mosquitoes and the sickness and death that they watched sweep over their communities each summer. They could only make generalizations, associating the sickness with a season and understanding that it was worse around the swamps that so defined this landscape.

The leading theory at the time was that the sickness was caused by “miasma,” a sexy sounding word that has long since fallen out of use. Miasma is basically a stench or smell considered to be negative and potentially unhealthy. And this notion that these seasonal fevers were caused by bad smells coming from lowlands has a very long history that dates back all the way to the early days of Rome, which suffered the burden of its own unique strain of malaria – Plasmodium vivax.

It was from Rome that we inherited the name malaria. Originally this was not one, but two separate words: mal aria, or quite literally, “bad air.” And it was this “bad air” or miasma down in the lowlands around what would one day become Rome that allegedly prompted Romulus, the city’s founding father, to build atop seven hills so as to escape the pestilence associated with the low country.

The Scourge of Malaria

Malaria has been shaping our existence, patterns of settlement and cultures since the very origin of our species. So when Francis Nixon set foot upon the Outer Banks that summer of 1830 in search of respite from the miasma and ensuing fevers of summer on mainland North Carolina, he was doing exactly what western civilization had always done, he was searching for clean air to breathe.

Nixon and his family are believed to be the first of the Carolina planters to look east towards the Outer Banks to escape the malarial fevers that plagued the mainland. With the knowledge that the area known as Nags Head was generally free of sickness, he procured a 200-acre plot for his family’s summer time retreat near the base of Jockey’s Ridge. Word spread quickly to the other Perquimans plantations of the healthy climate and disease-free respite that he had discovered on the ribbon of sand off the coast. And by 1838 the first official hotel was opened in Nags Head to accommodate those well-to-do families that could afford to step away for a few months each year to escape the sickness that had come to define the South and its people.

It is difficult for us to truly wrap our minds around the effect that malaria had upon the Southern states. This is a disease that was officially eradicated from American soil in the 1950s. Generation after generation has been born into a world where such a disease is one that only inflicts the tropical Third World – certainly not the affluent “West.” But before the discovery of the connection with mosquitoes in the 1890s, death tolls in the South were identical to what we see today in sub-Saharan Africa.

Actual statistics are tough to come by for this time period unfortunately. Many deaths are directly attributed to malaria. Others simply to the symptoms. And then there are those that went unreported all together. In all though, probably one out of ten people succumbed to this disease every year.

During the Civil War, for which meticulous numbers were kept, an average of 10,000 Union soldiers died each year from the malarial fevers they contracted while fighting in the South. Even into the next century, Henry R. Carter, senior surgeon for the United States Public Health Services, in 1913 wrote in his report, Malaria in North Carolina, that people in tidewater North Carolina could not survive to the age of 30 here unless they were able to acquire significant immunity to the disease. The plague of malaria was so pervasive that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was established for the sole purpose of controlling and eradicating this disease from the South, which is why it is based in Atlanta instead of Washington.

A Resort Is Born

The trend that Francis Nixon and his family began would steadily pick up steam and momentum as the century wore on. From an unknown and practically non-existent hamlet tucked in behind towering sand dunes, Nags Head grew into the premier summertime resort community of North Carolina – rivaled only by Asheville, which also traces its rise in prominence to wealthy planters escaping malaria down below. Boardwalks were built, and grand hotels were erected. Horse races were organized and all manners of entertainment were brought in, built or planned to keep North Carolina’s landed gentry occupied and happy while on the island, laying the groundwork for the type of resort destination that Nags Head would come to be known for into the 21^st century.

Today, the Outer Banks is one of the United States most sought after vacation destinations. Each year millions of visitors flock to the coast of North Carolina making tourism here a multi-billion dollar industry. Much like the aristocracy of the antebellum South that Nags Head began catering to 185 years ago, these people come for the rejuvenating effects that days spent with toes in sand and lungs filled with salty air has upon a person. Though the fever and sickness of malaria may no longer be the driving force of this need for escape, the debilitating effects of corporate-wasting syndrome and DNA-mutating impacts of a life spent overworked, over tech’ed and overstressed have proven to be just as powerful motivators.

