Coastal geologist Stanley R. Riggs is scheduled to be at the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center this weekend to officially launch his three volume, 10-book North Carolina Land of Water series that explores the state’s coast.

He will be at the Harkers Island museum at 3 p.m. Sunday for a discussion and to sign copies of the first book in the series, “Cape Lookout National Seashore: Paradigm for a Coastal System Ethic,” which was released in October. A reception is to follow. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.

Riggs has spent more than six decades “studying North Carolina’s barrier islands, documenting how they shift and evolve as living systems shaped by wind, waves and storms,” organizers said.

Related: Coastal geologist Stan Riggs sets out on 10-book project

He joined East Carolina University in 1967, where he taught for more than three decades before becoming a distinguished research professor. He has served on the North Carolina Coastal Resources Commission’s science panel and Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change, and was recognized in 2022 with the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian honor.

“Riggs’ latest book establishes the geologic and climatic framework needed for understanding and learning to live with our changing coast,” according to R.A. Fountain, the book’s publisher. “He demonstrates that Cape Lookout is a model for how our barrier islands should be treated–compared especially to its northern neighbor, Cape Hatteras–while also engaging his readers with a fascinating social and cultural history of an island that’s now become America’s grandest national seashore.”

The books are geared toward a general audience and use “research, history and hundreds of photographs, illustrations and maps to show how wind, waves and storms reshape the coast and how North Carolinians can adapt,” the publisher continued.

Core Sound’s Executive Director Karen Amspacher said the museum is “honored to be the ‘official celebration’ of this amazing body of work and Stan Riggs’ life commitment to Eastern North Carolina. Here in the Hook of Cape Lookout this story is ours and we welcome Stan back to give to this community his research, but also his love for this place, its people and its beauty. Welcome home Stan.”

To have a copy signed before it is shipped, purchase the book online through the museum. The book is also available through the publisher rafountain.com, and all proceeds of book sales will go to various nonprofits throughout the region as part of the author and his wife’s commitment to give back to coastal conservation, preservation and education.

The first chapter of a recently published book about Ocracoke’s unique dialect begins with the imagined experience of a visitor’s first time taking the ferry from Swan Quarter across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke Village.

During the trip to the 14-mile-long island only accessible by boat or light aircraft, the visitor decides to explore the ferry, pausing upon hearing a group speak a sort-of familiar dialect they can’t quite place.

“You greet the group and then make the same mistake as hundreds of tourists before you, by asking ‘Where are y’all from?’ The response, ‘right here,’ accompanied by uproarious laughter, leaves you disoriented,” the scenario continues.

The mistake is “so frequent that it is part of island lore, passed down by O’Cockers – Ocracoke residents who trace back their family lineage on the island for generations.”

This encounter in the first chapter of “Language and Life on Ocracoke: The Living History of the Brogue,” sets the scene for an exploration into the once-prominent dialect now only spoken by a few hundred on the island.

Published by UNC Press, authors are North Carolina State University English professors Jeffrey Reaser and Walt Wolfram, and Ocracoke Preservation Society board member Candy Gaskill, a fourth-generation resident.

“With this prolonged and comprehensive approach to the region, the authors document the island’s changes, providing readers with a deeply researched, empathetic, and engagingly written snapshot of one of North Carolina’s most cherished places, one with a linguistic heritage worth celebrating,” UNC Press said in a release.

Wolfram told Coastal Review in an interview that he really wants people to understand that Ocracoke had this rich legacy of language.

“What’s Ocracoke famous for? Well, it’s famous for Blackbeard,” Wolfram said about the pirate that was beheaded on the island in 1718. “It’s also famous for its language,” but O’Cockers are losing this tradition that has been a part of the island culture for centuries.

The dialect was “once an iconic trait of the 200-mile chain of Outer Banks islands” but is “now merely a whisper in the region.” Now, there are less than 200 who speak some semblance of the traditional brogue, the book states, and “there are sure signs that the traditional Brogue will soon become extinct.”

Wolfram said he thinks “there are certain things that are strongly associated with that community, and the language has been one of them, and now it’s threatened. What the book does is remind them of that tradition. So in a sense, (the brogue) will be remembered with examples even when it is almost gone.”

This is their third book on Ocracoke and builds on Wolfram’s 1997 “Hoi Toide On The Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue.” “Hoi Toide” is the brogue pronunciation of high tide — the long i vowel is pronounced as “oy” – and is the origin of the nickname, hoi toiders.

Reaser said in an interview that they “really wanted this to be the first linguistics beach read” and be a bit of an introduction to the linguistics, which is the study of language and structure, to make it accessible for all audiences.

The book is broken up into 24 short chapters, which can be read in any order, and touch on what the brogue is and who speaks it, if the brogue is Shakespearean English or if it’s pirate talk, how to study language, accents and dialects, about African American and Latino communities on Ocracoke, the weather, how the language is evolving, and speculation on how the brogue will evolve, or disappear.

The brogue isn’t Elizabethan, by the way, and it’s “not just pirate talk” (their emphasis) despite Ocracoke’s ties with Blackbeard.

What is it then? The short answer is that the “primary finding was that it was an English dialect that had been influenced by Gaelic languages and other English dialects that had previously been influenced by Gaelic languages.”

“We’re focused on Ocracoke, and we want to preserve and celebrate that dialect and that tradition, but there is another purpose of just getting people to understand more generally, that this is how languages work, this is how dialects work. That they’re always patterned and systematic,” Reaser explained. “Even when there’s a dialect that isn’t celebrated the way that Ocracoke tends to be, that is something that people should take seriously and value.”

Of special note is the companion website with more than 80 QR codes that link to sound or video clips on ocracokebrogue.com, all pulled from their extensive collection of oral histories, media clips, documentary footage and other materials.

“You don’t want to just read about it, you want to hear what it actually sounds like,” Wolfram said.

A peek between the pages

Many of the chapters are based on stories from villagers, such as the first chapter, “Do they take American money over there?” That’s coming straight from the O’Cockers’ stories, Reaser said.

There’s even an anecdote in the book about a British Broadcasting Co. crew that traveled to Ocracoke with the intention of having residents recite lines from Shakespeare’s plays.

Reaser said that having the BBC visit was a “really funny experience,” because they were sure the story was that Ocracoke had preserved Elizabethan English.

“We’re trying to tell them otherwise,” he said, and tried to direct their attention to how interesting the community is with its “really rich mix of all these historical traditions,” but they stuck with their story.

“They actually had the complete works of Shakespeare, and they’re trying to get locals to read it,” he said, expecting it to sound like they were at the Globe Theater, “which is so insulting.”

So, some of the performers in the community recognized what was happening, and decided to put on their best British accent, and overdo the stage performance.

“What the BBC captured was something that’s not even close to the local dialect,” Reaser said, but they aired it, and they must have received enough feedback because you can’t find it anywhere on their website. An updated version has been released but it still pushes the Elizabethan myth.

Wolfram said the publication features stories that people aren’t necessarily aware of as well, like the prominence of the one African American family that moved there in 1865 and maintained the family as a unit until the late 2000s, and how men’s and women’s speech patterns were affected by changing economic drivers, namely the village increasingly depending on tourism.

“We want people to remember how the Black family fit and didn’t fit into the community,” Wolfram said.

Women were in the service industry as tourism grew for the village while men continued to focus on water-related work, Reaser said. The brogue then became “crystallized as this artifact of masculinity, where it never had that in the past.”

Appreciating Ocracoke

Wolfram first heard about Ocracoke as a new professor at N.C. State in 1992.

In the acknowledgement, Wolfram explained that he and his wife decided to travel the state to experience different communities. While explaining these trips to his colleagues, another faculty member told him to “take a trip to Ocracoke, where ‘the people speak Elizabethan English.’”

Wolfram said he recognized the comment to be a “simplified romantic myth often associated with long-term isolated language varieties such as Appalachian English, but I was intrigued.”

That first trip was the catalyst to him devoting more than three decades and taking hundreds of trips to the island to learn more about the village’s families and their history.

When Reaser was a graduate student at N.C. State in 2000, he joined Wolfram on a trip and became just as enthralled with Ocracoke.

The two emphasized how grateful they are to have been welcomed over the years.

There’s a real love of the community and people who live there. “They’re so generous to us. It’s an incredible experience,” Reaser said.

Wolfram said the residents “have been incredibly collaborative and cooperative with us, and we can’t thank them enough for that.”

He feels that when researchers study a community, it’s nice for academics and their reputation, “but we want it to be meaningful” for the communities who give their time and resources.

“We do these sorts of sophisticated analyzes, but what does the community get out of it?” Wolfram continued, explaining that he finds it “ethically inappropriate” when academics go to a community for information and never see them again.

People need to know what you’re doing with the stories, histories and cultures they share with you, and how what you’re doing can help the community, Wolfram said, adding he and his team try to help with any project or program they can as a way to thank the community for “being so generous in terms of talking to us, working with us, and allowing us in.”

Before composing over two dozen volumes of poetry, before becoming a professor at the prestigious Cornell University in upstate New York, and long before winning any of his numerous national literary awards, Archibald Randolph Ammons was a poor boy working on his father’s Columbus County farm during the Great Depression.

Ammons would eventually achieve fame under the byline “A.R. Ammons,” a heralded poet noted for his beautiful but also scientifically precise descriptions of nature. However, with those who knew him personally, including those who knew him during his formative years in coastal Carolina, he went by the less precise but more identifiable name “Archie.”

‘Alluvial country’

Archie Ammons was born in his family’s farmhouse just outside of Whiteville on Feb. 18, 1926. The fields he helped his father plow during his youth were 6 short miles from Lake Waccamaw and only 35 miles from the Brunswick County beach communities his family would travel to for the occasional fish fry or oyster roast. Ammons spent these hardscrabble years mostly behind hitched mules, furrowing the soil in which he and his father grew corn, tobacco, peanuts and other cash crops so typical of eastern North Carolina agricultural districts.

Though he would not begin writing poetry until some years later, his experiences on the farm and in what he called the “alluvial country” of the coastal plains impressed him deeply and would eventually find voice in his writing.  

For instance, in the poem “Silver,” about a mule his family owned during his childhood, Ammons remembers how he and Silver would “fall soon again into the slow requirements of our dreams / how we turned at the ends of rows without sense to new furrows and went back / flicked by / cornblades and hearing the circling in / the cornblades of horseflies in pursuit.”

In the poem “I’m the Type,” Ammons would look back at his early life on the farm in light of his later career as a famous writer and note how he “misses the mules and cows / hogs and chickens, misses / the rain making little / rivers, well-figured with / tributaries through the / sand yard.” Ammons learned in his childhood to be attentive to the living world around him, including not only the plants and animals but also the physical forces that shape living things. They entered his imagination as a boy and stayed with him the rest of his life.

From the South Pacific to the Outer Banks   

According to Roger Gilbert, a professor of English literature at Cornell University who is writing a biography of his former colleague, the Ammons family farm was not particularly successful, so a young Ammons sought employment in the largest nearby city.

“He had been working in the shipyards in Wilmington after high school and one day he came home and the farm had been sold,” Gilbert said in a recent interview. “That farm had been his world growing up. So when that was gone, when it was no longer a place that belonged to him, I think he felt he’d lost that sense of having a home.”

This bitter loss began a whirlwind period in Ammons’s life. American involvement in the Pacific theater of World War II was ramping up just as he graduated high school. With no more family farm to tend, Ammons enlisted in the Navy. He was deployed as a sonar operator aboard the destroyer U.S.S. Gunason, on which he sailed through the South Pacific, listening for the pings of reverberating soundwaves that could signal the underwater presence of enemy vessels or weapons.

It was also during this time, on the long voyages at sea, that Archie began writing his first poems. He was training the precision of his ear in more ways than one.  

When the war ended, the poor country boy from Whiteville took advantage of the GI Bill to attend Wake Forest College. Ammons graduated in 1949 and left town with a Bachelor of Science and, more importantly, a courtship with his future wife, Phyllis.

He moved almost immediately to the Outer Banks village of Hatteras, where he would spend the 1949-50 academic year as principal of tiny Hatteras Elementary School — and where Phyllis would join him after their wedding during Thanksgiving break.

Though he was only on the Dare County island for a year, the dramatic seascapes of the Outer Banks entered his poetic imagination just as the sandy farmland of Whiteville had. In an unpublished poem written during his first summer on Hatteras, and kindly provided by Professor Gilbert out of the Ammons archive at Cornell University, Archie tried to capture in words the strange magic of the Banks at night: “Night has come to this small island, / Drowsing on the golden dunes cool-mist opiates. / Far out at sea, a ship’s sea-lantern sways / And a lost gull screams.”

Gilbert noted that Ammons, by this point, had not yet found his unique poetic voice. But “the Hatteras landscape stayed with him and influenced some of those early poems,” he said.

A Second Vision of Land and Sea

By “those early poems,” Gilbert was referring to Ammons’s first collection of poetry, “Ommateum,” which he self-published in 1955. By this point, Ammons was living in New Jersey and working at his father-in-law’s manufacturing firm, which made glassware for laboratories.

In “Ommateum,” Ammons began to dabble in the scientific specificity and abstraction that would later become a hallmark of his style. More central to his first book, however, is one of Ammons’s mainstay themes: the transience of nature and human life.

In fact, the very first poem in “Ommateum” draws on the windswept ecology of Cape Hatteras to show us a narrator, Ezra, seeking his voice amid a powerful vortex of natural forces. Reworking many of the specific images and themes of his unpublished poem from his year in Hatteras, Ammons describes how Ezra speaks his name to the sea, “but there were no echoes from the waves / The words were swallowed up / in the voice of the surf.” The protagonist has to turn away “from the wind / that ripped sheets of sand / from the beach and threw them / like seamists across the dunes.”

Finally realizing the futility of fighting the wind, Ezra decides instead to adapt to and even become part of the landscape. “So I Ezra went out into the night,” the poem ends, “like a drift of sand / and splashed among the windy oats / that clutch the dunes / of unremembered seas.”

The poem sets the tone for the rest of the volume and, in a way, for the rest of Ammons’s career. It is somehow fitting that a poet from coastal North Carolina would begin his first book looking for meaning in a sea squall.  

According to Alex Albright, a retired professor of creative writing at East Carolina University and the editor of the indispensable Ammons volume “The North Carolina Poems,” “There’s a journal entry from when (Ammons was) in the Navy that provides a controlling metaphor for his life.”

“He sees off in the distance the fine line of the horizon,” Albright said in a telephone interview, “and as he gets closer and closer to it, it’s not really a straight line. It’s that second vision that he brings to a lot of his landscapes.”

Becoming a classic

“Ommateum” sold barely any copies when it first appeared. But little by little, Ammons began making inroads into the professional poetry establishment. Individual poems started getting picked up by journals and magazines here and there throughout the 1950s, and in 1964 he was hired to teach poetry writing at Cornell University, where he would later become a full professor and befriend Roger Gilbert.

The same year also saw the publication of his second collection, “Expressions of Sea Level,” this time by a major university press. From that point on until his death in 2001, Ammons would never go more than four years without releasing a new volume.

From the 1970s through the end of the 1990s, Ammons’s star rose without cease. He won the National Book Award for one collection of poetry in 1973, then the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry for a different collection in 1975. It was around this time that the influential literary critic Harold Bloom said that “No contemporary poet, in America, is likelier to become a classic than A.R. Ammons.”

As if to prove Bloom’s point, Ammons released a volume in 1981 that received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and another volume 12 years later that won him his second National Book Award.  In October 2000, just five months before his death at age 75, he was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame.

