Second of two-part special series. Read part 1.

In Currituck County, on the northern Outer Banks, the maritime forests grow thick with southern live oaks. These trees can live up to 300 years, their twisted trunks spiraling out of sandy soil all the way down the Carolina coast. For centuries, they have borne witness to changing communities and landscapes.

On this 11-mile stretch, also known as “Carova” or “the 4×4,” which goes from the North Carolina-Virginia line to the start of the paved road in Corolla, there is a diverse range of ecosystems. The Atlantic Ocean swells, and stiff winds pound the exposed homes on the eastern side of the barrier island. Moving west toward Currituck Sound, the forest grows thicker before transitioning into marshy wetlands alongside a set of man-made canals. At the northern gates to False Cape State Park in Virginia, the forest grows tall enough to make you forget there is a beach nearby.

It was Carova’s natural beauty and quiet serenity that struck both Edna Baden and Elizabeth White, Carova residents since 1994 and 2004, respectively, inspiring them to move permanently.

Maintaining protected, undisturbed areas also is important for the survival of a 500-year-old herd of wild Colonial Spanish mustangs that are a unique breed roaming 7,544 acres of beach, wetlands and forest that surround the 700 houses dotting the landscape.

Legend has it that today’s herd is composed of the descendants of horses left behind when Spanish settlers arrived on the North Carolina coast in the late 1500s. DNA testing by the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, a nonprofit founded in 1989 to protect the horses, supports this theory. Their research confirms that the Corolla wild horses are genetically isolated from other wild horse herds like their northern neighbors, the wild ponies of Chincoteague and Assateague islands.

The herd used to roam freely from the town of Duck up to the Virginia line. But when developers extended the paved road north to Corolla in the 1980s, the fund recorded more than 30 horse fatalities caused by the increased traffic on N.C. Highway 12. The organization decided in 1997 to create a sanctuary in the off-road area to protect the 20 remaining horses. The herd’s population today is roughly 100 horses.

Meg Puckett is a native Virginian who joined the Corolla Wild Horse Fund in 2016 as herd manager. She is on call 24/7 to respond to emergencies and monitor the animals’ behavior, migration habits, and general health and welfare. Because residents see the horses daily, and often know them well enough to identify them by name, Puckett frequently gets phone calls with news about a particular animal’s activity. In that way, the horses are also part of this community.

Yet, Puckett stressed that the horses are wild animals, different from domestic horses, so the fund tries to keep their intervention as minimal as possible. But she said that the changing environment threatens the horses to such an extent that the fund has had to intervene multiple times over the past few years to keep the animals alive.

“We had one mare that died from a disease called Potomac Horse Fever, which is caused by mayfly larva in the water. That’s something that normally would be killed off in a deep freeze, but we’re not getting deep freezes,” Puckett said. Another horse recently died on the beach after suffering heat stroke.

There have also been three confirmed cases and a fourth suspected case of equine pythiosis, commonly called swamp cancer, over the past two years, including one mare who had to be evacuated and now lives on the mainland. The Chincoteague herd also lost a few horses to the disease a few years ago. “That’s an infection that historically had really only been seen in more tropical climates,” Puckett said.

The infection is caused by fungal growth in decaying plant matter that is left in standing water. Irregular weather patterns driven by climate change bring intense rainfall and drought, creating patches of standing water, especially on beach roads where tire tracks have created indentations in the sand.

“We’ll get heavy flooding rain and then nothing. So you just have this stagnant water and then it never rains again to flush it out of there,” Puckett said.

Contaminated water is also an issue for people living on a shallow water table with no coordinated sewage-management system. Groundwater is only a few feet deep on most lots. Baden said everybody used to drink water straight from the tap, but no one does anymore.

Steve Grout, another longtime Carova resident, concurred. “Most people spend thousands of dollars on water filtration systems just to get stuff that comes out clear,” he said. “For most people, it comes out of their faucets brown.”

“All of this is tied into humans,” Puckett said. “When you start messing with the marsh … it’s supposed to flood, it’s supposed to filter that water. And when it can’t do that, that’s when you start to see problems.”