Driving along N.C. 12 past Jockey’s Ridge and Kitty Hawk Kites, you can see the remnants of this time long since passed in the architecture of the ocean front homes. Here, you will see a line of houses quite unlike mansions that have come to typify ocean front property of the Outer Banks. Weathered, bleached from the sun and seasoned by salt, many of these houses date back over 100 years. The unpainted aristocracy, they are called. And they stand as a window into a history long ago forgotten.

BEAUFORT — The world was beginning to come alive as I pushed away from the dock. To the north of me, over Great Island, the sun was just slipping up and over the horizon as I idled out of Taylors Creek and brought my skiff onto plane. Dorsal fins of bottlenose dolphins crested the surface of the water in the orange reflection of the rising sun. Threading my way through the unmarked bars of Shark Shoal, I was heading out to check on the progress of a small egret rookery situated near the mouth of the North River. Though still early for the real excitement, birds were already beginning to show up in their full regalia of breeding plumage. A haze was rolling in off the ocean and across Back Sound, leaving a slight tang upon my lips.

This stretch of the North Carolina coast lies just below the lance shaped spit of sand known as Cape Lookout. Here, the orientation of beaches are more or less south facing. So when the southwesterly winds begin to blow, instead of pushing in that hot and oppressively humid air of the mainland such as is experienced on the Outer Banks, here beneath the cape, cool air rushes in off of the ocean. And with this pelagic air mass comes the sweet stench of salt – that intoxicating aroma of the open ocean that beckons mariners, like Homeric sirens, calling them back to the sea from which we all came.

I took a huge breathe, filling my lungs to full capacity with the ocean breeze. Maybe it was the extra oxygen, or maybe it was something more primal, a chemical connection to that smell of salt laden air awakening 3.4 billion years’ worth of cellular memory. But a sort of euphoria crept across my body as I exhaled my morning ration of coastal bliss.

All life came from the sea – that salty, wind tossed expanse of blue that so characterizes our planet.  Our genes are linked to it. Our evolution was dictated by it. And according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson’s theory of Biophilia, even our psyches are inextricably connected to it. Need proof of all of this? Just take a look inside yourself.

Human blood is almost identical to seawater, 98 percent identical actually. The sodium content is the same. The mineral content is the same. Take seawater, remove one molecule of magnesium, add one molecule of iron, and you have an exact match. When life crawled itself out of the watery embrace of the oceans, it could not bring itself to fully sever its connection. Even chlorophyll, the life blood of plants if you will, shares this same 98 percent match to seawater.

I switched off the motor and trimmed the lower unit up and out of the water as my boat glided silently through the shallows, finally coming to rest on an exposed sandbar. The water was too shallow at the moment to bring my skiff into the spider web of creeks that ran through Middle Marsh. Hopping over the side of the boat, I carefully hoisted a spotting scope out of the skiff and onto the shoal for long distance viewing of the rookery, taking care that I did not get any saltwater on the optics and other parts that really mattered.

Salt is the great equalizer around these parts. No vehicle, outboard motor, exposed metal or electronics are completely immune to its corrosive properties. The pitting that now pock marks the stainless steel on my boats tower is a testament to this fact. As are the hints of rust forming around the edges of my old Land Cruiser.

But as corrosive as saltwater is to metals, it’s downright lethal to life on this planet. This is one of the great biological ironies I think. Despite the fact that both terrestrial plants and animals are made up of it, and need it to sustain life, a little too much salt and everything goes haywire. And when it is present in great quantities, it functions much like fire does in our longleaf forests, becoming the selective force of chaos and destruction that dictates what can and cannot survive. Adapt or die. Evolve or fade away into oblivion. Salt, along the coastline, is the grand orchestrator of life.