Albright, who knew Ammons personally through their work together at the North Carolina Literary Review, pointed out that the shy, affable farm boy from Whiteville was aware he had a gift.

“He knew that he was in a rare class,” Albright said. “He had a Southern way of deflecting praise, but there were very few poets that he imagined were as good as he was.”

Not Deep down but across

Ammons is by no means omnipresent in Whiteville today, but neither is he or the world of his childhood totally forgotten. His family home was torn down years ago, but Whiteville High School has a couple of old buildings he would have sat in as a student in the 1930s, and the Pentecostal church he attended with his parents still stands out by Spring Branch. There is no plaque for him in town, but the Reuben Brown House, a historic preservation group in Columbus County, runs an annual poetry contest in his honor.

The fields and swamps he roamed as a boy are in a similar state of in-between. “Until very recently he would have recognized the Columbus County landscape,” Albright said. “The bridges are a little better, but it’s still swampy. There’s still bugs, it’s still quiet, and you’re still really close to the coast out there.”

According to Albright, even the Brunswick County beaches of Ammons’s youth have not yet been totally transformed.

“There’s a little place when you go to the right on Ocean Isle, that’s where they went for their oyster roasts,” he said, “and on the back end, you can sort of forget that the high-rise bridge is going over to Ocean Isle, and it can feel very isolated.”

Still, Ammons was powerfully attentive to and protective of the natural world. The poet would likely have some strong opinions about the lack of care taken for the soil, water, trees and animals of southeastern North Carolina if he saw it today.

“He could be looked at as an early environmentalist,” Albright said of his old friend. “His feel for the land was just something. And part of what he would see would be heartbreaking. The factory tree farming, especially.”

In “Making Fields,” one of his most moving poems about his North Carolina roots, Ammons describes the give and take between the land and his ancestors who worked that land going back to his father’s father.

The life he presents to readers in this poem is a hard one, and it unfolds overtop a thin coastal soil stratum that doesn’t always offer bounty and wealth. But at the end of the poem, Ammons can still clearly see and hear his connection to the place of his birth.

“… the land is not deep down but across, as into time” he writes. “the runs, the / ditch banks, the underbrush, the open fields with a persimmon tree / or wild cherry call, they call me.” 

Every summer, the women of Ocean City Beach organized crabbing trips to Topsail Island’s north end. On a waxing moon, when the tide was exactly right, moms and their kids skimmed the saltwater shallows hunting blue crabs, as many as they could carry. The fat jimmies and sooks were the promise of delectable family recipes: rich gumbo, savory crab casseroles and delicate crab-stuffed eggs.

“My mom would always say that on a growing moon, you get more crab meat than on a wasting moon,” Kenneth Chestnut says. “I didn’t believe it, but I became a believer.”

Chestnut’s faith arrived one unforgettable day. The tide had just begun to turn, creating tranquil waters that are a guaranteed feast for hungry blue crabs. Suddenly, the marsh teemed with them, and harvest baskets quickly overflowed.

“It was almost biblical,” Chestnut marvels. Faced with this unexpected bounty, the women had to think fast. How would they get such a haul home?

“They told us boys take off our jeans — we had on swimming trunks underneath — tie up the bottoms of them and fill them with crabs,” Chestnut says, chuckling at the memory.

Back at Ocean City Beach, everyone went to work steaming the mountains of crabs. Pickers meticulously avoided damaging the fragile back shells. Those were always set aside to dry in the sun for use in one of the most beloved dishes: deviled crabs.

Chestnut’s mother, Caronell, took her version to Michelin-star level. She began by sautéing minced onions and celery in rich butter before adding flour and milk to create a luxurious bechamel sauce. After gently folding in sweet crab meat and chopped, hard-boiled eggs, Caronell Chestnut mounded the exquisite mixture into the sun-bleached shells. She finished each serving with a dusting of cracker meal and “small tip of butter” before baking them golden brown for a neighborhood feast.

And it wasn’t just crabs at those delicious gatherings.

“They would prepare dishes and then share dishes. All kinds,” Chestnut reminisces. Food was the heartbeat of the hamlet, a profound expression of connection, so central, so vital, that someone eventually realized Ocean City Beach needed its own cookbook.

More than recipes

The crabbing and cooking memory Kenneth Chestnut relates resonates deeply with my own childhood in Jacksonville, just 25 miles away. Yet, our neighborhoods were worlds apart.

The Chestnuts were Black; my family was white. Although the Civil Rights Act had been law for a decade when we first drove through Ocean City Beach on our way to and from favorite crabbing spots in the early 1970s, Topsail Island’s lines of segregation were clear.

We understood Ocean City Beach as separate, “the Black beach.” Its enduring community cookbook, originally published in 1980 and titled “Ms. Winnie’s Seafood Cook Book,” is a powerful testament to Maya Angelou’s profound truth: “Human beings are more alike than we are unalike. And the minute we began to understand, just the slightest part of that, we recognize ourselves as family.”

Winnie Robinson, a long-time Ocean City Beach resident, painstakingly assembled that first recipe collection as a fundraiser. Chestnut imagines she walked house to house, asking cooks to share their most delicious creations.

The sumptuous dishes, often elaborate in their seasonings — fish chowder with a splash of white burgundy wine, dill- and nutmeg-scented clam fritters, grilled sesame trout, sweet-and-sour sauteed croakers, to name a few — tell a complex story.

In 1949, Edgar Yow, a white man and former Wilmington mayor, witnessed the harsh realities of racism. He envisioned a haven where people of color could enjoy the shore and own oceanside homes in peace.

Yow held seaside property and collaborated with Kenneth Chestnut’s father, Wade Chestnut, and Wade’s siblings to turn part of the acreage into the milelong Ocean City Beach. By 1954, this determined community had 15 homes, a welcoming motel, a bustling restaurant and, soon after, an Episcopal chapel, a church summer camp and the iconic Ocean City Fishing Pier.

“When growing up, I would go on the beach and I would see it was really crowded to the left, really crowded to the right, recalls Carla Torrey, editor of the cookbook’s latest incarnation, “Tried and True Recipes.” “And there would maybe be me and two other people on our beach. And I always was like, ‘Why is that? Is there something special about me?’”

“And then I later realized why. That it was this invisible line where nobody crossed over and came on our beach.”

Unwelcome at many restaurants and living somewhere set apart for no other reason than its residents’ skin color, Ocean City Beach’s talented chefs cultivated a culinary utopia.

Torrey shows a fuzzy black-and-white photo of a community garden thriving even in dry, sandy soil. She yearns for the creamed corn one neighbor prepared fresh from the cob. Chestnut recalls his dad salt-curing mullet in a barrel and neighbors carefully tending molting crabs that would become fried, soft-shell delicacies.

Kitchen creativity, Torrey and Chestnut explain, blossomed during the summers. Moms and their kids, home from school, lived at Ocean City all week. Working dads joined their families on weekends. The women supported each other by sharing meals and recipes. Those carefree days offered them the luxury of time to lovingly prepare food and experiment with fresh ideas.

“It was a joy to her if she didn’t feel pressured to cook,” Chestnut remembers about his mother. “I think that was why she especially loved it down here.”

Each cook infused delights with flavors and methods passed down through the generations along with the latest trends, like Carol King’s Prawn and Egg Curry and Bessie W. Hill’s shrimp-stuffed eggplant.

As Winnie Robinson herself wrote in the original cookbook’s acknowledgments, “Our source has been the ‘world of food.'”

Cooking up the future

Today, 30 Ocean City Beach homes survive from a peak of 100 that existed before hurricanes Fran and Berta took their tolls in 1996. Storms also claimed the Ocean City Beach pier, leaving behind only a solitary tower standing sentinel on a scrubby oceanfront lot. The village nearly blends into the relentless sprawl all around. In 1990, North Topsail Beach absorbed Ocean City Beach into its town limits.

The triumph of civil rights has slowly, gently, loosened ties to this community born of necessity. “Descendants (of original homeowners) can go anywhere and buy anywhere, as opposed to just here,” Chestnut notes. “That’s the way it should be.”

Yet, the important story of Ocean City Beach is far from forgotten. It lives on in an exhibit at Surf City’s Missiles and More Museum, tracing Topsail Island’s history. The community holds a place on both the N.C. Civil Rights Trail and the Jacksonville Onslow African-American Heritage Trail. A roadside marker near the old pier entrance humbly sums up Ocean City Beach’s founding. Blue street signs delineate its roads.

And there’s the cookbook.

While the societal injustices that compelled Ocean City Beach’s creation are a painful memory, they don’t diminish the deep nostalgia families feel for the idyllic summer days they spent in the village. Ensuing generations cling to heirloom recipes and the cherished tradition of sharing meals, a legacy of resilience and joy expressed in the community cookbook.

Chestnut carries on his mother’s clam fritter recipe, the one with dill and nutmeg. His daughter still prepares her grandmother’s Shrimp and Rice Surprise, an easy, irresistible mélange of ham, sausage, shrimp, mushrooms and melty cheese.

Torrey, driven by a passion for preservation, spent hours immersed in Robinson’s pages. She brought forth treasured recipes and solicited new ones for “Tried and True Recipes,” published in 2014, including her own elaborate citrus crabcakes with coriander and blood orange aioli.

Sales of “Tried and True Recipes” help fund maintenance of the chapel and community building, which continue to host gatherings. Potlucks and an annual Labor Day block party happen annually.  

Proceeds also support Ocean City Beach’s annual Jazz Festival. Every Fourth of July, people of all colors come together for two days of music. Torrey’s husband, Craig, organizes a historic walking tour during the event, guiding visitors through streets that hold so many stories.

“Tried and True Recipes” is always available at the festival and year-round online. Both the cookbook and the Jazz Festival are powerful vehicles to tell the story of Ocean City Beach, Carla Torrey says.

“And hopefully keep the history going so it’s not forgotten.”

Caronell Chestnut’s Deviled Crabs

½ cup chopped onion

½ cup chopped celery

½ stick butter or margarine

2 tablespoons all-purpose flour

½ cup milk

1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

Seasonings as desired

1 pound crab meat

2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped

Cracker meal or cracker crumbs

Butter or margarine

Sauté onions and celery in butter or margarine until vegetables are tender. Remove from heat and add flour, milk, Worcestershire and seasonings. Return to heat and cook until thick. Add more milk if necessary for the right consistency. Mix this with crab meat and hard-boiled eggs. Fill crab shells or a baking dish with mixture. Sprinkle top with cracker meal or cracker crumbs. Place a tip of butter or margarine on top of each shell. Bake at 350 degrees until brown (about 25-30 minutes).

Visitors to Ocracoke Island this summer can learn a little about the cozy village during the Ocracoke Preservation Society’s 2025 Free Porch Talk Series.

The society was founded in 1983 with the goal to “provide access to education, research, and exploration of the island’s rich history and culture through programs, events, and exhibits,” its website states.

The nonprofit organization has maintained since 1992 a museum in the David Williams House built around 1900, where the porch talks will be held at 49 Water Plant Road. Parking is available at the National Park Service docks. Attendees are encouraged to bring drinks, snacks and their pets. Offered at no charge, the nonprofit organization welcomes donations.

Organizers have announced the June talks and plan to publicize each on its social media.

The following is the June schedule:

• 10:30 a.m. Thursday, June 5: “Stories on the porch” No. 1 with Donald Davis and his Ocracoke storytelling workshop participants.
• 1 p.m. Tuesday, June 10: Ocracoke lighthouse history, details and “My Most Memorable Climb to the Top of the Ocracoke Lighthouse” book signing with author Philip Howard.
• 1 p.m. Thursday, June 12: “Ocracoke A.D. (After Dorian)” with authors Ann Ehringhaus and Heather Johnson.
• 1 p.m. Tuesday, June 17: Ocracats Inc. Rita Thiel will discuss the clinic that manages the village’s feral cat population.
• 10:30 a.m. June 19: “Stories on the porch” No. 2 with Donald Davis and his Ocracoke storytelling workshop participants.
• 1 p.m. Tuesday, June 24: “Language and Life on Ocracoke” with authors, Jeff Reaser, Candy Gaskill and Walt Wolfram.
• 1 p.m. Thursday, June 26: Seashells of Ocracoke Island with North Carolina Shell Club member and island resident, Charlie DeCarlo.

The society is currently working on the series schedule for the remainder of the season. Contact admin@ocracokepreservationsociety.org to give a talk on a Tuesday or Thursday afternoon.

Brunswick County is joining NC Cardinal this December, giving patrons access to a catalog of over 7.9 million items with their Brunswick County Library card.

The NC Cardinal program of the State Library of North Carolina is a consortium of public libraries in more than 60 North Carolina counties dedicated to sharing resources and expanding access to library materials through a single online catalog and system-wide borrowing privileges.

Brunswick is one of a handful of coastal counties in the program. Beaufort-Hyde-Martin Regional Library, Carteret and Onslow county public libraries are members as well.

Brunswick County Library will transition to NC Cardinal from Dec. 9-11. During this time, the online catalog will be unavailable, and patrons will need to have their physical library card with them in order to check out.

Brunswick County Library cardholders can officially begin using the new NC Cardinal software to manage checkouts on Dec. 12. Any book or DVD can be requested from an NC Cardinal member and shipped to their pickup library of choice at no cost to the patron, but local patrons will continue to have first dibs on items owned by Brunswick County.

“Joining NC Cardinal is a win-win situation for Brunswick County,” said Library Director Patricia Dew. “All library card holders will have access to almost any book they could want and the County saves money at the same time.”

The program is supported by grant funds from the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) as administered by the State Library of North Carolina. Brunswick County Library received a $10,000 grant to cover all costs associated with the change and migration to new software. The cost of joining and the first two years membership in the NC Cardinal consortium is funded through the State Library of North Carolina, then an annual cost share for continued membership is determined based upon the size of the library’s collection and patron base. The end result is a cost savings for Brunswick County.

Find more information about Brunswick County Library and NC Cardinal at brunswickcountync.gov/NC-Cardinal.

North Carolina Sea Grant has revised and expanded its “Seashells of North Carolina,” a long-trusted guide to help everyone from beachcombers to graduate students identify the treasures they find along the Tar Heel State’s beaches.

The late Hugh Porter, who was referred to as “Mr. Seashell” during his nearly 55-year career at the University of North Carolina Institute of Marine Sciences in Morehead City, and Lynn Houser wrote the guide that was originally released in 1997, was edited by Jeannie Faris Norris, and features images captured by Beaufort-based photographer Scott Taylor.

The revised and expanded edition published in June builds on the original and includes detailed descriptions and photos of 275 species, instructions for shell identification, introductions to the biology and geographical range of these animals, and an index of scientific and common names with updated scientific terminology, per the publisher, University of North Carolina Press.

Porter, who died at 86 in 2014 in Carteret County, began his career at UNC-IMS in the 1950s as a research assistant, then served as an instructor in 1957 and just a few years later, in 1963, became an assistant professor. He retired in 1996 but was a regular fixture through 2010, according to Sea Grant.

Porter started the shell collection in 1956 that was on display at UNC-IMS during his tenure. In the late 1990s, the specimens totaling more than 233,000 were donated to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh to become part of the mollusks collection there. The collection is under the care of Research Curator Art Bogan, who is also on the team that updated the book.

Bogan, who said he primarily works with freshwater bivalves, joined the museum in 1997, when there was but a small shell collection at the museum. He learned shortly after moving into the role that UNC-IMS had donated its fish collection and Porter’s shell collection to the museum, and Bogan spent several years cataloging the thousands of specimens.