The Chowanog, Yeopin and Poteskyte Native Americans are the original inhabitants of Currituck County. Seasonal settlers like fishermen, lightkeepers, waterfowl hunters and the U.S. Coast Guard have passed through for centuries.

It wasn’t until the 1960s that commercial development was poised to begin in earnest in Carova as developers from Virginia Beach looked to expand. Vehicle traffic skyrocketed along the beaches, prompting the U.S. Department of the Interior to get involved and restrict vehicle access in 1973. Today, Carova remains free of high-rises and commercial development and is a prime destination for vacationers and second-home buyers.

“Its attraction is that it is a relatively free area in terms of regulation,” said Clark Twiddy, president of Twiddy & Co., an Outer Banks property management company. “Swan Beach, North Swan and Carova have, I think, always held this place in our imagination as a free, natural environment with a minimum of human disturbance or human intrusion.”

But escaping to a seemingly wide-open space is inherently intrusive.

Along Carova’s sand roads, bulldozers idle over piles of fallen branches and dug-up sand. Horses graze between “for sale” and “no trespassing” signs on every corner.

The maritime forest grows behind the dunes, but the tree roots stretch under vacant lots awaiting clearing. Despite a designation under the Coastal Barrier Resources System, which strips federal funding to disincentivize development in storm-prone areas, single-family homes continue to spring up.

Many residents turn to work in the construction, real estate or tourism industries, which can contribute to the destruction of the environment they also aim to protect. And with the rise in lot sales over the past three years, more lots are always in need of clearing.

This gives Baden pause. “I bought my house when it was 10 years old,” she said. “For all I know, my lot could have had live oak trees.”

The lot next to Baden’s house was recently razed. Her neighbor, J-P Peron, a real estate agent and Carova resident, sold it to someone who may well become another neighbor. She watched as another neighbor cleared it. Baden refuses to walk on the lot — she feels bad energy. A lot of deaths happened there.

There’s also extensive construction in wetlands and other flood-vulnerable areas. Many of these places are on the Currituck Sound side and are likely to be underwater when sea levels rise a foot, which is almost certain to happen by 2050. More intense hurricanes, driven by climate change, on top of higher sea levels are also expected to cause more frequent floods in the coming decades.

Already in Swan Beach, which lies on lowland marsh, residents deal with flooding on a regular basis. To build in this area, property owners must bring in truckloads of sand to fill in low spots and create space for septic tanks and water systems.

“I’m astonished that they’re building where there are wetlands,” White said. “I never thought the area in front of my house would be developed because it’s clearly all wetlands, and the water needs to go somewhere.”

There are few regulations for building in Currituck County, in general, and the lack of federal support does little to hamper construction for those who can afford it. Also at issue is that the northern Outer Banks are in a roughly yearlong drought, according to White and her partner Bill Sanderlin. A common hangout area for the horses in Swan is usually waist-high with water but is completely dry these days. White and Sanderlin pointed out that many of Swan Beach’s roads are flooded 50% of the year, perhaps tricking recent buyers into thinking the land is drier than it is.

This is not enough for real estate companies to turn buyers away, however. “If you’re in the real estate business, you disclose things. And the only sin is a failure to disclose,” Twiddy said.

Once people are settled as full-time residents, it’s both common practice and a common pipe dream to try and prevent others from moving there too, whether it is to preserve the privacy of their space or, like Baden and White, to prevent more deforestation and conserve more space for the horses.

“The best buyers for vacant lots are the houses next door to them. If you’ve got the means and the opportunity arises, you jump on it,” Peron said. “I bought a lot to the south of me. I have not been able to buy a lot to the north of me. I’ve been trying for over a decade.”

“You picked that lot because it was so nice and open,” he continued, “but the last thing you want is to have a big, honkin’ house 20 feet away from you.”

The horses play into this land-grab effort, too. Residents are working to buy land and take it out of development so that the horses have enough room to roam and space to take shelter in case of extreme weather.

“The idea is to raise enough money so that we can buy all the land in a corridor that would connect from Swan Beach up to the Virginia line,” White said, who is helping with this project.