A few days before my morning venture out to the egret rookery, I found myself driving down N.C. 158 on the Outer Banks to hop the ferries back over to Carteret County. Instead of the verdant green of slash and loblolly pines that typifies the drive through Kitty Hawk and Nags Head, the needles of every last pine tree were brown – salt induced leaf necrosis. Only days before, a nor’easter blew up the coast. Winds barreled in off the ocean, driving massive quantities of salt spray across the islands, inundating habitats that are normally sheltered from the daily baptism in saline that characterizes life closer to the tide lines. Those species that were not adapted for handling such measures of salt, suffered as a result.

Whether it’s a matter of keeping the stuff out of your system to begin with, or adapting novels ways to expel the stuff once it begins to accumulate inside of you, survival in this kind of environment means having to evolve novel ways of protection from the destructive properties of excess salt.

Live oaks, a maritime species famously tolerant of salt spray, offers a good case in point as to how some plants manage to thrive where others burn, wither and die. The name of this tree kind of says it all. Called a “live” oak because the leaves remain green year round, this unofficial mascot of the south has adapted to salt by growing thick leathery leaves with a waxy coating over them called the cuticle. Just as you might wax your car to protect it from the elements, so too does the live oak with its leaves. Yet despite these adaptations, the seemingly indestructible live oak still must take shelter behind the dunes. And that gnarled, twisted, quintessentially wind bent look we see in the more exposed specimens, is the result of salt spray sculpting the growth of the tree always out and away from the direction of the salt.

Other species, such as the ubiquitous salt marsh cordgrass found that repelling salt in an environment regularly submerged by saltwater was futile. Instead of fortifying its exterior, this species has developed specialized glands to excrete salt from its leaves. Additionally, cordgrass, along with many other species of salt marsh plants that grow along our coast, have also developed cells with a higher concentration of amino acids to keep the fresh water that is there from leaching out through osmosis.

As I stood marooned on my shrinking sandbar watching egrets through the scope, the telltale sound of dolphins surfacing for breathes of air erupted just feet away in a channel behind me. When it comes to dealing with the problems of salt, most animals have a distinct advantage over plants in that they can simply move to higher and dryer ground when needs be. But what of marine wildlife, species such as sea turtles, pelagic birds and mammals like the coastal bottlenose dolphins hunting 25 yards away from me? What do they do? All of these creatures have returned to the ocean in order to exploit the specialized niches it provides. Like the plants that now occupy the coastal fringes of continents, these animals readapted to the salt life.

Marine wildlife all need the same things that their terrestrial cousins require for life – freshwater (amongst other things). But when at sea, there is water, water everywhere . . . but not a drop to drink. That is of course, unless you can drink saltwater.

Mammals, such as dolphins, whales, seals and sea lions have developed specialized kidneys just for solving this problem. Called a reniculate kidney, these things look more like a bag of grapes than what we typically think of as a kidney. Each one of those grapes if you will, are basically functioning like an individual kidney. And depending upon the species, there can be thousands of these that make up one reniculate kidney – all working separately yet together for the same goal. Much of the water that marine mammals ingest comes from the metabolism of their prey. But species such as dolphins still consume around six liters of saltwater a day – about 30 percent of their water intake. These reniculate kidneys work double duty to process out quantities of salt that would otherwise kill terrestrial species like you and me.

Pelagic birds on the other hand deal with salt in a very different way. Many species of birds have developed their very own desalinization plant in the form of salt glands located above their eyes. These glands are then connected to their nostrils via specialized ducts that secrete salt which runs down to the tip of the beak. Other species, known unimaginatively as tube nosed birds, collect the salt that runs from these specialized glands in a tube above their nostrils. When the salt begins to build up, every so often they will literally sneeze a briny liquid out of this tube – much to the chagrin of other seabirds nearby.