For the last 300 years, what everybody’s been using for identification is the shape, the sculpture, the color, the size to arrive at identifications, but within the last probably 25-plus years, with the advent of genetics and genomics, identifying shells has “gotten messy,” Bogan said. Researchers are going deeper by looking at comparative anatomy and dissecting the animals to see “how the plumbing all fits together” or how the organs are arranged.

Bogan, who has an obvious passion for mollusks, said that the great thing about malacology, or the study of mollusks, “is you can learn something new every day. It is changing. There are new discoveries, new species described, new resources becoming available.”

Katie Mosher, who retired earlier this year from her position as North Carolina Sea Grant’s communications director, said she started the research organization in 1998, about a year after Porter’s “Seashells of North Carolina” was published.

When she joined Sea Grant, she would witness firsthand how people could be drawn to the book.

“People would come up and just talk to us about what that book has meant to them or what it meant to their family,” Mosher said, adding that they would recount stories about taking their copies to the beach, or losing it in a flood during a hurricane, or that was at a parent’s house and unable to save it after the parent’s death.

“You hear these stories of true personal attachment that people had to a book, and it really was appealing to me,” Mosher said.

“We knew how popular (the guide) was,” Mosher continued, explaining that Sea Grant reprinted the guide several times over the past three decades, working with UNC Press for the last number of years to distribute the book.

When it was time for another reprint in the fall of 2021, UNC Press pitched to Sea Grant the idea of updating the book instead of just reprinting it.

That’s a move Sea Grant was considering at the time as well, Mosher said.

UNC Press offered to manage the printing and include the edition in its Southern Gateways Guides. 

Mosher told UNC Press it was a go, assembled a team of seashell enthusiasts, or conchologists, and got to work.

In addition to Bogan and Mosher, contributors include Jamie M. Smith, who works with Bogan at the museum, Shell Club members Edgar Shuller Jr. and Douglas Wolfe, and, with Sea Grant, Erika Young, Anna P. Zarkar and Carrie Clower. Georgia Minnich, who retired from the North Carolina Aquariums system, provided the illustrations, and the book includes new photos as well as Taylor’s from the 1997 edition.

Bogan explained that before Mosher called and asked him to help, he and a few members of the North Carolina Shell Club had been discussing the need to revise the guide, especially since the taxonomy of mollusks had changed significantly since the 1997 edition. The North Carolina Shell Club formed in 1957 and holds its annual show during May at the Crystal Coast Civic Center in Morehead City.

Club members had been keeping notes like scientific name changes in their personal versions of Porter’s edition, Bogan said.

“They had already been gathering some of the information that we would need to have for the update,” Mosher added.

Shuller, former Shell Club president, said that after he retired in the 1990s he joined the shell club in 2000. That’s when he really began to get interested in shells. In the time since, he’s had a 20-plus-year education in malacology, “and not at any university, actually, just getting your feet in the sand and digging around trying to learn what you can.”

Through that, Shuller said he began to understand the amount of work Porter had invested in the guide. One thing the users complained about with the 1997 edition, however, was that it was organized by shell shape rather than the accepted taxonomic order at the time.

But that was done for “a very good reason, I’ve come to appreciate.” It was organized by the shape of a shell to make it easier for users. “That was one thing we were worried about, and of course there was the issue of the outdated nomenclature,” Shuller said.

Shuller said he had been commenting to Bogan off and on over the years about the guide needing to be revamped.

“I didn’t know he was paying attention. I was quite surprised when he called me about this and the Shell Club was quite anxious to help out on this thing,” Shuller said. “I mean, we really were. We knew that the book needed some work to bring it up to date, and we were hoping to be able to get some of our ideas into the book,” Including having the new edition arranged taxonomically correct.

Mosher explained that the emphasis being on the shell shape in the previous edition had its value, but they wanted to make the guide organized for multiple uses. “As we were putting the book together, I was trying to think about it from my kind of every person perspective,” Mosher said.

Shuller said that to help with identification, “We came up with a very unique pictorial indexing system, which I think is going to be very useful in helping people locate the shells within the book. We have high hopes for that. I think people are going to really appreciate this particular edition.”

Young, Sea Grant’s coastal and marine education specialist, began with organization in 2022, after teaching at UNC Pembroke for 13 years. She said she has been collecting shells since she was a graduate student at UNC-IMS in the 1990s and was excited when Mosher brought her onboard.

Throughout her career, Young has used field guides and, she said that this updated version is “rigorous enough for a graduate student that needs specifics but it’s easy enough to flip through while you’re walking on the beach. It should very easily get you to where you need to be to find out what you’ve collected. And I just love that.”

Following the shell path

The team all came to appreciate seashells along different paths.

Shuller found his way to collecting mostly because of curiosity, he said, and was particularly drawn in after seeing the “fantastic, amazing exhibits” the Shell Club members put together for its annual show.

He and his partner decided to participate in the show the following year, “still not knowing anything about shells. We had picked up small shells along the beach and didn’t know what they were,” Shuller said in explaining why they got in touch with the shell club in the first place. It was to learn the names.

They soon began collecting shells in earnest, then invested in a microscope to which they could mount their camera and began taking closeups of the shells. “These were film cameras, of course, so we spent an entire summer taking pictures, taking them down to have them developed, coming back, doing it again, over and over again,” Shuller said, but they ended up with “some beautiful photos,” and they did well at the show that year.

Mosher grew up in Ohio and did not see the actual ocean until she was 18. She moved to North Carolina after college and “I really found myself drawn to the ocean for many reasons, as we all are.” When she began collecting shells, “I was just mostly enamored with the colors and the shapes and knowing, knowing that there a lot of them that we were collecting didn’t have the bright color.”

Young said that while at UNC-IMS, she would often consult Porter’s shell collection or Porter himself about what she found on the beach. Now she recognizes “what a treat that was” to have that connection with Porter, and fast-forward, she’s helping to work on the revision for his book.

Bogan grew up outside Seattle and became fascinated with shells when he was at the Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia. He was responsible for putting material into the collection.

“It becomes a lifestyle. How much do you want to learn? How much do you want to invest? How much time do you have?” Bogan said. “We learn from each other, we share facts, we ask questions, and the biggest question is, how do you flip that curiosity switch in students? Get them excited about seashells, about shell shape, animals?”

Of the more than 250 freshwater fish species in North Carolina, there’s a surprising amount that venture into marine and estuarine waters.

Which ones? That answer can be found in the 464-page “A Guide to North Carolina’s Freshwater Fishes,” published in March.

“From Wolf Creek, the westernmost community in Cherokee County, to the small Outer Banks town of Buxton in Dare County, North Carolina’s fresh waters are home to forty families of fishes: Thirty-one families whose species are primarily freshwater, five families whose species are primarily marine and estuarine, and four families whose species are almost evenly split between freshwater and marine,” the introduction begins.

The University Of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill published the guide that is an update to the 1991 “The Freshwater Fishes of North Carolina” by Edward F. Menhinick.

Authors are North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences Ichthyology Collections Manager Gabriela Hogue, museum adjunct researcher Bryn Tracy, Scott Smith and Jesse Bissette, both with North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries, and Fred “Fritz” Rohde, a fisheries biologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Beaufort Lab.

Illustrated with 546 full-color images, the new guidebook has data on all freshwater fish families and 260 maps showing where to find them, the state’s ichthyological history, or study of fishes, a key to help identify fish, and an appendix that explains the meaning behind the scientific names. The paperback, $35, and the eBook, $9.99, can be purchased online from the publisher and in the museum’s gift shop.

The authors all expressed their commitment to educating the public about the often-misunderstood freshwater fish in all of North Carolina’s waters.

“This book is a culmination of my 50 years spent studying the freshwater fishes of our beautiful state,” Rohde told Coastal Review in an email response. “Unfortunately, too many people have no idea of the fish diversity that we have in the coastal area — it’s more than Largemouth Bass and ‘bream’ — and we hope that our book will enlighten them.”

The guidebook is to help people understand what’s in the state’s streams, see how beautiful the state’s fishes are, and then maybe “become an advocate to help conserve our waters,” Tracy said during a recent conversation with Hogue and Coastal Review.

Hogue agreed.

“We want people to be able to identify every fish where they’re at in the freshwaters of North Carolina, but also just fall in love with them,” Hogue said. “Most people think it’s just the marine fishes that are beautifully colored, that are intricate, that have weird features, and yes, they’re incredible, but we have incredible diversity and beauty, and strange, weird features and structures in our freshwaters too.”

Bissette and Smith explained in an email that this is a resource anglers and nature enthusiasts who frequent coastal areas can use to explore inland freshwater regions.

“Having a comprehensive guide to freshwater fishes can enhance their appreciation and knowledge of the diverse species they might encounter throughout North Carolina, including those freshwater fish that occasionally stray into brackish or coastal waters, such as Longnose Gar, and those saltwater fish that sometimes venture into freshwater, like Striped Mullet.”

Freshwater isn’t a misnomer for the fish families that spend time in waters with higher salinity.

“Fish don’t adhere to the boundaries we draw, often moving between ‘freshwater’ and ‘saltwater’ habitats. Many species also have life cycles in both freshwater and saltwater ecosystems,” Bissette and Smith continued.

For example, they said, an anadromous fish like striped bass and American shad spend the majority of their lives in saltwater but return to freshwater to spawn. Also, many rivers and streams flow into coastal areas, creating the estuarine environments those on the coast know and love.

“Understanding the freshwater species that contribute to these ecosystems helps to shed light on the broader ecological dynamics at play in coastal regions,” they said.

Tracy and Hogue both said they’ve spent decades studying fish.

Tracy took a few courses on ichthyology in the late 1970s while at University of Missouri-Columbia for undergrad and grad school. After graduating, he spent 13 years as an environmental biologist for a power company, then spent the rest of his career as an environmental specialist with North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality’s Division of Water Quality. He assessed the relationship between fish health and water quality until he retired in 2017.

Hogue, who has been at the museum since the late 1990s, said she’s always had a love for the water.

After a snorkeling trip with her father, which she called “just an incredible experience,” her interest in studying fish was piqued, but she never thought it was a career option. Unlike most of her classmates studying biology as undergrad at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, she did not want to go pre-med. She told her reasons to her academic adviser who encouraged her to find her passion, and she did while doing research at the Illinois Natural History Survey, which houses millions of specimens.

Once she finished graduate school there, she joined the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission staff to take aquatic inventories in state parks. Three years later in 1998, she moved to the natural sciences museum and has been there since.

Tracy said they first met to discuss the idea of a book in 2012, and began in earnest in 2020.

Tracy didn’t want to spend 10 years writing several-inch-thick tomes on fishes “that you could use as a doorstop,” so he, Hogue and Rohde wrote a short paper before publishing “An Annotated Atlas of the Freshwater Fishes of North Carolina” in October 2020, he said.

The roughly 200-page PDF had been downloaded more than 4,400 times as of last week and is available to anyone at no charge.

When the atlas was made available, Hogue said that almost immediately they were asked when the book would be coming out. As the number of downloads increased, so did the decision to “dive in and do this.”

They used data from the 2020 atlas and the Fishes of North Carolina project, which began in 2013 to identify all of the state’s known freshwater and marine fishes, to update the 1991 freshwater fish guide. Both the atlas and Fishes of North Carolina website are companions to the new guide.

A lot has changed since that early 1990s edition. There are new species, new distributions and even new names. “Even though this book was great in its heyday,” it was time for an update, Tracy explained.

Hogue explained that they had a few goals with the book, chiefly, making it accessible both financially and for all audiences.

“We didn’t want to just write a book for ichthyologists, or students who are hoping to be ichthyologists. We wanted to make it for anybody that wants to know more about fish,” Hogue said.

Hogue said that science doesn’t always seem accessible and she feels scientists need to just “take off that white lab coat” and dispel the belief that “we’re all geniuses because we’re scientists. No, I’m just a regular person that loves fish.”

Also, in terms of accessibility, Hogue was adamant the guide includes a photo glossary explaining how to use a dichotomous key and a glossary. A dichotomous key is a sequence of paired statements that help the user identify a species.

“In North Carolina, we are so lucky that we have these ecoregions,” Hogue continued. “We’ve got the mountains, we’ve got the Piedmont, we’ve got the coast, we’ve got the sandhills, and so that also creates incredible diversity in the habitats of these species, and that’s why I think we have such a rich diversity.”

The Wildlife Resources Commission published the 1991 guide, and Hogue approached the state agency for help with the update. The commission came through, providing a $15,000 grant that helped keep the book cost relatively low. The project also received a $950 photography grant to travel the state for better images from the North Carolina Chapter of the American Fisheries Society.  

The hope is to make downloads of a chapter or the entire book available at no charge. “But we haven’t gotten to that level yet,” Tracy added. “We’re not in it for the money.”

Hogue said the “incredible research collection” that she manages at North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences helped with data for the book.

The collection of about 1.4 million specimens focuses on southeastern United States because it is “such a hotspot for biodiversity.”

The museum’s sizable collection, most of which is available on a globally accessible database, is made up of smaller collections museums, researchers, universities and others donated for a variety of reasons. Either the institution didn’t have the funds any more to maintain a collection, or the department moved in a different direction, Hogue said.

When the museum was founded, the intent was to showcase what is in North Carolina, “but it’s not like a fish knows a geopolitical boundary,” so that focus has widened, she said. In addition to the Southeast, 67 are countries represented in the collection.

It didn’t go unnoticed by Hannah Bunn West that the children’s book she helped author on the history of Jockey’s Ridge was released while protections for the National Natural Landmark are at risk on the state level.

That threat is similar to what prompted the largest sand dune system on the East Coast to be saved and ostensibly permanently protected 50 years ago.

On Aug. 15, 1973, siblings Ann-Cabell, Inglis and Gibbs Baum of Kill Devil Hills saw bulldozers at Jockey’s Ridge and ran home to tell their mother, Carolista Baum. In protest, their mother stood in front of that bulldozer, forcing the operator intent on removing sand to abandon his post.

Carolista Baum rallied the community to save the dunes, and she co-founded the group People to Preserve Jockey’s Ridge. The group raised money, held petition drives and lobbied state and local officials. The effort paid off. In 1975, Jockey’s Ridge was designated as a North Carolina state park.

Ann-Cabell Baum spent her youth in Nags Head across from Jockey’s Ridge. She is now vice chairwoman of the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge State Park.

“We were 6, 5 and 3½ the summer of 1973 when we were playing and saw the bulldozer at the back side of the dune,” Ann-Cabell Baum said.

“Jockey’s Ridge means so much to our family, it’s where we as children played every summer day and ran up and rolled down, requiring a swim in the ocean to get some of the sand off before our nightly baths,” she said. “As a kid we thought all kids had a sand dune, and we shared ours with all the visitors to the beach. We always would talk to other kids that we’d meet at the ridge and share with them the best place to jump and catch the most air as well as not leaning too far forward when you ran down, otherwise you might faceplant.”

North Carolina Office of Archives and History Historical Research and Publications Supervisor Ansley Herring Wegner, who came into the role in October last year, thought this was an important part of North Carolina history and decided early on in her new position to pursue a book on the Baums and Jockey’s Ridge.

Wegner has been with the archives office since 1994. She was administrator of the Highway Historical Marker Program since 2014, before taking on the supervisor role last fall.