Twice, Peron has been able to get sellers to donate their lots to the Corolla Wild Horse Fund, especially in areas that are difficult to build on. Puckett is all for this practice: “I think that any lot that you take out of development is a good thing.”

Carova’s Climate Future

Climate threats are coming for Carova, and soon. What remains murky is what residents in the 4×4 area and people across the state are going to do about it.

One state project working on the ground is the North Carolina Resilient Coastal Communities Program, facilitated by the state Division of Coastal Management, which aims to provide communities with expertise and funding to complete resilience and adaptation projects. Currituck County representatives participate, but the county’s only listed project within the 4×4 area is a shoreline stabilization study to explore beach nourishment.

Farther south, on Pine Island sanctuary in Currituck Sound, Audubon North Carolina is beginning some marsh restoration pilot projects to strengthen eroding shorelines and elevate sinking wetlands through sediment application and creating structures with natural materials like Christmas trees.

The benefits that come from buying up neighboring lots can extend beyond the horses, helping improve ecosystem connectivity for other wildlife. “We are all here for a reason. The isolation, the environment. It behooves us all to protect it,” Puckett said. “If I’m protecting the horses, that means I’m also protecting the environment. If it’s healthy enough for the horses, it’s going to be healthy enough for all the rest of the animals.”

Yet, none of these projects will substantially help Carova residents prepare for higher seas, stronger storms, fiercer heat waves, or the other climate threats that are predicted to come their way.

Edward Ponton, who is one of the only full-time residents born and reared in the 4×4, wonders if these threats and other hardships are taken less seriously because people with multiple homes can escape. The Pontons are one of the families who have made Swan Beach their home for generations, and they don’t plan on leaving any time soon.

“You just wonder if some of those people are going to make their money and get out of here and we will be left with whatever is to come,” Ponton said. “My dad always likes to say piracy is alive and well on the Outer Banks.”

This is the second in a two-part special reporting series on climate change along the northern Outer Banks. Read part one here. This series is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.

First in a two-part special series.

On a blustery day in September, Edward Ponton studies an incoming storm as the afternoon rain meets the ocean. He points north, calling attention to the backs of the rolling waves, indicating a southeast swell. It’s the remnants of Hurricane Fiona making its way up the North Carolina coast.

“There’s something down there,” Ponton warns. “If it’s coming across a certain way, you have to be prepared … and that would have been 100 years ago, how people knew there was a storm coming.”

Ponton’s family has been a multi-generational presence in the Northern Currituck Outer Banks since the early 1960s, when Buddy Ponton, his father, came south from Virginia Beach to fish and build a family home.

From the North Carolina-Virginia line to the start of the paved road in Corolla, North Carolina, there are three unincorporated communities: Carova Beach, North Swan Beach and Swan Beach. This 11-mile stretch — often referred to as “Carova” or “the 4×4” — is the northernmost part of the Outer Banks, sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Currituck Sound to the west. The only way to access this area is by driving up N.C. Highway 12 in a four-wheel-drive vehicle until the two-lane highway becomes a beach.

Ponton’s memories span a lifetime of experience. He is the youngest “old-timer”: a resident who was born and raised in the area and who still lives there full time. In the lowlands where he rowed his canoe as a child, new houses now sprout up like weeds. A 500-year-old herd of protected wild horses grazes over 7,544 acres of land that their human neighbors are racing to buy up even as stronger storms and bigger floods threaten to cut the remote community off completely.

But the changing climate has not scared off longtime residents nor big developers seeking to capitalize on the booming tourism and second home market. In fact, with each passing year, it becomes more and more expensive to buy a home and live in Carova, especially in the face of increasing climate threats.

Understanding Carova

In the 4×4 area, there are no grocery stores, gas stations, or commercial businesses of any kind. There are no hospitals or healthcare providers, though the community does run a volunteer fire and rescue service. A tightknit community has formed from years spent out on their own.

In the 1960s, a Virginia Beach-based developer purchased land and subdivided it into one-third-acre lots. “Originally, the plans had been for the Ocean Highway to come down from Sandbridge (Virginia) down to Corolla. A lot of people don’t realize development here on the Currituck Banks started from the north,” Ponton said.