Reptiles and birds are pretty similar in how they deal with problems. This makes sense given that they are so closely related. So it should be no surprise that the great ocean going turtles of the world also developed a similar sort of desalinization plant in their heads. But Instead of salt laden aqueducts leading to nostrils, these creatures excrete the stuff from the supraorbital salt gland in the form of gelatinous saline infused tears. This unique trait has been observed by coastal peoples everywhere long before civilization. And cultures all over the world, simultaneously understood this to mean that the sea turtle was shedding tears for all of her unborn children that she would never meet after she left the beach.

As I continued my ruminations on salt and its role as a guiding hand of evolution along the coast, water began to lap at my calves. The tide was coming in and my boat was beginning to float over the sandbar I was on. Like the tide that was flooding in around me, with sea levels on the rise, one cannot help but to wonder what the effects will be on the surrounding environment. As roots become flooded out in both maritime and mainland forests, as salt water intrudes further up our river systems like we are seeing now on the Cape Fear, as we continue to lose ground to the ocean, what will the effects to our environment be? It has taken life countless millennia to readapt to a world infused with salt. Birds do not grow glands that work as desalinization plants overnight, and plants do not completely reconstruct their cellular structure in a matter of decades. Who will adapt and who will die? One thing is for certain, the little rookery on Middle Marsh now has a shelf life. And the landscape that we have taken for granted as being static and everlasting, now faces a brave new world.

But really though, this is life on a sandbar – to borrow from the philosophy of bumper stickers. Dynamic equilibrium is all that we can really hope for here. Though the hand of man is now engineering a sixth mass extinction on the planet, and swinging climate in ways that only super-volcanoes and meteorites large enough to bring the Cretaceous period to a close were capable of before, along the edge of the sea change is the only constant. And salt, that toxic yet necessary element for life, is at the forefront of driving this change.

BEAUFORT — In the depths of winter, when the battle between light and dark sways towards the night, when temperatures have plummeted to the lowest of lows, when ice begins to reform along coastal stretches far to the north, a most unexpected visitor arrives in North Carolina.

To be quite honest, you probably have never heard about them or seen them. This is not surprising, as they are something of a new comer to this Old North State. Their arrival is unceremonious and often cloaked by darkness. The odds of encountering one of these visitors are completely stacked against you. Their numbers are few and quite often spread thin.

Yet each year, for a couple of decades now, they appear as if out of nowhere, and materialize from the sea.

High pressure and low temperatures have coalesced to clear the night sky of the humidity driven haze that typically hangs in the air. The stars are incalculable this evening, glowing so brightly as to be seen above the two beams of my headlights bouncing over the sand as I drive the beach. Old live oak and red cedar stumps rise from the sand at the edge of the sea, the artifacts of island migration and the constant change that characterizes life on a sandbar – and very real threats to life and limb when navigating this beach at night by vehicle. This is not my first rodeo, however, having spent much of my life driving this very same stretch of sand along the Currituck Banks.

A dark shape catches my attention beyond my headlights. With all of the stumps around there are plenty of dark shapes to jump out at you, but this one is different. This one is moving. This one is crawling out of the ocean. I conclude that this is decidedly uncharacteristic behavior for a stump, even for this time of night, and come to a stop in order to get a better look. Hauling itself from the cold and wind churned waters of the Atlantic Ocean this evening is an adult harbor seal.

This is pretty new stuff. If you found yourself cocking your head to the side and thinking that you have never heard of such a thing, then rest assured this is for good reason. Thirty years ago, there were no seals on these beaches. In fact, when we look back into the primary sources of the annals of history, we find the record to be conspicuously empty of any mention of seals at all. It has only been since around the mid-1990s that these animals have begun making an annual appearance — and quite frankly, no one has a clue as to why. But, there is one person who is determined to find out.

Meet David Johnston of Duke University’s Marine Lab in Beaufort. Johnston has that sort of look you kind of expect from a biologist. A look that says, “I get paid to play outside, so I am genuinely happy, content with life, and I have the beard to prove it.” Come to think of it, that kind of sums up my look as well.