The conversation to make the story a children’s book was fueled by the attention social media posts would garner when Wegner would share the story of Carolista Baum on the anniversary of the day she stood in front of that bulldozer at Jockey’s Ridge, and began in earnest during the process to establish a historical marker for Carolista Baum, which was installed in July 2023 in Nags Head.

“I thought, I would love to do a children’s book about this because it’s a story for children. It’s a story about children getting things done in their community with their mom’s help,” she said.

Wegner said the archives office has always published historical books, and has recently launched a series for young readers. Her hope is that these children’s books expand their audience and teaches more people about North Carolina history.

Wegner said that, within a week of becoming supervisor, she met with Ann-Cabell, who resides in Raleigh as well, to talk about getting the book written.

“It was my first round with a children’s book, and I just felt like it would be a good one to do,” Wegner said. “It’s an important story. It’s environmental history. It’s children using their voices and getting things done.” 

Baum found the watercolors of Outer Banks artist Larry McCarter that were used for the book. Book designer Sheila Barrett Carroll suggested West write the story because of the book “Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks” that West had published in 2022.

West agreed.

West grew up on the Outer Banks, attended Manteo High School and graduated from University of North Carolina Wilmington. She taught second, third and fourth grades before becoming a freelance writer, publishing in 2022 her book, “Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks,” which features a chapter on the late Carolista Baum, who died in 1991.

West told Coastal Review earlier this week that she met with Ann-Cabell Baum to hear her perspective of that day her mother stood in front of the bulldozer for the chapter on Carolista Baum West included in her book. West and Baum then collaborated on the children’s book.

West explained that in addition to being asked to adapt that chapter for an upper elementary-age reader, she has developed lesson plans and classroom activities to accompany the book for teachers to use as part of the North Carolina curriculum.

“Save Our Sand Dunes” is accessible for everyone from lower elementary, through upper-middle high school, and adults would even enjoy it, West said, and there’s what she called a “really neat mix of visuals” including illustrations, watercolors, photographs, graphics, the bumper stickers they sold to purchase the sand dunes that were privately owned at the time, and at the end, a page for the reader’s own Jockey’s Ridge scrapbook.

West said she wanted to focus on the children’s initiative to save the dune, rather than the legislative work that is heavily featured in her book.

“I wanted the main takeaway of this story to be how it was the three Baum children that really got the ball rolling, and even if you’re young or small, that your voice matters, especially when it comes to protecting the environment or your community or the people around you,” West said, adding she really wanted to drive the point home that kids made such a big difference in this story.

In thinking about what would really connect with young readers, she developed the narrative of the day the children went up on the dune and saw the bulldozer and then witnessed their mother stand in front of the heavy equipment.

Now herself the mother of two, ages 4 and 7, West said many of the parents in her circle have been receptive of the book.

“It’s so timely, such coincidental timing to that we have a book coming out called ‘Save Our Sand Dunes’ and there’s issues happening right now with Jockey’s Ridge.”

She’s referring to the protections for Jockey’s Ridge under the Coastal Area Management Act that are in jeopardy because of a dispute between the Coastal Resources Commission that is legislatively empowered to write the rules, in this case protections for Jockey’s Ridge as a designated Area of Environmental Concern, and the Rules Review Commission, a panel empowered to review and either approve or reject rules.

In October, the rules commission axed 30 longstanding Coastal Resources Commission-enacted rules from the state administrative code, including the AEC for Jockey’s Ridge. Since then, there has been a back and forth between the two commissions over 16 temporary rules the CRC subsequently approved to reinstate what it said were the most critical rules that had been rejected.

The Rules Review Commission then rejected those rules earlier this month over language used, particularly the word “unique,” in describing the sand dune system. The CRC met Thursday to discuss the rejection and heard from several residents fighting again for the dune’s protection, including West and Baum.

The slogan for the campaign to save Jockey’s Ridge in the 1970s was “Jockey’s Ridge for all the People,” West said. “The message is that this is a space for everyone to enjoy, rather than have private developers profit off of it. It’s a space for all the people to enjoy.”

West continued that she thinks that’s the main worry right now with Jockey’s Ridge.

“People’s fear is that it’s going to pave the way for people to be able to develop not necessarily on (the park) because it is a state park but around the area of Jockey’s Ridge. We’ve just seen so incredibly much development on the Outer Banks recently, even in the in the last 10 years, I would say, and while people are becoming really disheartened by a lot of it,” she said.

West said she hopes to use the book to spread awareness of how the dunes were originally saved, so it can serve as a reminder to those who know the story of Jockey’s Ridge, or as a way to educate new residents.

Ann-Cabell Baum recalled writing a book about Jockey’s Ridge in the second grade, “but not quite as great as ‘Save Our Sand Dunes.’ I even made the cover and sewed the pages into the book as part of a class project.”

However, Ann-Cabell Baum continued, “my book wasn’t as beautifully illustrated nor were my pictures as gorgeous as those painted by Larry McCarter. Hannah did a wonderful job of job of taking the summer of 1973 and sharing all the events that unfolded through 1975. We all hope that as kids and adults alike read this book, they’ll become members of the Friends of Jockey’s Ridge and help us build the next generation of kids and adults to make sure Jockey’s Ridge is here for years to come.”

The book really highlights how special a place Jockey’s Ridge is to her family and to everyone in Dare County, and everyone that comes to visit,” Ann-Cabell Baum said.

Ann-Cabell Baum said that with all the concern now that sand may be removed from the dunes without AEC protections, “It’s super important now that everyone realizes protection of natural resources goes beyond just a designation, it’s truly a responsibility to our children and the generations to come that we preserve and protect this super special place.

“It’s all of ours to enjoy, and it’s also all of ours make sure we save it, time and time again, when it’s in jeopardy. And, when it’s in jeopardy like now, with the removal of the AEC, area of environmental concern, we have to raise a fuss, it’s our obligation to make sure we take care of Jockey’s Ridge State Park.”

Buy the book

“Save Our Sand Dunes” by By Hannah Bunn West with Ann-Cabell Baum and illustrated by Larry McCarter and Anne Marshall Runyon can be purchased through UNC Press, which is distributing the book for N.C. Office of Archives and History.

Whether you’re a beginning gardener or one who’s been growing beautiful flowers and vegetables for years, one thing is clear: The fastest and easiest way to start a garden is by keeping it small.

“Even on a limited budget it is possible to get a garden going quickly,” Barbara W. Ellis writes in her new book “Container & Small-Space Gardening for the South: How to Grow Flowers & Food No Matter Where You Live.”

The author of two dozen gardening books, Ellis is an expert grower based on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Her latest title is an easy read that covers all of the big questions about container and small-plot gardens in the notoriously hot and humid South: which plants to choose, what pots work best, how much to water, how often to feed, and the right spots for small gardens, container or otherwise.

Ellis also shares gardening advice from her years of real-life experience, including how to be an environmentally friendly gardener. She even digs into seed starting, pest management, garden design and end-of-season tasks.

Best of all, Ellis’ practical instructions, alongside gorgeous photos, move smoothly from chapter to chapter, building confidence and excitement to get out there and grow.

Here are some of Ellis’ top container- and small-space gardening tips.

The easiest way to garden

A container garden is the easiest way to garden, “provided you start with big pots,” Ellis says. Large pots hold water, thereby requiring less watering. “I think beginners start off with small pots, 10 or 12 inches, and they can’t keep up with the watering. One of my first containers, years ago, dried out so quickly that if I watered it in the morning it was nearly dead by the time I got home from work.”

Containers are a smart way to graduate to small-space gardens. “The minute you start planting in the ground, it is more exciting but probably more complicated,” Ellis says. “Large containers make it possible to learn about growing plants, plus how to combine colors and plant forms, plus what kind of care makes them look better and be healthier.”

The dirt on sandy soil

Eastern North Carolina’s dry, acidic, sandy soils present frustrating challenges for growing healthy plants. How can gardeners overcome struggles? “Organic matter, organic matter, organic matter,” Ellis says.

“Sandy soils burn through it more quickly than any other soil type.” Add organic matter every time you dig a hole. Keep soil covered with mulch, even spreading finished compost under mulches like pine needles. Additionally, minimize digging “because that increases the rate at which the organic matter gets used up,” Ellis says.

How water should flow

Whenever you water, “water until water comes out of the bottom of the pot or the top few inches of soil are wet. That encourages roots to go down into the soil and not crowd around the surface, which makes them more susceptible to drought,” Ellis says.

Carefully select locations. “A pot or garden that receives sun in the morning and shade in the afternoon will need watering less often than one that receives shade in the morning and sun in the afternoon.”

Keep an eye on plants to understand their moisture needs. “I have learned to look at the leaves of plants to figure out when they need watering. The shape changes as they begin to wilt, and the color also changes.”

Resisting temptation at the plant store

“Container & Small-Space Gardening for the South” stresses the value of balancing your gardening dreams against location reality, right down to calculating how many plants you need to save time, money and effort.

Useful lists help you select easy plants for sun and shade. Still, how can you control wishful thinking while being color-bombed at the garden store on the perfect spring day?

“I use a hard-and-fast personal gardening rule, ‘Be attractive or die.’ That keeps me from bringing home plants I know won’t do well. If I have killed something three times, that’s it,” Ellis says. “This approach also made me get excited about looking for plants that thrive where I garden.”

Ellis advises visiting local public and private gardens and native plant organizations to learn what plants work best for your area.

What full sun really means down south

Ellis’ book is full of guidance you might not think about, like how to assess sun and shade patterns. Garden stores may label plants as “full sun,” meaning they need six to eight hours of direct sunlight a day, but Ellis notes that they don’t necessarily need that sunlight all at once.

“While most food crops prefer full sun, some — tomatoes, for example — will produce fruit in part shade in southern gardens,” she writes. Always remember that many plants markets might recommend for sunny areas refer to northern gardens, Ellis adds. Those plants will need more shade and often more watering in the south.

Saving money and the environment

Plastic wastes like soil bags and plant containers harm the environment. Ellis composts all potting soil for reuse, being careful not to add diseased plant parts or seed and plant parts from invasive species. “Most years, I also just replace about the top third of the potting medium in a pot.”

She donates surplus soil to fellow gardeners. Ellis uses some of her extra soil to pot plants she divides and then donates to a local garden club’s annual plant sale. She recycles and refurbishes planting containers, too. Even terra cotta pots are repairable, Ellis writes.

From the spruce-fir forests at the state’s highest elevations to the sea level sand flats of the coast, a newly released guidebook offers detailed descriptions of these and the other nearly 350 recognized natural communities across the state.

The 1,235-page “Classification of the Natural Communities of North Carolina” by Michael Schafale, community ecologist with the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program, is available online at no charge.

The Natural Heritage Program works to provide research and data, and helps guide decisions on the potential ecological impacts of conservation and development projects. This program is part of the Division of Land and Water Stewardship within the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Schafale explained recently to Coastal Review that the Natural Heritage Program keeps records of the best examples of each kind of community and uses them to prioritize conservation and make sure all kinds get protected. The land conservation agencies and nonprofits work on that goal to varying degrees.

Schafale, who’s been with the program since 1983, earned his master’s in botany with a focus on plant community ecology from Duke University. He also has been part of the collaborative, multi-institutional Carolina Vegetation Survey since 1987. He references the survey’s data, and that of the National Vegetation Classification, in the guidebook.

This is the fourth edition of the guide, called an approximation like the three prior editions to “remind the user that, while it is the best synthesis of knowledge the author can offer at this time, and can be useful, our understanding will continue to evolve,” according to the introduction. The first approximation was completed in 1984, the second in 1985, and the third in 1990.

A “natural community” is the collection of living things naturally occurring together in a particular kind of environment, Schafale said. Or, “in terms of the things people see — natural communities are the different kinds of forests, grasslands, marshes, etc. that make up the natural landscape.”

These natural communities have a certain combination of moisture, soil chemistry, topography, elevation, fire or flood frequency, and tend to have the same kind of plants and animals.

“It varies a bit over time and a bit from one such place to another, but you can recognize it as the same kind of thing. If you see some of the species that tend to be in them, you can predict that you have a good chance of finding others,” he said.

The 343 natural communities in the state highlighted in the resource are grouped into 30 themes, with types and subtypes nested under the themes. “There is substantial description material for both the broad themes and the individual subtypes,” Schafale continued.

While the resource is technical and intended for ecologists, botanists and others familiar with scientific names and jargon, the concepts of the communities should be understandable to a broader range of people familiar with the wildlands and natural areas of North Carolina.

“The classification is also likely to be useful to anybody who needs to name natural vegetation or natural ecosystems or types of animal habitat– academic biologists, agency biologists, environmental consultants, possibly regulatory agency people as well, though the communities themselves are not targets of regulation,” he said.

Work began on the fourth edition at a slow pace just a couple years after the third was published in 1990, then a briefer publication to the fourth approximation, called the “guide,” was published in 2012, Schafale said.

“Most of the communities in the classification were worked out by then. It was the plan from that time to produce a more thorough descriptive book, with more thorough description of the communities, more literature review, more use of the Carolina Vegetation Survey data. Work on it began shortly after the guide was published. So that is what is now finished,” he said, adding all of this builds on the earlier editions.

One of the most important changes since the 1990 edition is that there is enough understanding to recognize subtypes where he said they once just saw unintelligible variation.

For example, the 1990 classification recognized one type of pine savanna while the fourth recognizes four, and they can determine what species are only going to be in one or two of the types of pine savanna.

“That kind of refinement has happened in virtually all the communities that were known in 1990. There are a few communities that we just didn’t know about at all in 1990, such as the very rare Calcareous Coastal Fringe Forest, where soils filled with shells support plants that need high calcium levels,” he said.

Also, for the new approximation, “We extended recognition to some things we knew existed but hadn’t covered, such as the pond lily beds along tidal rivers,” he said. “Over a much broader spectrum, we can recognize and name kinds of variation that once were just disorderly heterogeneity, and by doing so, we can make sure they get conserved and we can accumulate understanding specific to them.”

This includes a majority of the communities. “There are new data and information on the species that make them up, on their dynamics, and on their other characteristics.”

Schafale explained that the Carolina Vegetation Survey and National Vegetation Classification brought a tremendous increase in the amount of available data.

The Carolina Vegetation Survey works to document natural vegetation for inventory, monitoring of environmental impacts, and assessment of conservation status.

Survey data are still not fully analyzed, but they were used extensively in writing the descriptions for this guidebook, Schafale said.

“Where pieces of the dataset had been analyzed, the insights gained went into its classification. An example is the Sandhills Mesic Transition Subtype and Coastal Plain Mesic Transition Subtype of Pine/Scrub Oak Sandhill. The distinction is visible in the data but was not recognized until the analysis showed it to us,” he said.

The National Vegetation Classification is a comprehensive classification system for all vegetation types in the United States. Work began on this classification in the early 1990s with the first version released in 1998 and a second in 2016.

The classification brought the insights of many more people and people over a wider range of states to the fourth approximation, he said.

Coastal communities, climate change

Schafale said he finds the coastal region to be extremely interesting, ecologically.

“One of the notable things is its tremendous diversity of natural communities as well as species,” which he said is “remarkable” despite having very little topography.

“Most places with high diversity are mountainous, and differences in elevation and topography and rockiness are a major thing that makes it possible. The coastal plain has very little variation in elevation or climate and is nearly flat, but a lot of variety is tied to its subtle topography, to differences in soil texture, and to all the different ways a wetland can be wet,” he explained. “River swamps, tidal areas, wet upland flats, peatlands, Carolina bays, and limesink ponds are all wetlands, but they are different in how deep the water gets, how long it stays, how regularly it comes back, how long the soil is saturated, whether it flows.”