Now, a southern beach gate restricts the wild horses from moving into Corolla, and two northern gates restrict vehicle access into Virginia via False Cape State Park in Virginia. Those gates closed in the 1970s to vehicle traffic, angering residents who now must drive south to the Wright Memorial Bridge and head back north on the mainland to get to Virginia. Less than 20 old-timers still have keys to the northern gate — Ponton’s key will die with his father, Buddy.

Edna Baden was a weekend warrior before she moved full time to the Northern Outer Banks 28 years ago. There were only about 50 year-round residents then, which has grown to about 200 today. “When I moved here in 1994, there were only a handful of houses on the ocean. There were a lot of trailers still. They had little shack kind of places,” Baden said, referring to the Outer Banks’ classic stilted, trailer-style home.

Those original homes are now few and far between, nestled in thick maritime forest. Many of the old-timers settled on the Currituck Sound side, along man-made canals that give them boat access.

Today, there are more than 3,000 properties and 700 houses on this strip of barrier island. Many of those houses appear gargantuan against the dunes, with some of the oceanfront homes featuring more than 20 bedrooms and bathrooms.

It is surprising to see the size of these homes considering that the entirety of the northern Currituck Outer Banks is maintained under the Coastal Barrier Resources System, or CBRS, which was created by the Coastal Barrier Resources Act, signed into law by President Reagan in 1982.

The purpose of the law is to encourage land conservation and discourage development in storm-prone coastal areas by withdrawing federal funding from Coastal Barrier Resources Act areas, also known as CBRA zones. People who build within a CBRA zone cannot access the National Flood Insurance Program protection or federal disaster assistance money.

Click on the arrows in the top left of the above map to turn on boundaries such as CBRA zones.

In most cases, researchers have found that the act disincentivizes development in those areas. But in Carova’s case, it is a desirable enough destination that construction creeps in anyways, bringing in high-end development and people willing to pay exorbitantly high insurance rates.

High Seas Ahead

At milepost 16, a house called the Laughing Gull sticks out like a sore thumb, sitting so far out on the beach that cars have to weave around it to get by. It seems like it’s closer to washing away with each crashing wave.

Researchers say that in the United States, the East and Gulf coasts will bear the worst of sea level rise. Like watching your pillow spring back after you lift your head up, a melted glacier at the poles gets pushed up by water underneath it, sending the new ice melt far away — to places like the North Carolina coastline. Over the next three decades, sea levels are expected to rise 10 to 14 inches along the East Coast and 14 to 18 inches along the Gulf Coast, the highest levels in the United States.

Scientists can estimate this rise through 2050 because the oceans trap and store heat, so high greenhouse gas emissions now do not instantly translate to higher sea levels. Instead, the sea level rise over the next 30 years is based on the warming in our world today, and there is “virtually nothing that we can do about that,” said Daniel Gilford, climate scientist at Climate Central, a nonprofit organization that researches and reports the science and impacts of climate change.

This is happening while the Outer Banks are no longer naturally moving. Over time, the islands are supposed to gradually shift westward as ocean waves and winds from the east blow sand to build up the marshes on the west. But hard structures like buildings and roads stop that steady erosion and rebuilding from happening, and instead, there is erosion without addition, whittling the island away until someday, it might not be there at all.

On the northern Outer Banks, sea level rise will first hit areas along the Currituck Sound, the side that naturally should be rebuilding, since the marsh is closer to sea level. This inevitable rise is likely to swallow swampier areas near the Virginia border, around the man-made canals, and the entire Currituck National Wildlife Refuge.

Without extreme cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels could rise more than a foot by 2050. Beyond that, global action on climate change could mean the difference between 2, 4, or more feet of sea level rise by 2100.

“In the latter days of the 21st century, the sea level rise along the North Carolina coast is really going to be dramatically influenced by the decisions that we make right now,” Gilford said.

Today, the Laughing Gull stands alone — its neighbors were moved landward to behind the dunes as the tide encroached upon their foundations. But its survival is uncertain because rising seas are not the only climate concern in Carova. Hurricane Florence, a ferocious storm that hit in 2018 and was a $24 billion disaster, didn’t hit Carova as badly as other places along the Outer Banks. But the threat of hurricanes remains, and a warmer ocean can make hurricanes worse by fueling greater flooding and storm surges.