Normally you can find this guy being tossed around in a research vessel chugging its way through towering waves in the southern ocean heading toward Antarctica to study seals. At other times, his research takes him to slightly more ideal locations such as Australia or Hawaii. But the day that he called me up and asked me to meet with him to discuss a research project he had brewing inside his mind, several months before I happened upon this harbor seal now perfecting its yoga stretches on the half frozen beach in front of me, David Johnston was sitting in his office on Piver’s Island in Beaufort where he runs the Johnston Lab (not a coincidence in naming) and does time teaching marine bio grad students for Duke.

Sitting at a table before an impressive spread of flat screen TVs on the wall, all displaying one large continuous satellite image of a grey seal colony along the coast of New England, Johnston began discussing the need for getting to the bottom of why seals are starting to show up here. You see, if we were just finding harbor seals, which are common enough on the beaches north of New Jersey, this might be attributed to a rebounding population thanks to the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1976. Though harbor seals do make up the bulk of the seals we are seeing, it’s the other species, however, that are really beginning to raise red flags.

Mixed in with the harbor seals are basically every other species of seal found in the western Atlantic. Massive grey seals weighing in at 500 pounds are showing up in Kitty Hawk and Ocracoke. Harp seals and hooded seals, both species that live and die by the pack ice of the Arctic, are being found from Carova Beach to Cape Lookout. None of these should technically be here – especially the pack ice seals.

A few years back I was working on a story about seals off the coast of North Carolina for a magazine when I received a tip from the N.C. Wildlife Resource Commission that fishermen were regularly reporting seals in Oregon Inlet that year – especially around one particular island. As of yet, no one had been able to make an official investigation into this and I was asked if it was something I would be interested in checking out. Naturally I jumped at the suggestion and did what any sane person would do: I slid my kayak into the hypothermia-inducing waters of February and paddled out into one of the world’s most dangerous inlets in search of seals. What I was to discover would ultimately change our understanding of seals in North Carolina.

Paddling out to the island in question, at first I saw nothing remarkable. Studying the shores from a distance with binoculars I only saw what I thought to be debris washed up from a recent nor’easter. When one of the logs got up and hauled itself back into the water however, I realized that there was more to this log.

What I had stumbled upon turned out to be a colony of adult seals – mostly harbor, but with a couple harp seals thrown in for good measure. I counted 37 adult seals hauled out on that beach, and in short order I had other seals popping up next to my kayak to get a better look at me.

This was not supposed to be happening. This is North Carolina, not Maine. Yet, here they were. And these were not the juveniles that we have come to expect. These were all mature seals, and they were literally everywhere.

Talking with Johnston about this in his office, he grinned from ear to ear. It was ultimately this discovery in 2011 that put Oregon Inlet on the map in terms of seals, and it was right where he wanted to get started.

“This feeding colony is the southernmost known in the Atlantic, and very little is known about the ecology and population biology of these animals. These are important questions in the context of climate change, as these animals are found at the southernmost limits of their thermal tolerance,” said Johnston. Furthermore, “This area is also the focus of upcoming construction which could impact these animals.”

The construction that Johnston was talking about was the proposed replacement of Bonner Bridge, which spans Oregon Inlet. This new, and longer version of the bridge, is to be built right over top of the island that these seals are using. Just what exactly the impact of such long term construction would have on these seals, nobody knows.

This study is still in its infancy, and will most likely take several years given the short window of time there is to work with. Next winter Johnston and a team of graduate students will start working with aerial drones, thermal imaging, remote cameras and video to begin intricately piecing together the puzzle of these seal’s use of the Oregon Inlet site.

A harbor seal comes ashore at Indian Beach on Bogue Banks in February 2006.

This is ultimately where I come in, as the team’s photographer and videographer, and how I found myself sitting at Duke’s Marine Research Lab across from Johnston discussing my experience with seals on the Outer Banks and collaborating with one of the top minds in the field.

There is a certain degree of urgency to this whole thing. The situation in the north is changing quickly. Ice packs are changing. Fish populations are changing. Puffin chicks are starving to death because the parents can no longer find hake and herring – two species of fish incidentally that many seals depend upon. The ocean is warmer. Less salty. And God only knows what else. This is why when we see seals beginning to pop up on our coast, especially those that should be lounging around on ice flows, images of canaries in coal mines start dancing in the heads of researchers.