The coast is filled with exceptional natural communities, like “pocosins — those tangled masses of evergreen shrubs, both on the big peatlands and in the larger Carolina bays. North Carolina has the lion’s share of them,” Schafale said.

And the longleaf pine savannas, “with the tremendous numbers of plant species packed into small areas. There is something like them throughout the South, but North Carolina’s particular kinds are rare and narrowly ranging – you don’t get to the middle of South Carolina before you’re in different ones.”

The natural lakes are another exceptional natural community. “Almost all the natural lakes between Florida and New England are in North Carolina, and there are just a handful. And among them, there is not another one like Lake Waccamaw.”

North Carolina has some of the best examples left of “the more widespread coastal communities like the dune grasslands and tidal marshes, and the river swamps and bottomland hardwoods.”

While not the primary purpose, the tool still has usefulness in understanding climate change.

“The different communities will respond to climate change differently, so understanding what they are can give a framework for considering and predicting responses to climate change,” he said.

When the Natural Heritage Program analyzed the effects of climate change on the state’s biodiversity some years ago, the work was organized by the themes and communities in the fourth approximation.

Currently, he continued, the Natural and Working Lands committee for addressing greenhouse gases has put an emphasis on peatlands for carbon storage – the peatland pocosins and coastal plain nonalluvial wetland forest themes of the fourth approximation.

“As a concrete example of how communities differ, the spruce-fir forests theme is the coldest set of communities in the state, so perhaps one of the most vulnerable to warming per se,” Schafale said. “The longleaf pine communities are composed of species that mostly range well to the south, so they are not so likely to be vulnerable to warmer temperature. But they depend on fire, so changes in weather that make it harder to do controlled burning will be bad for them, though no more so than institutional changes that make burning harder.”

For Lisa Rose, author of the new book, “Urban Foraging,” her fascination with the often-overlooked plants that can be a part of a healthy diet began with family and has become a profession and a passion.

An anthropologist with an interest in ethnobotany and herbal medicine, Rose has written three books. Her first two, “Grand Rapids Food” and “Midwest Medicinal Plants,” were focused on her home state of Michigan. Her latest, though, “Urban Foraging,” released in October, takes a nationwide look.

“I’ve traveled a great deal between both coasts … so in considering this book, I really had to double click into generally what am I going to be able to find across most of my regions,” she said. “So in parts of North Carolina coastal regions, you might have 35 of those plants, whereas 15 might not be immediately at your fingertips. The criteria, first and foremost (was) geographic distribution.”

The foundation for her interest in botany, plants and how they can be a part of everyday life, began in Flint, Michigan, where she grew up. Her father was an engineer and mother an avid gardener, and both parents contributed to her fascination with plants.

“He was always asking questions, “she said, describing her father. “He was very engaged in the natural world. In fact, he taught me at a young age that the natural world is the best engineer, that the natural world has solutions to the problems of imbalance. There’s a natural rhythm, not always nice and frequently chaotic in the restoration of balance.”

It was her mother, though, who applied knowledge of the natural world to daily life.

“My mother was a gardener for a good chunk of my childhood, not because it was a hobby, but because it was a practical, economical way to feed her family,” Rose said. “We had a feral concord grape hedgerow when I was growing up and my mother would put up about 50 to 75 quart jars’ worth of juice. I mean that that really was a foundation of my childhood.”

Not every plant in the book grows in eastern North Carolina. Aspen, according to North Carolina Parks webpage “Vascular Plants of North Carolina,” only grows in the mountains of the state and even then, only rarely. Hyssop, described by the “Vascular Plants” page as “one of the tallest and most robust native herbs in the state,” has not been recorded in the Piedmont or coastal plain.

With 50 plants listed in her book, though, there are plenty to choose from. Some are well known as edible wild plants, particularly blackberries and grapes, although Rose features wild concord grapes of her native Michigan.

Some of her selections are surprising, although when reading about these plants, it becomes apparent why they were chosen.

The prickly pear is a case in point. Rose suggests numerous possible uses for the plant, ultimately settling on recommending a prickly pear simple syrup. When harvesting prickly pear, Rose makes clear the hazards involved, pointing out that the species has two types of sharp barbs awaiting the careless.

“Both the prickly pear pads and fruits are covered in large and tiny spines. While the large spies are somewhat avoidable, the glochids are pesky buggers that can get into the skin and feel like a fiberglass rash,” she writes. “The glochids will embed themselves into fabric, so do your gathering with leather gloves.”

She described for Coastal Review the lesson she learned the first time she harvested prickly pear.

I didn’t realize — It’s not the big thorns that are the worst problem. It’s the glochids. They’re horrible. I had harvested my first batch of prickly pear using a cloth bag and cloth gloves. That was the worst idea ever,” she said.

Her recommended recipe for prickly pear simple syrup is as a “delicious simple syrup for margaritas.”

A number of Rose’s recipes are for mixed drinks, which she noted is part of a long tradition.

“In past generations a lot of plants were preserved into a bitter as digestive aids and served as aperitifs. Monks were brewing them in the Middle Ages, 13th century France, Germany. So it’s really a long tradition, of maybe not for medicinal any longer but definitely today for a cocktail hour,” she said.

Many of the plants Rose writes about are often thought of as common weeds. Field garlic is a great example. Also known, according to the North Carolina State Cooperative Extension webpage as crow garlic, onion grass, stag’s garlic, wild garlic, and wild onion, the plant is common, especially along the edge of gardens. The plant has a distinct odor that is a cross between an onion and garlic and has the appearance of a spindly scallion.

Her recipe calls for a wild garlic flatbread, but she also notes the tops make an excellent garnish in place of scallion in a salad. She also writes that the bulb is exceedingly fibrous and quite difficult to use in a recipe.

Rose also takes readers into the forest. She noted that the needles, bark and resin of pine trees in general are edible. The needles in particular are emphasized for their culinary versatility.

“Chop the needles and use them as an herb to flavor salads, butters and vinegars for dressings,” she suggests in her book. She also notes that homebrewers can use pine needles to create ”a Belgian or wheat-styled ale without making the brew overly pine flavored.”

For Rose, “Urban Foraging” is a way to help readers understand the common plants in our lives that can be a part of our everyday diet — trees, flowers and many that are considered weeds. The book also reminds us of a largely forgotten history, a time when foraging for wild plants was a regular part of life. “In general, common knowledge we’ve forgotten about (wild plants),” she said.  “We’re about two generations now from that having been a really common practice.”

ELIZABETH CITY— LeVern Davis Parker’s family has deep roots in the boatbuilding history of Dare County. 

The Manteo native recently released a book, “Our Family, Its History Their Boats: Six Generations of Boat Builders in Dare County,” from which she shared highlights during a presentation Oct. 5 at Museum of the Albemarle, part of the museum’s monthly “History for Lunch” series. Copies of the book are for sale in the museum gift shop.

Parker is a descendant of George Washington Creef Sr., who developed the shad boat that was adopted in 1987 as the state boat of North Carolina. Creef Sr. was born in East Lake and moved to Manteo around the time of the Civil War. He worked for the U.S. Navy, hauling coal. 

“He crafted a boat that could maneuver shallow sound waters of Roanoke Island called a shad boat,” Parker said.

White cedar, a lightweight, native wood with a natural ability to resist rot, was used for the shad boats, which were powered by three sails. Fishermen used the boats to retrieve fish from pound nets in shallow waters and unpredictable wind shifts, according to the state Department of Cultural Resources.

“Two men were needed to operate this new design of boat. One to steer and one to shift the ballast, which often weighed 50 pounds or more,” Parker said. “They were workboats, and over the years had gone through many changes.”

Parker’s grandfather, George Washington Creef Jr., learned the boatbuilding trade from his father. One boat he built named the Hattie Creef steadily “plied the waters of northeastern North Carolina” for 70 years, Parker noted. 

“The book refers to both the boat and my great-aunt Hattie as Renaissance women,” she said. “They were able to change and reawaken with the times.”

The boat Hattie Creef evolved from being powered by sails to a gas engine to a diesel engine over the years and was used as a fishing boat, sailboat, oyster boat and recreational boat. 

But its lasting claim to fame was making a trip from Elizabeth City to Kitty Hawk, taking “two young brothers and their crates” containing airplane parts. Orville and Wilbur Wright would, from there, launch aviation history.

Creef Boatworks was an extensive operation in Manteo and included Creef and Creef Railways, which Creef Jr., and his brother Benjamin Howard Creef jointly owned and operated, Parker said.

Her father, Vernon Davis, and her uncle Ralph “Buddy” Davis continued the family tradition of boatbuilding but took a different tack. 

“They weren’t really interested in the utilitarian boats of the Creefs,” Parker said. They were instead “interested in developing boats for speed.”

In the 1930s, her uncle was called “the Speed King,” she said. Later, around the turn of the century, her father was called “the ‘Master of Going Faster’ – something he was pretty proud of in his late 80s.”

They’d started building racing boats as boys and in their late teens and early 20s “raced all over North Carolina” in boats with names such as Miss Ford, Miss Chevrolet and Dodger, Parker said. They built boats in the garage, backyard and barn and worked in their family’s store, which they viewed “as a way to get spending money for their first love: Boats.”

The brothers built many Class E runabouts, which were popular on the East Coast from the 1930s to the 1960s, and later in Louisiana and southern Florida, Parker said. The boats they built were for “the weekend racer” who would return to his job on Monday. 

Boat racing stopped in the country from 1939 until 1945 because of World War II, but the brothers would later build some of the most successful race boats in their era.

“I knew growing up they had built race boats, but really until I started researching, I wasn’t aware how important those boats were on racing circuits in the 1950s and ’60s,” Parker said. “I was amazed at the number of local, national and international championships they held. Neither would boast about it — that just wasn’t their demeanor.”

During Parker’s talk about about her family’s connection to boatbuilding, she encouraged the audience to return Monday to view a new exhibit, “Rock of the Eye: Boatbuilding Traditions Around the Albemarle,” which traces the region’s extensive maritime heritage from the Indigenous canoes dating back to as early as 500 B.C. to modern boatbuilding techniques.

“Rock of the eye” means building by tradition and building right, according to Don Pendergraft, director of regional museums. 

The term comes from the “Hoi Toider” brogue of Ocracoke and Engelhard, and described how area boatbuilders historically used their eye and lining a finger up with their eye to perfectly make a symmetrical boat. “It has to be symmetrical to float,” he said.

“In the exhibit, you will see techniques that would have been very familiar to my father, my uncle, my grandfather and my great-grandfather,” she told the crowd.

Parker also encouraged attendees to visit Manteo, where they can see two restored shad boats built by her family members.

After her presentation, Parker signed copies of her book at the museum gift shop.

Julie Pipkin said she attended the talk because her two sons are Creefs and distantly related to Parker. 

“They love the water (and) love boats,” the Elizabeth City resident said. “I enjoyed the history and want to share it with my sons.”

Beverley and Michael Egolf recently relocated to Elizabeth City from New Jersey and said they found the presentation informative. Michael Egolf, a new Museum of the Albemarle volunteer, had worked as a diver for 10 years at New Jersey Maritime Museum. 

“We’ve always been interested in boats,” Beverley Egolf said, adding that Parker “really knows her stuff.”

Dr. David Shiffman’s favorite thing to talk about are sharks, and has been since he was very young. 

“I’ve loved sharks for a really, really long time, since I was younger than anyone in this room,” Shiffman said to a few dozen last month at North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort.

Shiffman, an interdisciplinary marine conservation biologist who specializes in the ecology and conservation of sharks, stopped in the Carteret County town as part of the tour for his book, “Why Sharks Matter: A Deep Dive with the World’s Most Misunderstood Predator.” His book is available at the museum’s gift shop.

The talk in Beaufort Sept. 20 was the 27^th stop of his 40-day “Reading Frenzy” international tour. A resident of the Washington, D.C., area, he also spoke at his alma mater Duke University in Durham and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh. 

As a student at Duke, he spent 2005 in Beaufort at the university’s marine lab, graduating in 2007. He earned his master’s in marine biology from the College of Charleston in 2011, and his doctorate in 2016 from the University of Miami in ecosystem science and policy.

Shiffman told Coastal Review in a follow-up interview that he wrote the book, “Why Sharks Matter,” because sharks are some of the most misunderstood animals on the planet, and they’re also ecologically important and threatened.

“Sharks are so ecologically important that we’re better off with healthy shark populations off our coasts than we are without them, but due to unsustainable overfishing practices, we’re in danger of losing many species forever,” he said, adding there’s growing recognition that we need to save sharks, but there’s lots of confusion, and even misinformation, about the best ways to do that. 

His book features detailed descriptions of dozens of different conservation policies and management regulations that can be used to help protect sharks, including a description of what policies work in what situations and how people can help with each, he said.

Being from Pittsburgh, Shiffman explained to the audience in Beaufort that he fell in love with the ocean through zoos and science museums. The first shark he ever saw was in the Pittsburgh Zoo when he was a child. 

“One of the things that I love about sharks is that they’re absolutely weird. They’re fascinating. They’re different than any other living thing in so many ways,” Shiffman said, and one way is their skeleton, which is made of cartilage. “They don’t have any bones.”

There are 536 known species of shark, he continued, having to repeat himself after a voice piped up from the crowd, in disbelief, “How many?” 

And, there’s a new species discovered somewhere in the world every two weeks and that’s been true for the last 12 years.

Shiffman, during both his talk and in his book, explains that much of the fear people have toward sharks comes from “inflammatory, inaccurate popular press coverage in general, the movie ‘Jaws’ and the dumpster fire of nonsense that is Shark Week,” he wrote.

Shiffman cites in his book a 2013 paper by Robert Hueter and Dr. Christopher Pepin-Neff that suggested new terms for shark-human interactions such as “shark sighting” or “shark bite,” which is the terminology Shiffman uses.

Whenever there’s a shark bite anywhere in the world, it’s headline news, he said during the presentation. Adding his favorite statistic about this, which came from the Pepin-Neff and Hueter paper, is that for something like 38% of all reported shark attacks in Australia, “the shark did not physically touch the human at all. It swam near them.”

Pepin-Neff released just this week a new study in the journal Biology on how The New York Times is changing its coverage on shark encounters. 

Pepin-Neff analyzed 10 years of articles that cover human-shark interactions and found that there had been a shift in the newspaper’s reporting style since about 2018.

A comparison of the number of articles that include shark “attack” and shark “bite” mentions between 2012 and 2021 shows that from 2012 to 2017 there was a clear dominance of the phrase “shark attack,” but parity began to emerge in 2018 with increased use of “shark bite.”

“Sometimes rare but terrible and tragic fatal shark bites occur,” Pepin-Neff said in a statement, “The data collected show that 32-39% of all reported shark ‘attacks’ have no injury. This may constitute a game-changer for how the public thinks about sharks and how the media reports on shark ‘attacks.’ The findings of The New York Times illustrate that a change is happening, and the public supports this change.”

This type of research is important because there are direct connections between public attitudes toward shark bites and support for shark conservation, according to the report. 

Shiffman said during his talk that a big reason most people are afraid of sharks is the movie “Jaws.” Before the movie was released 47 years ago, a lot of people didn’t really think about sharks – fishermen and surfers did – but people who went to the beach to swim didn’t really think about sharks, but this movie changed the world, and not in a good way for the ocean.