Hurricane response is complicated because of Carova’s designation in the Coastal Barrier Resources System, which bars federal flood insurance coverage, forcing property owners to turn to private insurance markets.

“The insurance on our house gets dropped every two or three years,” said Elizabeth White, a Swan Beach resident since 2004. She is a customer at Lloyd’s of London, which she says is some of the most expensive insurance on the market.

Paying the price

Living in Carova is no easy feat in itself. Since the area is zoned exclusively for low-density residential housing, increasingly large and expensive single-family homes are the only option for buyers. While the trend had been moving in this direction for a couple of decades, the start of the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated it.

“Sales went through the roof,” J-P Peron, a real estate agent and resident, said of the pandemic. “Overnight, my business quadrupled.” So many people were buying houses that Carova ran out of post office boxes and internet plans. People snatched up houses and land, making it even harder for the people who build, clean and service houses in Carova to live there, also.

Two of those builders are Steve Grout, a carpenter who has been a full-time Carova resident for more than a decade, and Alex, an immigrant day laborer. In September, they were working on renovating an oceanfront house that was weathered away by the wind and sea. But the new siding they were installing won’t last long, either, Grout said, as it’s hard to withstand the elements.

While Grout has a short commute to work each day, Alex lives on the Currituck County mainland and makes the two-and-a-half-hour round trip commute to Carova and back every day. “My family lives in Durham,” Alex explained, saying that he visits them every weekend, “but the rest of the time I stay out here in Powells Point.”

Powells Point is right across the Wright Memorial Bridge on the mainland, but even then, it can still take over an hour to reach Carova. Alex wishes that Carova had rentable accommodations so that he and his family, along with other workers, could live closer to the construction sites.

Because of the lack of affordable rental homes in Carova, and despite 80% of properties in the offroad area sitting empty, sourcing labor can be difficult and projects take longer to complete. Builders rely on workers like Alex, who are both skilled and dedicated, and Grout said they usually have to pay them more than a contractor would for similar work elsewhere.

At the construction site, Grout and Alex were preparing for the arrival of a crew from HGTV to film the house for an episode of the show “Beachfront Bargain Hunt.” Grout said their renovation faces unique limitations, compared to other homes that appear on the show.

“It’s hard for us because we can’t really find help out here. Normally, they probably have 30 guys out here and finish the whole project in a month,” Grout said. “But we don’t have that luxury.”

Clark Twiddy, president of Twiddy & Co., a property management company on the Outer Banks, sees that his employees who clean and service the rental homes face similar challenges. “The average cleaner for Twiddy & Co. drives 82 miles one-way,” he said. “The people who clean these homes by and large don’t live here.”

But without changing the area’s zoning to allow for multifamily housing or without a clear plan from the county or Twiddy & Co. about who is going to supply that housing, it is hard to see how people without considerable resources can afford the cost of living. “We as a destination will fail, period, unless we address housing in a meaningful way,” Twiddy said.

For those who are able to buy a house, they then need to be able to afford a car with four-wheel-drive, which quickly deteriorates from the sand and saltwater. “The life expectancy of a daily driver up here is between three and five years at most,” Peron said. “I’m on my sixth Ford Expedition for work. Then I’ve also gone through one Jeep Cherokee, two Jeep Grand Cherokees and one Jeep Commander.”

The expense of living in Carova is a factor of its remoteness, lack of federal infrastructure and exposure to the elements. In the face of imminent climate threats like storms and floods that “we live with all the time,” as Ponton described.

From an outside perspective, it can be hard to understand why people are willing to spend so much to live in a place as remote as Carova. Even when speaking with residents about their experiences, questions linger about why they choose to live there and whether they can do it sustainably.

Next in the series: Read about the steps that residents are taking to manage the environment around them, whether that is to protect the wild horses, the natural landscape, or their way of life. This series is part of the Pulitzer Center’s nationwide Connected Coastlines reporting initiative.