The ocean really is the last frontier for us. It is a world apart from ours. Species that call the oceans home, play by a different set of rules than we do on land, they are constrained by different forces. Theirs is a world kept secret from us, hidden beneath the waves of the sea, guarded by Poseidon. The story of these seals and why they have begun to show up along our beaches is one small part of this mystery. Hopefully it is a part that in the coming years we will be able to shed light upon before our actions as a society dictate it to be too late.

COROLLA — I am hunting down a ghost story. I am making my way north of the last outpost of civilization on this end of the Outer Banks, where the paved roads give way to open beaches. With tires slacked down to a mushy 15 psi, I navigated my Land Cruiser through the deep ruts and sugar-soft sand along the base of the dunes. This narrow strip of beach, roughly 15 feet wide, was all I had been left to work with as a strong northeast wind was driving an angry sea well up the shore.

Cutting the steering wheel to the left, I pull myself out of the ruts that I had been following. The engine groans as I begin to crawl my way up and over a ramp through the dunes. This ridge of sand stands guard between the rest of the island and Poseidon’s unbridled wrath; and behind it lies a network of sand trails that lace this part of the Banks and leads to the rental homes here.

Penny’s Hill near Corolla swallowed whole the small fishing village of Seagull more than 90 years ago. Gone were two churches, a one-room school, a post office and about 35 houses. Photo: Frogsview Blog

The sea oats and American beach grass that colonize the ocean side dunes give way to dense stands of wax myrtle tangled in wild grapes and mixed with the occasional stunted and gnarled persimmon. Looking out toward the sound side of the island, this shrub thicket melts into a forest of seemingly impenetrable live oaks, which melt into loblolly pines. A small band of wild horses that make this northern most section of the Outer Banks their home grazed peaceably some 200 feet away.

Out of this landscape rises a tremendous wall of sand. Several stories high, a monstrous dune peaks well above the surrounding forest just to the south of me and towards the sound. It is a sight that seems disconnected from these barrier islands. More Sahara than Outer Banks. This dune is so large that it is easily seen from the mainland some four miles to the west across Currituck Sound. A landmark if you will, that has guided countless ships along the ocean and skiffs along the sound for centuries. This is where history, legend and geology become one.

The Outer Banks once gave rise to numerous sand hills of such proportions. With names such as Penny’s Hill, Lewark’s Hill, Jones Hill, Poyner’s Hill, Kill Devil Hills and Jockey’s Ridge, these massive sand dunes once characterized the islands and set them apart from others elsewhere along the Eastern Seaboard. Though each of these giant hills officially had names — this particular pile of sand being Lewark’s Hill — colloquially these massive dunes were referred to as “sand waves” or “whaleheads” on the Outer Banks. From a geological perspective, however, they are all classified as medanos – a migratory dune.

Medanos are defined as very large “living dunes” that distinctly lack vegetation. Such absence of vegetation is the result of the constant flux that these sand dunes are in — hence the concept of “living.” Towering above the landscape as they do, medanos are affected by the winds that typify life on the Outer Banks in ways that other dunes in the area are not.

Jockey’s Ridge, the highest sand dune on the East Coast, eased itself over top of the first hotel on the Outer Banks, built around 1838. In later years, clerks offered discounts to visitors who didn’t mind digging their way into the two-story structure. Photo: Jockey’s Ridge State Park

Though summer may bring an almost constant southwesterly breeze to these barrier islands, it is the northeast gales that come howling in off the ocean the rest of the year that drive these dunes across the landscape. The wind picks up and carries billions of grains of sand up the northeast face of these giant sand hills, which can be several stories tall. Once the sand crests the top of the hill, it slips into the eddy behind the peak and tumbles down the steep embankment along the backside of the dune. Grain by grain, storm by storm, the dune is rolled over top of itself.