“There is actually something called the ‘Jaws effect,’ in the peer-reviewed published literature, which describes how a fictional portrayal of a real-world issue affects what real world people really think about that issue, ” he said. Adding, the author of “Jaws,” Peter Benchley, “was so horrified by what this book and movie did to public perception of sharks that he dedicated most of the rest of his life and a lot of the proceeds from ‘Jaws’ to shark conservation.”

As for Shark Week, Shiffman writes in his book that the Discovery Channel, though improvements are being made, had fostered “nonsense and fear over facts,” rather than use its platform to promote science, conservation and public understanding.

Shiffman told the audience in Beaufort that the risk of being injured by a shark is small. More people in a typical year are killed falling off cliffs while taking selfies with the scenery behind them than the number killed by a shark.  

“I don’t want to minimize real concern,” Shiffman continued, but there’s a very small risk you’ll come in contact with a shark and that relative risk should be kept in mind when considering policy solutions.

“They’re not a threat to you, but they’re actively important. We’re better off with shark populations off our coast than we are without them. But unfortunately, many species face very, very serious conservation challenges,” he said. 

“The number one threat by far is us, is humans, is unsustainable overfishing practices,” which includes targeted fishing, bycatch and for shark fin and shark meat trades.

He noted that while over the last 20 years, the trade in shark fins has been dramatically declining, things have gotten a lot worse in the last 10 years for sharks because of the shark meat trade, which is a major element that has not been given attention in the media.

“The problem is unsustainable overfishing, too many sharks are being killed,” Shiffman said. He explained that one set of solutions is to make the fishing more sustainable, such as size limits or quotas. There’s also a newer suite of policies in recent years that say there’s no such thing as sustainable fishing. You need to ban all fishing.

“It’s worth noting here that 90% Oof all the shark scientists in the world agree that the goal here should be making fisheries more sustainable, not banning all fishing,” he said.

Shiffman explained that one thing he’s learned in his career is that while this is bad news, “it is not hopeless, it’s not a lost cause.”

Scientists know what policy solutions work and that they need more help. 

“This is a big part of the reason why I wanted to write the book “Why Sharks Matter,” because there is not – before my book – an accessible to the public guide with the different policy solutions that are out there,” he said. 

After a lot of the talks he gives, people ask for reading recommendations to learn about policy solutions and shark conservation that they don’t need a law degree to understand. He said he’s had to tell those who want to read more that there’s no book out there, that was until May of this year when his book was published.

“This is the first shark book to comprehensively address this topic for a nonexpert audience,” Shiffman said in the follow-up interview. “I’ve found that when I attend conferences where experts discuss these issues, the conversations are very different from what I see among enthusiastic nonexperts on social media. So, my goal for the book was to make the technical and confusing world of shark conservation policy accessible to the interested public.”

Shiffman said he’s been blown away by the reception of his book while he’s been traveling the world talking about it.

“I’m so grateful for everyone who has come out to hear me speak, and for everyone who has bought a copy of my book,” he said. 

Folks can follow Shiffman on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @Whysharksmatter, where he said he’s always happy to answer any questions anyone has about sharks. 

Historian Dr. Chris E. Fonvielle Jr. will explore the truth behind Wilmington and Cape Fear legends at 6 p.m. Aug. 30 in Pender County’s main library in Burgaw.

In his newest book “Curious Tales from Old Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear: The Truth Behind the Legends,” Fonvielle looks at five of the region’s well-known legends through the eyes of an historian.

“The stories, all of which contain an element of truth, have gotten discombobulated after being told and retold for hundreds of years. But what is the truth behind them, what really happened? During this special presentation attendees will have the opportunity to learn the truth behind local legends,” according to the library.

A Wilmington native, Fonvielle is professor emeritus in the history department of University of North Carolina Wilmington. He has had a lifelong interest in American Civil War, North Carolina, and Cape Fear history. After receiving his bachelor’s in anthropology at UNCW, Fonvielle served as the last curator of the Blockade Runners of the Confederacy Museum. He received his master’s in American history at East Carolina University, and his doctorate from the University of South Carolina.

He has published books and articles including “The Wilmington Campaign: Last Rays of Departing Hope,” “Wilmington and the Lower Cape Fear: An Illustrated History,” and “Fort Fisher 1865: The Photographs of T.H. O’Sullivan.”

In 2014, then-Gov. Pat McCrory appointed Fonvielle to the North Carolina Historical Commission. Upon his retirement from UNC Wilmington in 2018, he was presented with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine for distinguished service to the State of North Carolina, signed by Gov. Roy Cooper.

For more information or assistance, call Pender County Library’s Burgaw branch at 910-259-1234 during regular business hours.

“Local” qualifies as one of the most overused words of the early 2000s. So commonplace then on restaurant menus, in food markets and in food media, “local” became a dubious descriptor even co-opted by nonfood companies (local landscaping anyone?). All the hyperbole culminated in “Farm to Fable,” an investigative series that earned journalist Laura Reiley a Pulitzer Prize nomination for exposing misleading claims around local food. 

That’s too bad because eating local still matters at a deeper level than the cliché “local” leads us to believe.

“Eating is never as simple as we might imagine,” writes author and editor Marcie Cohen Ferris as she introduces 20 leading activists, chefs, farmers, entrepreneurs, scholars and others in the food realm who penned essays for her new book “Edible North Carolina: A Journey Across a State of Flavor.”

The writers Ferris unites demonstrate the complexity, reach and significant impacts of local food in North Carolina. They extend stereotypical farm-to-table’s narrow boundaries out to what Ferris calls “the story of the contemporary food landscape.”

“Edible North Carolina” presents a panorama that encompasses the state’s food history, heritage and Indigenous and regional tastes like the Lumbee Tribe’s collard sandwiches in Robeson County and Down East commercial fishers’ favorite wild-caught scallop fritters. New voices broaden local flavors and concentrate food activism on today’s issues of access, equality, sustainability, reconnection, diversity and inclusivity.

“When I arrived in Cary and became the first Latina food columnist for the local newspaper, the resistance to my voice was swift,” Sandra A. Gutierrez writes in her “Edible North Carolina” essay. She recalls a subscriber in the mid-1980s upset that “her beloved paper had chosen a ‘Mexican’ as the writer for its food section.”

“Had I capitulated to this racism, I would not have witnessed the birth of a new culinary movement in the region. I embraced the culinary traditions of my southern white and Black readers but at the same time found my passion to introduce them to a global world of flavor.”

Baby steps like pulled pork tacos and chipotle in barbecue sauce that Gutierrez and others helped guide over the years led to a 2022 James Beard best chef southeast award nomination for Indian-born Cheetie Kumar of Raleigh’s acclaimed Garland. The restaurant’s Indian and Asian flavors and techniques are “driven by in-season ingredients from our home in Raleigh,” Kumar writes in “Edible North Carolina.”

Population migration has shaped North Carolina’s food landscape since the beginning. Ferris, a southern-foodways-focused professor emerita of American studies at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, traces the state’s “edible history” from Indigenous people to African, English, Scottish, Irish, European and more influences. The mix is responsible for the state’s distinctive and nationally celebrated flavor — North Carolina took three James Beard Awards in 2022. That food scene nurtures understanding and acceptance of immigrant populations.

That’s good news, but behind the scenes, local food culture is ailing.

Lack of food access, poor pay for food industry workers, big agriculture consuming small farms and the fragility of centralized food supply chains are just some symptoms. The COVID pandemic, climate change, political divisions and the immigration crisis have magnified problems that are affecting the “economic livelihoods of thousands of North Carolinians in ways unimaginable in the past,” Ferris writes.

“Now more than ever we viscerally understand what it means to lose local farms, entrepreneurs, food markets, food banks, school cafeterias, beloved neighborhood restaurants and landmark food venues.”

“Edible North Carolina” contributors take readers through a range of unsettling emotions as they describe what is being lost but then lift them up with exciting changes driven by the many challenges.

Carla Norwood and Gabe Cummings offer a heartbreaking account of how Warren County’s once-thriving farm economy has declined over the past 50 years, including the farm that has been in Norwood’s family for generations. Residents who long had access to fresh, healthy, local food face decreasing numbers of supermarkets. Just two remain in the entire 444-square-mile county. Tiny downtown Warrenton alone hosted four bustling food markets 100 years ago.

As agriculture has waned, so have job opportunities. The poverty rate is high; a quarter of the population is food insecure.

“All the cues from the modern world seem to say: leave this place behind; go to a city with high-paying jobs where you can shop at upscale supermarkets and eat in trendsetting restaurants,” Norwood and Cummings write.

“Dislocation” of local food economies, as Norwood and Cummings term it, has impacted commercial fishers as much as farmers. In 2000, Carteret County watermen faced intense competition from cheaper, inferior and unsafe imported seafood, cultural preservationist Karen Willis Amspacher, executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, writes in her piece about North Carolina’s local seafood movement. Fish houses faded as pricey waterfront development overtook communities and blocked entry to public waters.

Instead of giving up, Norwood, Cummings and Carteret County families did exactly what Ferris said she hopes “Edible North Carolina” inspires readers to do: support and help rebuild local food systems that will assure food sovereignty for everyone.

“I really hope that people think about two things maybe: joy and justice,” Ferris says.

“I want people to understand their power as eaters in the state of North Carolina, as people who buy and consume foods and impact the health of their community. I think when you read this book you can start feeling what are the small ways you can help rebuild your little landscape.”

Norwood and Cummings in 2010 founded a nonprofit that connects diverse farmers and food entrepreneurs with new markets. The organization also repurposes abandoned spaces for local food processing.

Commercial fishing families organized Carteret Catch to brand local seafood, show consumers why it was better, and prove to restaurant professionals that diners were willing to pay more for it. Seafood sales increased, and more Catch groups formed along the coast.

Without that local catch and traditional seafood preparations he grew up eating in New Bern’s African American community, chef Ricky Moore would not have won a 2022 best chef southeast James Beard award for his work at Saltbox Seafood Joint in Durham. The restaurant’s devotion to local foodways helped put North Carolina on the national culinary map.

“The backbone of my business – North Carolina fish and seafood – is sourced from local fishermen and women,” Moore writes in “Edible North Carolina.”

“As a son of this place, it is my mission to uplift the fisherfolk who tend its waters and share its seafood bounty.”

“Edible North Carolina” grew from Ferris’ classroom teachings on southern and North Carolina food culture. As students listened to guest lecturers like Amspacher and collected oral histories, the need for those voices to be collected in a serious tome emerged. Still, every “Edible North Carolina” essay ends on a light note, a recipe that reflects the writer or subject’s food journey.

Norwood and Cummings share a Warren County resident’s classic sweet potato pie. Anthropologist Courtney Lewis, concerned with the loss of Indigenous foodways, offers tuya gadu, a Cherokee bean bread. First-generation Southerner chef Oscar Diaz contributes BrunsMex Stew with black beans, cilantro and fresh tomato salsa.

Recipes were important to include, Ferris says, because they “speak to a moment. They speak to history …To many generations of family.” A recipe “communicates to us in another language,” she says.

That language is one that everyone understands because everyone must eat. Cooking leads to meals, and meals can stir conversation about what local food really means and the many lives it touches. Over dinner, we might consider numerous ways to help — shopping at the neighborhood seafood market, volunteering to pull weeds at an urban farm, checking supermarket produce sections for local vegetables, lobbying lawmakers, starting a movement.

“Edible North Carolina” makes us realize that we must never let “local food” be relegated to one more meaningless marketing campaign.

Reprinted from the Ocracoke Observer.

Hannah Bunn West has shone a spotlight on some little-known, impactful women in the history of the Outer Banks.

Her new book, “Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks” (The History Press, 2022), reveals seven such women, from the arrival of the first Europeans to the recent past.

The first chapter begins with the Lost Colony and features Eleanor Dare, wife of Ananias Dare and the daughter of John White, the colony’s governor.

In her third trimester of pregnancy, Eleanor arrived on Roanoke in July of 1587. On Aug. 18, she gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in North America. Little is known as to what became of them.

Back then, mother/infant mortality even in England was high and that Eleanor gave birth in such a primitive setting with no medical help caught the author’s attention.

West, who grew up in Kill Devil Hills, provides meticulous detail about the time and the theories of what happened to the settlers. There are 29 footnotes to the first chapter alone.

“We have observations from some of the men at that time from surviving journals of John White and Thomas Hariot and other sources, but we have very little record of the women’s experiences,” said West in an interview. “I chose Eleanor Dare mostly because a big aim of this book was to widen the lens and look at some different perspectives on the commonly known history that we have on the Outer Banks.”

The other women featured with their own chapters are Chrissy Bowser, Irene Tate, Nellie Myrtle Pridgen, Carolista Baum, Cheryl Shelton-Roberts and Virginia Tillett.

Prior to the book’s conception, two of these women, Chrissy Bowser and Irene Tate were unfamiliar to the author.

Chrissy Bowser was selected as a post-Civil War African American landowner. West first learned of her while visiting Island Farm, a living history site on Roanoke Island that depicts life in the mid-1800s.

While making cornbread, a docent talked enthusiastically about Bowser, the Etheridge family’s cook, who went on to own property. “She started telling this incredible story of this woman,” West said. “I have spent my childhood out here and I have always had an interest in history, but I had never heard of (Bowser). So, that was kind of one of the ways in which one of these women was chosen for my book.”

Researching Bowser’s life was not easy. There are still questions surrounding some basic aspects of her identity, birth year, and whether she was born enslaved or free.

Articles and story sources West found in the local press mostly say that Bowser was born free, but West’s research, which involved poring through census records, marriage records and Freedmen’s Colony documents, did not reveal obvious signs pointing to that.

“So, instead of definitively coming down on either side, I wanted to just present the information as objectively as I could, and make the point that, hundreds of years ago, the details of certain people’s lives were well documented, and others were essentially considered insignificant,” West said.

Despite the many footnotes, 186, at the back of the book, the book is not a dry historical reporting.

West has a degree in creative writing with a concentration in nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a lifelong passion for history.

By way of introduction, West colorfully begins Chapter 4 this way: “The image of a woman striding alone on the seashore is called to mind at the mention of Nelly Myrtle Pridgen by anyone who knew her. The sight of her lean figure slightly stooped like a stock of sea oats, habitually combing the stretch of sand in front of her Nags Head home was as constant and reliable as the rise and fall of the tide for nearly seven decades.”

Pridgen, who died in 1992, actively opposed development on the Outer Banks and would walk every day gathering items that would turn into an invaluable collection.

How is this for a childhood memory:

West writes: “On the morning of September 12, 1900, there was an unexpected knock on the door of the Tate family, Kitty Hawk residents. They answered it to find their neighbor boy, Elijah Baum, standing with a strange gentleman who looked travel worn and weary. The stranger took off his cap and introduced himself as Wilbur Wright, from Dayton, Ohio. Little did the Tates know that the man they had received would become world famous, along with his brother Orville, for humankind’s first flight.”

Irene Tate was just three years old that morning, but the impact of his visit influenced the course of her life. She took to the sky herself becoming the first female pilot to fly round trip from New York to Miami. Her first time in an airplane predates that of the Amelia Earhart, who was also born in 1897.

Tate had many other accomplishments throughout her lengthy career, logging more than 50,000 flight miles and the chair of the Women’s Division of the National Aeronautic Association.

The writing and selected photos of this chapter makes one realize how remote and stark Kitty Hawk was at the turn of the 20th century — a far cry from what it is today.

The book is laden with black-and-white photographs drawn from many sources and which match the historical tone of the book.