These so called sand waves, named such because they were like a tidal wave of sand barreling down upon the islands, have the destructive force of a glacier – unstoppable, consuming all. Anything and everything in the path of these dunes will succumb to its slow march across the landscape. Lewark’s Hill, like Run Hill further south in Kill Devil Hills, is currently in the process of engulfing vast stretches of maritime forest. Steep cliffs cascade down into the trees where the canopy of live oaks and loblolly stick out of their tomb of sand. Left in its wake, one can sometimes find the remnants of a ghost forest, those skeletal trunks that stood years beneath the sand before the dune moved on.

History and geography coincided perfectly for Orville and Wilbur Wright, who could not have made history in 1903 without the wild sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills. Photo: Library of Congress

Forests, however, are not the only thing that these legendary waves of sand have entombed over the years. Entire towns have vanished beneath these unstoppable juggernauts. The sleepy village of Seagull once stood along the banks of the New Currituck Inlet before it was swallowed whole by Penny’s Hill after this sand wave migrated across the inlet, filling it in and changing commerce in the area forever. Jockey’s Ridge, the largest “living dune” on the East Coast, allegedly sits atop of one of the original 19th century Nags Head resort hotels, according to a 1906 edition of National Geographicmagazine. Today, you can even see the remnants of the Jockey’s Ridge Putt Putt golf course that was buried by the advancing sands of this medano, peaking out of the east side of the dune near U.S. 158. Sand is constantly being removed from the southern flank of Jockey’s Ridge to save the houses that sit in its path. All up and down the Outer Banks similar stories punctuate the foggy history of these hills. Though most such stories have long been forgotten even by those who live here.

There are few places where the history and the environment are so tightly braided together as upon these barrier islands. The medanos of the Outer Banks stand testament to this fact. License plates in North Carolina would not read “First in Flight” if it were not for the giant dunes of Kill Devil Hills that the Wright Brothers so famously launched their flying machine from the top of (now planted with sod to keep it from moving). Communities such as Corolla and Diamond City may never have been built if it were not for the towering hills used for spotting migrating schools of fish and whales. The projected path of these dunes was a consideration for the establishment of most towns along the Banks actually. And before the days of lighthouses, these sand waves where the only means of navigating along this infamous stretch of coast, possibly sparing thousands of lives from joining the already gruesome statistics of the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Climbing to the top of Lewark’s Hill I was afforded a commanding view of both sound and sea. Looking out over the blue horizon, I thought back to the first time I climbed this dune decades past. As a boy turned lose upon the wilds of the northern beaches so many years ago, I was warned not to climb this hill at night. Legend had it that a house set beneath its sands where an old lady was buried inside. Those foolish enough to climb atop her tomb of sand at night would find her icy cold hand reaching out of the dune, fingers clasped around their ankle, as she pulled you down below. History, legend or geology? As with so many things about this coastline, the lines are blurred.

Yaupon Holly. Photo: Sam Bland

Overnight, temperatures plummeted. Although clear skies prevailed this morning, the bone-aching cold had me scrambling to slip on gloves and a toboggan as I set out along an unmarked trail off the side of N.C. in Cape Hatteras National Seashore. The sun was just beginning to climb above the ocean. Its warm pinkish glow bathed the island in strips of light that shone through the breaks in the dunes. A small family of tundra swans whistled by overhead making their way toward Bodie Island Lighthouse. Salt marsh crept into both sides of the trail in spots, and the high tide had pushed Pamlico Sound up and over the little berm that I followed deeper into the shrub thicket.

After a few minutes of half hiking, half sloshing through the water, the purpose of my rousing from a perfectly warm bed so early in the morning began to materialize. In a wintery landscape dominated by the muted tones of browns and grays that characterize this season on the barrier islands, a dense stand of yaupon holly heavily laden with vibrantly colored berries is an explosion of color that is almost hypnotic. Fire engine red berries contrast against the deep jungle green of the elliptically shaped leaves of this coastal holly. Cedar waxwings the colors of a rainbow flutter in and out, gorging themselves on this winter smorgasbord. A true visual feast in the monochromatic world of winter.