Two of the better-known women garnering lots of popular press articles were Carolista Baum and Cheryl Shelton-Roberts. Baum is well known for getting in front of a bulldozer that was to level the high sand dune at Jockeys Ridge and replace it with a condominium project. She forced the workers to cease that day and the developer later agreed to its historical importance. Baum spearheaded the efforts to turn it into a state park.

Shelton-Roberts, the only surviving woman in this book, is a life-long lover of lighthouses and through much turmoil, played a key role in moving the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in 1999 to a safer location. Had she not been successful, the lighthouse would have fallen into the ocean. Whether to move the lighthouse or leave it to nature drew strong feelings on both sides. This chapter includes a lot of inside details, including Senator Marc Basnight getting then-President Clinton’s ear to secure funding.

This well written book is successful on two levels. The women merit inclusion for their accomplishments, and each chapter serves as a historical chapter on the evolving history of the Outer Banks.

The book is getting attention. It seems like almost every day someone is asking if a particular woman was included or will be in the next volume, West said.

I, along with many others, have suggestions for other women to be hailed as a remarkable woman of the Outer Banks. But having read this book, I would not substitute any.

West may oblige with further volumes, but that hasn’t been decided.

“Remarkable Women of the Outer Banks” is available for purchase at local independent bookstores on the Outer Banks, including Books to be Red, and through Arcadia Publishing’s website. For a full list, visit the author’s website at www.hannahwestwrites.com.

This story is provided courtesy of the Ocracoke Observer, a newspaper covering Ocracoke island. Coastal Review is partnering with the Ocracoke Observer to provide readers with more environmental and lifestyle stories of interest along our coast. 

Summer Michaud-Skog has called a small coastal town in Oregon home the last few years during the pandemic.

Before the world stopped, she had been traveling the country in her mother’s old minivan, establishing chapters of Fat Girls Hiking and finding accessible hiking trails.

Fat Girls Hiking, a group she founded in the mid-2010s, is described as a nationwide fat activism, body liberation and outdoor community to take the stigma out of the word fat and empower people to live their best life. Fat Girls Hiking has more than 37,000 Instagram followers and nearly three dozen official chapters across the country.

After Michaud-Skog’s cross-country trip, she was approached by Timber Press in Portland, Oregon, to write about the Fat Girls Hiking community. “Fat Girls Hiking: An Inclusive Guide to Getting Outdoors at Any Size or Ability” was published March 29 and is available online.

In 2014 when Michaud-Skog, who is now in her early 40s, and her girlfriend at the time began hiking frequently, she didn’t often see people that looked like her on the trails or on outdoor-focused social media.

“I am a queer, fat, heavily tattooed woman with chronic pain who hikes in dresses,” Michaud-Skog writes early in the book. “I don’t have money for ‘proper’ outdoor gear and most of it doesn’t even come in my size, so I get by with what’s available.”

She wrote that often during their hikes, especially during challenging sections, they would sing “we’re just two fat girls hiking.” It made them laugh. “It was a comfort to know that it didn’t matter to us that we were fat girls hiking, we just loved being outside.”

The next year, in 2015, Michaud-Skog began looking for diversity in outdoor social media. She decided to create the Instagram account, Fat Girls Hiking. “I shared photographs and wrote about trails, campsites and road trips.” She also has a Fat Girls Hiking Facebook page. The community grew through the online presence, evolving into in-person meetups.

In the book, she stresses that the goal of Fat Girls Hiking is not to lose weight but to create a community “where fat folks could be outdoors together.” She uses the phrase, “Trails Not Scales” to emphasize the importance of “a fat outdoor community that isn’t focused on weight-loss or diet talk.”

Michaud-Skog, who spent her youth in rural Minnesota, and others in the Fat Girls Hiking community share in the book how they found their place outdoors.

“The FGH community is full of people with lots of different identities and backgrounds who come together to support one another and find joy and healing in one another’s company,” she writes. “Each member is finding their own ways to connect to the outdoors.”

She also writes advice on how to hike, what to wear, equipment, what to bring and other ways to make hiking in larger bodies more comfortable, which can be applied to many outdoor activities.

In a recent interview with Coastal Review, Michaud-Skog explained that though the name is Fat Girls Hiking, the community is not just for fat girls and not just hiking. Instead it’s pushing back on the idea of who representation in the outdoors, and to redefine what it means to be a hiker and to hike.

“It doesn’t have to be a certain mile. It doesn’t have to be a certain elevation gain, I think the most important thing is to go somewhere,” she said, whatever is accessible, if it’s the wetlands, old-growth forests, “find something that excites you.”

The “gatekeepers,” as she calls them, can happen in any industry and are those saying you have to do this a certain way and be wearing a certain thing, otherwise it’s not considered a real hike.

“For me, it’s a hike if you’re outside walking in nature. It’s a hike, and I think it’s the intention. You don’t have to let other people define what the hike is,” she said.

Michaud-Skog said that you can use mobile apps or Google to find features that pique your interest and stir the motivation.

“I really got into birding when the pandemic started, so that was really exciting to me,” she said, “I honestly never thought that would interest me but now I am fascinated with different types of birds.”

She bought binoculars and a book on birds and spent a lot of time outdoors birdwatching, she said.

It’s a fun activity to do outside, she continued, and feels like the pace of the activity, particularly for slower hikers, those with chronic pain or a disability, is pretty accessible, especially if you have like a place to sit. “And it’s a really cool connection to nature because you get to see birds up close. To me, it’s exciting.”

Michaud-Skog explained that hiking also motivated her try other outdoor activities.

“I think it really inspired me to try things that I didn’t think that I could do because of the size of my body. Would it be different? And how would it be different?” she said. “I think for me doing a lot of research on a particular activity that I want to try before I would do it is really helpful.”

She cited kayaking and paddleboarding as examples of popular activities on the coast that may seem inaccessible for some body types.

“There are things you need to think about with something like kayaking or stand-up paddleboarding,” such as, is there a weight limit? “This is something that I think people who maybe aren’t fat or plus size, they wouldn’t even think about … that it might not even work for somebody who’s a certain way.”

Michaud-Skog leads retreats where participants do more than hike, and she has to call ahead and ask if the equipment works for people who are this size or that size.

“And so for me, I think the easiest way for me to feel more comfortable in taking up space is to have the information that I will need in order to feel comfortable, or at least know what to expect when I get to the outfitter, or get to the place where I’m going to rent a kayak. Do they even have gear that’s going to accommodate me? That’s really important.”

Many don’t want to put themselves in an uncomfortable place by trying something new, but Michaud-Skog said doing so was an experience of personal growth for her.

“Even if maybe I didn’t do well, because a lot of times trying new things — especially if you’re not a person who’s represented usually in kayaking or watersports — you’re probably not going to be good at it,” she said. That can be really hard for some, but the confidence comes after, not when you’re doing it.

She said people tell her all the time that the outdoors is for everyone, and she fully agrees, “but the thing that’s tricky is (that) we’re not all represented in the same way,” and that’s especially true for people who have access needs, including wheelchair users or those with chronic pain.

If a person wants to get outdoors, Michaud-Skog said its critical to know what their body needs and not allow shame to interfere with those needs.

“If you’re outdoors and need to sit down, there’s nothing wrong with that,” she said, adding that while it may not look like how other people hike a trail, it’s what you need, and once we are able to meet our own needs, we grow trust and confidence. “Plus, having that connection with nature is so special. It really improves our mental well-being,” Michaud-Skog continued.

It’s also good for the environment, she added.

“I think (that) if more people are in love with nature, more people are going to want to protect it,” she said. “The more people we have in the world who say ‘I want to protect natural spaces, and I want future generations to have access to this’ — that’s really important to me, too — but it starts with people being able to feel comfortable to go out there and take up that space and see the amazing beauty that nature has to offer.”

Janet Gillikin, 82, can’t help but tell the story again, laughing the whole way through. “I’ll never forget it my whole life.”  

She and Sonny Boy Stacy were children playing on a fish-house dock on their native Harkers Island when Gillikin suggested they race to shore. Running hard as he could, “Sonny Boy started swerving to the side,” Gillikin said. “And he fell right into the water.”

Judging by Stacy’s wailing, Gillikin was sure the boy had slammed into bags of hard clams fishermen stored under water, but when Gillikin asked if he was hurt, Stacy said no.

“Then why are you screaming?’” Gillikin asked, to which Stacy cried, “Because I got my chewing gum wet.”

With its glimpse of island life, Gillikin’s tale is more than a humorous anecdote, just like “Island Born and Bred,” the cookbook that records the story, is more than a recipe collection. Back on store shelves after a two-year hiatus, “Island Born and Bred” is not just Harkers Island’s community cookbook. It’s a definitive history told by the people.

“You can hear their voices in a very intimate, community kind of way,” said historian David Cecelski, who uses “Island Born and Bred” to teach history classes at Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

“If I had to pick 10 books on the folklife on the North Carolina coast for any time period ever, that cookbook would be on it.”

Recipes were an excuse

“Island Born and Bred” was never intended to be a scholarly text. “It is our attempt to tell the people who come and look that there is more to this Island than a weekend retreat or a Sunday afternoon drive. This is our home,” the book’s editor Karen Amspacher read from the hand-typed, black-and-white pages.

In 1987, Amspacher suggested the Harkers Island United Methodist Women craft a cookbook to fund its ministry’s good deeds. Not long from college work as an oral history transcriber, the Harkers Island native was certain that if somebody didn’t record stories she and others had heard their whole lives, those firsthand accounts would be lost forever. Amspacher envisioned recipes as merely the hook drawing readers into narratives. Some of her fellow Methodist Women weren’t so sure.

“I thought it was outrageous,” said Gillikin, who was Harkers Island United Methodist Women president at the time. She believed, “There are too many cookbooks out there. Everybody has 10 or 12 cookbooks. What do we need with another cookbook?”  

The ladies eventually came around, and “Island Born and Bred” ended up a cookbook people did need. People everywhere. Plans in 1987 to print just 500 copies of a 200-page book turned into the sale of 10,000 copies of a nearly 400-pager by the end of 1988 and thousands more shipped far and wide over the next 33 years.

From the beginning

Harkers Island residents put their hearts into the endeavor, sharing 625 recipes from old-timey classics like Fried Clams with Gravy to contemporary Microwave Swiss Steak. Stories, facts, poems and folklore came handwritten on napkins, slips of paper and legal pads or told to the United Methodist Women, who tape recorded and transcribed exactly what they heard.

An entire dictionary devoted to “Island Talk” listed terms like “I shan’t” (I shall not) and “slick cam” (slick calm) written phonetically, giving voice to the distinctive Harkers Island brogue.

Time and again, contributors honored determined ancestors who relied on their wits to thrive on nearby ribbons of sand — Shackleford Banks, Core Banks, Diamond City, Cape Lookout — places that afforded inhabitants freedom, togetherness, a bounty of seafood and stunning landscapes akin to heaven on earth.  

The book’s simple sketches, done by local artists, depict long-gone island scenes like boatbuilders at work, nets hung near once-numerous fish houses and a bonnet-crowned grandmother sitting on the “pizer,” an island word for “porch.”

Illustrations based on actual photographs included a poignant moving-day scene. The original circa 1911 photograph measured only about an inch square but still captured Clem and Louise Hancock on Shackleford Banks driving a horse-drawn wagon full of their belongings to more stable ground. Relocating became common. The “Island Beginnings” chapter traces Harkers Islanders’ lineage from pre-1650 settlements on outlying barrier islands to late-1800s hurricanes that forced residents to begrudgingly float their homes on boats across the sounds to fresh starts on Harkers Island.

Day after day, the United Methodist Women gathered stories and recipes. Every written word was hand-typed by volunteer Ruth Paylor on an IBM Selectric typewriter. Each page had to be perfect, no Wite-Out allowed because it would show up as a blob on the stat camera that print shop workers used to transfer Paylor’s typing to printing plates.

Pages arrived at the church fellowship hall in random lots, pages 53-86 one day, 95-175 another. “We had a room full of fish boxes stacked with batches,” Amspacher said. For weeks, the women collated pages by spreading them out in numerical order on a maze of tables across the fellowship hall. Volunteers wound the labyrinth, picking up page after page until a full book was assembled at the end.

“And they started reading the pages,” Amspacher said.

As the women navigated, they saw friends’ recipes, familiar tales and names of places long gone.

The maze ended at a hand-operated, book-binding machine the women borrowed from the print shop. Stacks of pages had to be carefully placed so that the 15 perforations on each sheet aligned perfectly with the plastic ring binder.

“We put together the first book, and we cried,” Amspacher said, fighting back tears. “We cried because we knew in our hearts, even though we didn’t want to admit it to each other, that Harkers Island was gone.”

A promise to never forget

Harkers Island quickly changed from a remote coastal fishing village in the early and mid-1900s to a tourist haven by the time the book project started. “I think my generation was the last to know it as it was,” Amspacher said.

“Island Born and Bred” held local culture for the ages.

In 1989, the book won the North Carolina Society of Historians’ Award of Merit “for its contribution to the preservation of North Carolina history.” It spawned more Harkers Island historic journals written by residents and helped inspire Harkers Island’s popular Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center. ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Good Housekeeping magazine, local television shows, numerous newspaper articles and glowing reviews all featured the work.

The United Methodist Women shipped orders to England, Canada, Australia, the Caribbean and every state in the U.S.

“I got a call from somebody in Billings, Montana, one night,” Amspacher recalled. “She said she had never seen the ocean but that she really appreciated the community because it reminded her of home.”

Even Harkers Islanders were moved, way more than they expected. After the book’s release, initially skeptical residents realized “Island Born and Bred” was special.  

“I’ll be looking at it and I’ll stumble on a story and get to reading it and forget all about the recipe,” said Dean Johnson, whose grandmother Nannie Raye Poole’s recipes appear throughout the book.

Johnson regularly taps her stained and tattered copy. Most recently, he prepared Poole’s time-consuming Conch Stew, page 194, for a neighbor wishing she could taste it again.

The rubbery shellfish must be pounded for at least an hour to tenderize the meat. As he talked, Johnson craved his late grandmother’s Fried Clam Fritters, page 190, that required fresh clams be gutted and then washed three times to remove grit. He launched into a story about Poole spending all day Saturday preparing Stewed Hard Crabs, pages 198 and 199.

“She started by catching and cleaning the crabs,” Johnson said, and ended by adding the island’s signature cornmeal dumplings.

Reading and rereading has convinced Johnson to gather loved ones more regularly, as Poole always did, to share local favorites, including the true Harkers Island Oyster Roast, page 206, he planned for the weekend. Like his ancestors, Johnson would cook wild oysters over a wood fire and serve them with Fried Cornbread, page 78, sour pickles and cold Pepsi.

“The heritage of it just makes me feel proud to be from where I am,” Johnson said, “and of those people who paved the way.”  

Over the years, “Island Born and Bred” did more than inspire. Proceeds helped many people in need, including North Carolina families economically devastated by a 1987 toxic red tide that closed commercial fishing; South Carolina victims of 1989’s Hurricane Hugo; and a Morehead City family who suffered a kitchen fire days before Christmas.

Profits continue to sustain Harkers Island United Methodist Church and its ministry work, the Rev. Lee Pittard said. Church leaders plan another printing soon. Amspacher expected the several hundred books released this fall to sell out before Christmas.

“But how many have been sold and how much money has been made is immaterial,” Amspacher said. “I can go through the book and tell you every one of the people, what their story is, who they were, what they’d been though.”

“This cookbook was Harkers Island promise to never forget.”