Sprawled out before me along both sides of the trail, these dense stands of yaupon holly hold a fascinating story of life along the coastal plain. Today, most North Carolinians only know this plant for its use in landscaping. However, there was a time when this unsuspecting shrub was the basis for extensive trade networks between Native American tribes that stretched from the Outer Banks to the Appalachian Mountains. Archeological digs as far west as the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois have even turned up pottery coated with the residue of this plant.

Yaupon holly, pronounced YO-pawn, grows natively along the coastal plain of North Carolina down to the middle of Florida and west along the Gulf Coast. Like the trade networks across the Carolinas suggest, the products of this shrub, despite their geographical restriction to coastal areas, were in high demand throughout the eastern half of the continent.

Traditionally, the green leaves of this plant were used as sort of a native tea known as “asi,” or “cassina,” and by the colonists as “Black Drink.” The red berries of the holly, however, are poisonous. At first glance you might wonder why a simple “tea” might have been traded from the Outer Banks to points as far west as Illinois. With all of the plants out there that held some sort of ethno-botanical use, what was so special about this species of holly? As it turns out, yaupon contains a drug that today drives a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States. You see, pre-colonial America was not that much different than modern day America in that they just couldn’t get enough of the drug we call caffeine.

A cedar waxwing with a plump, red yaupon holly berry in its beak. Photo: Audubon, Laure W. Neish/VIREO

Yaupon holly happens to have the unique distinction of being the only plant native to North America that contains caffeine, maybe the world’s most sought-after drug. And much like us coffee addicts today, native tribes would go to great lengths and pay a great expense to appease their addiction. Both John Lawson and William Bartram, who were great naturalists and explorers of early America with insight into native life in the Carolinas, wrote extensively about this.

Almost as soon as Europeans arrived on the scene, they were taught by the natives how to brew up a batch of Black Drink by harvesting the yaupon in the early summer when caffeine content was at its peak. Leaves and stems were roasted, cured and prepared exactly like Asian tea to create a piping hot cup of caffeinated goodness. At a time when trade to the colonies was crippled by royal taxes and import duties, this homegrown caffeine infused drink became all the rage up and down among the colonists.

Word made it out of the colonies and back to Europe about this so called Black Drink pretty quickly. Before long, our native holly was being sold and marketed as South Sea Tea and Carolina Tea throughout Europe. Due to the abundance of the yaupon holly plant in the American colonies, South Sea Tea was easy to come by and therefore inexpensive. Over the years, yaupon holly became associated with the lower classes of Europe who could not afford the expensive Asian teas or coffee that were being imported through the East India Company. By the mid-19^thcentury, yaupon fell out of favor in Europe.

Back across the ocean, however, consumption lingered on, especially in hard times. During the Civil War, the yaupon holly processing plants on Hatteras Island kicked into overdrive as they began producing and exporting Carolina Tea to the rest of the Southern colonies while Northern blockades were keeping English exports out. Likewise during the Great Depression and World War II, U.S. consumption once again spiked as tea and coffee became difficult to obtain. After the war, however, yaupon holly was quickly forgotten as America rode upon a wave of wealth thanks to the Marshal Plan and the reconstruction of Europe.

Stubborn. It’s a word often used to describe those who eke out a living along the Outer Banks. When it came to drinking Carolina Tea, the Outer Banks is thought to have been the last holdout. The tea was sold in restaurants along the Banks into the 1970s; Ocracoke Island is the last known location to have served yaupon tea.

Today, modern science has begun to focus on yaupon holly as another possible weapons the fight against cancer. Thus far, yaupon holly has proven itself to be packed full of antioxidants, beneficial polyphenols and anti-inflammatory properties that show promising results against colon cancer.

Given the abundance of this shrub in our backyards and its health benefits, America just might be ready for a Carolina Tea revival.