Wanda Willis’ Hurricane Cake

Wanda Willis’ “‘Hurricane Cake Recipe’ was recognized by Good Housekeeping magazine in 1989 and helped make the ‘Harkers Island cookbook a best-seller nationwide, and her ‘stew-beef-and-rutabagas’ helped build the Core Sound Museum,” according to her obituary. “Her kitchen table welcomed many traveling preachers, MYF groups, ballplayers, family members, and friends from far and wide to enjoy her cooking and hospitality.” Willis was “Island Born and Bred” cookbook editor Karen Amspacher’s mother.

Hurricane Oatmeal Cake
1 cup oatmeal
1¼ cups boiling water
2 eggs
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1½ cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Combine oatmeal and boiling water; set aside. Beat together eggs, sugars and oil until blended. Add sifted flour, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Add oatmeal mixture.

Pour into a greased 9-by-13-inch baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes.

Topping:
1 cup coconut
1 cup brown sugar
6 tablespoons melted margarine (see cook’s note)
1/2 cup chopped pecans
1/4 cup evaporated milk
Cook’s note: Butter works just as well in this recipe.

Mix together topping ingredients until moist. Spread over cake. Broil until topping is light brown and crunchy, about 2 minutes.

Bodie Island, Jockeys Ridge, Kill Devil Hills, Kitty Hawk, Monkey Island, Nags Head, No Ache Island, Ocracoke Island – these and Outer Banks place names come with rich stories about their origins, but how many are accurate?

Geographer Roger Payne made it his mission long ago to get to the truth.

Payne’s interest in the place names of the Outer Banks was sparked “many, many years ago” with his first trip to North Carolina’s barrier islands, he writes in the preface to his new book, “Outer Banks Gazetteer: The History of Place Names From Carova to Emerald Isle.”

“While waiting for the ferry at Oregon Inlet (before the bridge), I asked my dad, ‘Why is this inlet called Oregon Inlet?’ He hesitated, thought for a while, and responded, ‘That’s a good question.’ It seemed an unlikely name to be on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. After all, what does Oregon have to do with North Carolina? Thus began my interest in geographic names of the Outer Banks and in geographic names in general,” Payne recalls about that 1959 trip.

From that visit on, he kept records of unusual names on the Outer Banks. Even while attending East Carolina University, “I continued my interest in the Outer Banks and its place names,” Payne writes.

The reference guide published in March by the University of North Carolina Press contains more than 4,000 entries on the region’s place names and includes the history of beaches, inlets, towns and communities, islands, rivers and sand dunes, including the large dune Jockeys Ridge in Dare County. While local stories say that the top of the sand dune “afforded an excellent view of a horsetrack,” which Payne said there’s no record of, the true origin of the name is from an early landowner, according to Payne’s research.

Payne also includes locations that no longer exist, such as inlets that have disappeared due to erosion or storms, Native American villages and abandoned towns. For example, though there’s no trace of Gull Island today, the Carteret County island was in Back Sound between Shackleford Banks and Harkers Island and was prominent until the mid-20th century.

The guide is available online and in many Outer Banks stores.

Payne, who is executive secretary emeritus of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, earned his bachelor’s in geography and history in 1969 and his master’s in geography in 1972, both from the Greenville-based institution.

He began his career with the U.S. Geological Survey in 1974, officially retiring in 2012. The USGS, created by Congress in 1879, is the country’s largest water, earth and biological science and civilian mapping agency and the sole science agency for the Department of the Interior.

Payne also served as webmaster for the nation’s official geographic name repository, Geographic Names Information System, as USGS’ representative lecturer on mapping and general cartography to schools in northern Virginia, and as adjunct professor at several universities including Old Dominion University, East Carolina University, George Mason University and George Washington University.

Payne told Coastal Review in a recent interview that he was always interested in and even drawn to the Outer Banks since his first visit more than 50 years ago. Even then, he was already interested in the geographic names.

“However, it was not until I joined the U.S. Geological Survey as a researcher in the office responsible for geographic names on maps and in the United States that I discovered that my interest and its application was subject to principles, policies, and procedures officially. Of course, I already had degrees in geography and history, but then took numerous post-graduate course in linguistics and later, data base design,” he said.

Payne explained that his primary goal with his “Gazetteer” was to preserve the rapidly disappearing names and their original meaning when applied.

“Even the very old folk I interviewed — I interviewed hundreds — did not remember original meanings,” he said, adding that geographic names serve as markers for navigating one’s environment while simultaneously providing insight into the morphing and evolution of that culture.

“Of particular interest to me was to determine, prove, and document the numerous published name origins that are nothing more than folk etymology, which is prevalent everywhere, not just the Outer Banks,” he said.

“Some of these highly circulated renditions are clearly tongue in cheek, but others are true folk etymology where fabrication is used to complete unknown or forgotten meanings and are really believed by visitors and even local folk, including many now older local folk. Full original meanings for application are researched appropriately, documented, and provided in the book with my analysis,” he said, explaining that the meanings are based on more than 30 years of direct toponymic, or place name, experience and research.

There are also “educated speculations” based upon years of toponymic fieldwork and experience for certain things and names where intensive research and scores of interviews yielded no results or conflicting results, he said.

“Additionally, I have — I am convinced — unraveled the mysteries of the historical inlet situation in the Roanoke Island area as well as the historical inlet situation along the entire Outer Banks, which does appear conflicted in many sources. My rendition is based upon careful, detailed examination of all maps published in the area since 1585.”

This is not Payne’s first publication on Outer Banks place names.

In 1985, he published “Place Names of the Outer Banks.” Payne explained that when he determined that there was interest in the topic, he decided to publish his work.

“There are numerous place names books published, but since there was no such book of the Outer Banks, I decided in my spare time then, between working and family duties, to gather my notes and publish,” he said.

“The 1985 version is woefully deficient and obviously well out of date. Further, in the seven-year period preparing that version one had to actually visit individual facilities and actually examine each source since it was prior to full internet capability and the onslaught of digitizing everything,” he said.

The 1985 edition was adequate at the time, he continued, but with the advent of digitizing historical and other maps, as well as the availability of primary and other documents online, he said he was able to enhance the information culminating in this gazetteer.

“Specifically, the various myths of naming by folk etymology have been dispelled with the researched and documented actual reason and meaning for the names. This version contains over 4,000 entries, four times the number of the 1985 version, and everything is cross-referenced to a bibliographic citation in this volume,” he told Coastal Review about the 2021 edition.

Payne retired from the USGS in 2006, but two weeks later he was rehired by the same office to manage database transitions, monitor two websites as well as to respond to inquiries. “I responded to over 15,000 such inquiries from 2006 to 2012,” he said.

After 2012, he continued as a volunteer, managing and monitoring the United States’ geographic names program for Antarctica. After 2013, he said he was able to focus his studying Outer Banks Place names.

“It was, in my opinion, well worth the effort since there are more than 4,000 entries for the new version over the 1,000 in the 1985 version and the latest version corrects numerous and varied errors and lack of information because of lack of resources,” Payne said. “Unlike 1985, this version contains a ‘selected’ bibliography as well as each name cross-referenced to the source. I have provided true and documented name origins for almost every name along with all known stories, legends, and whatnot, which of course I think makes very interesting reading.”

And Oregon Inlet, by the way, which opened during a hurricane in 1846, is named after the first vessel to pass through it, the side-wheeler Oregon.

WILMINGTON — A temporary panel exhibit about the travel experience of African Americans during the legal racial segregation era will be on display in Cape Fear Museum of History and Science starting Friday through Aug. 29.

“Navigating Jim Crow: The Green Book and Oasis Spaces in North Carolina” traveling exhibit was created by the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, a division of the state Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

The exhibit explores sites from “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” published between 1936 and 1966. The travel guide included more than 300 businesses in the state from restaurants and hotels to tourist homes, nightclubs and beauty salons, in the three decades that it was published. More than 50 of the sites were in Wilmington.

The exhibit highlights a statewide network of business owners and sites that allowed African American communities to thrive, and that created “oasis spaces” for a variety of African American travelers, according to the museum.

The eight vibrant panels form the traveling display feature images of business owners, travelers, and historic and present-day images of Green Book sites in the state. The words of African American travelers and descendants of Green Book site owners are featured prominently in the exhibit. Each of the stories are from oral histories the African American Heritage Commission collected in 2018 and 2019.

Two identical versions of the exhibit are touring the state’s African American cultural centers, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, history museums, historic sites and libraries.

The next stop on the coast for the traveling exhibit is the Museum of the Albemarle. The panels will be on display Sept. 6-Oct. 29 at the Elizabeth City museum. For more tour dates across the state, visit https://aahc.nc.gov/green-book-project.

Also on the website there is an online exhibit that explores North Carolina’s Green Book Project, as well as details on the Green Book Project, listings, a project map and more educational resources.

The exhibit was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Paul E. Hosier’s “Seacoast Plants of the Carolinas” has earned recognition from the American Library Association.

Published by North Carolina Sea Grant and the University of North Carolina Press, the guide for coastal plant identification was recognized by the American Library Association Government Documents Round Table as a 2019 Notable Government Document, State and Local Selection.

“We are particularly pleased with this honor because the book was nominated by one of our colleagues at the State Library of North Carolina,” said Katie Mosher, North Carolina Sea Grant’s communications director.

“Seacoast Plants of the Carolinas” also was chosen as a 2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

“Subtitled, ‘New Guide for Plant Identification and Use in the Coastal Landscape,’ the book has been hailed as an accessibly written and authoritative guide, as Hosier introduces plant life in the coastal zone of the Carolinas for nature lovers, gardeners, landscapers, students, and community leaders,” according to a release last week from Sea Grant.

Larry Tise, adjunct research professor in the department of history at East Carolina University, will give a new take on the Outer Banks as they existed when the Wright brothers arrived at the turn of the 20th century, the topic of his newly polished book, “Circa 1903.”

The discussion set for 6 p.m. Jan. 23 at Coastal Studies Institute ECU Outer Banks Campus in Wanchese is part of the Science on the Sound lecture series held monthly.

Tise delves into the lives of those who called the seemingly remote barrier islands home when the Wrights invited flight in the early 1900s.

“His book offers fresh light on the life, culture, and environment of the Carolina coast at the opening of the twentieth century, an era marked by transportation revolutions and naked racial divisions. Tise subtly displays how unexplored photographs reveal these dramatic changes, transforming how we’ve thought of the Outer Banks for more than a century,” according to the university.

A native of North Carolina, Tise has two degrees from Duke University and his doctorate from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. He is the former director of the state Division of Archives and History and the Wilbur and Orville Wright Distinguished Professor of History at East Carolina University from 2000 to 2015.

The program will also be streamed live on the Coastal Studies Institute YouTube channel.

NEW HANOVER COUNTY — Orrin H. Pilkey and Gilbert M. Gaul will be making two stops here on their book tour, “Old Men and the Sea,” later this month.

Pilkey, co-author of “Sea Level Rise: A Slow Tsunami on America’s Shores,” and Gaul, author of “The Geography of Risk: Epic Storms, Rising Seas and the Costs of America’s Coasts will discuss these recent publications at North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Wrightsville Beach office at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 24, and 7-8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 25,  in the New Hanover County Public Library Pine Valley Branch, 3802 S. College Road, Wilmington.

Pilkey, 84, is the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus of Geology at Duke University and the author and coauthor of numerous books. His work focuses on both basic and applied coastal geology.

Gaul, 68, has won the Pulitzer Prize twice and been a finalist four additional times. For more than 35 years, he was an investigative journalist for The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and other newspapers.

Both books will be available for purchase.

Many a beach-going visitor to the Outer Banks has no clue that a rare maritime forest straddles the west side of Nags Head and Kill Devil Hills. But even locals may not know that Nags Head Woods was home to a vibrant community for close to a century.

All that remains today are four family cemeteries, and on a ridge far above Roanoke Sound, footings of long-gone buildings.

But now there is also a newly reissued book  “‘Everyone Helped His Neighbor’: Memories of Nags Head Woods,” by Lu Ann Jones and Amy Glass, that restores the history of the tight-knit community to its rightful place in the Outer Banks zeitgeist, told through interviews in the late 1980s with elder folks who grew up under the trees.

“What a privilege it was to do the local history interviews,” Jones told a small audience at a recent discussion and book signing in Nags Head. “I don’t think we knew we were breaking that kind of ground, but we’re very proud to share those voices.”

First published in 1987 by The Nature Conservancy, the nonprofit owner of 1,200-acre Nags Head Woods Preserve, the book, which was re-released in July, includes a new forward and afterword by the authors, as well as a few minor corrections, but otherwise it is the same.

“Amy and I always thought this book had life,” Jones said.  “And indeed it does.”

Of the 60 or so people who attended the event, about 40 were descendants of the Nags Head Woods community, Jennifer Gilbreath, Nature Conservancy conservation coordinator and organizer of the event, said in an interview.

“‘Everyone Helped His Neighbor’” was out of print for some time, although it is uncertain for how long, or how many had been originally printed, she said.

“I think it was really important that this project gave Outer Banks people from Nags Head Woods the opportunity to tell their story.”

Lu Ann Jones

Gilbreath said that a phone call last year from Kill Devil Hills town clerk Mary Quidley asking if the preserve had a copy of the 1987 book had first sparked her curiosity.

As it turned out, the conservancy had no copy, she said, and nor did anyone else.

“I found one on eBay for $50,” Gilbreath said. “It was the only one I could find.”

Intrigued, she kept following the publishing crumbs, and eventually found support from the University of North Carolina Scholarly Press to pursue a new printing. Once she tracked down Jones and Glass, who had remained friends, there was no going back.

As part of the Southern Oral History Program at University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Jones and Glass had spent about two intense weeks in 1986 doing in-person interviews with about 10 surviving members of the Woods community, which had once numbered 40 families.

In between the narrative history of the Outer Banks and Nags Head Woods, the 67-page book stitches together historic photographs and long paragraphs of memories and anecdotes quoted from the interviews.  By using the interviewees’ own voice, the book chronicles the daily routines of their lives, told in surprisingly vivid detail.

In one example, Evelyn Wise Gray recalled how she caught crabs as a teenager to peddle to “summer people” for good money:

“I’d get up mornings before day, and go lay down on a hill waiting for the soft crabs to come, because I wanted to be the first up … I’d just grab ‘em; I could never do nothing with a dip net. Sneak up on ’em and feel ’em out with my toe and pick ’em up. . . And in the afternoon when I caught all my crabs and got ’em shedded, well, I’d pack ’em in wet grass and go along, ‘Wanna buy some crabs?’ to every house.”

“I think it was really important that this project gave Outer Banks people from Nags Head Woods the opportunity to tell their story,” Jones said in a telephone interview.

Most of the people the young women had spoken with were then in their 60s, with some as old as age 93, and had left the woods in their teen or young adult years. Most interviews were done at the subject’s home and lasted about an hour and a half, although one woman chose to communicate through letters. Each interview was recorded and later transcribed.

When a few clips from interviews were played at the event, the thick Outer Banks brogue of the people speaking sounded as long gone as the days they were reminiscing about.

“I think the stories of the narrators stayed with me for a long time,” said Jones, who is employed as a National Park Service historian. “The people we talked to remain very much alive to us through those stories.”

It was a revelation from the interviews, Jones said, to learn that people from Nags Head Woods, and by extension, the Outer Banks, were quite mobile and interconnected, even “cosmopolitan.”

“These people were not isolated,” she said. “In a maritime world, you can go lots of places in a boat.”

Before World War I, the community in Nags Head Woods was vibrant and thriving. At its height, according to the Conservancy website, it had  “13 homesites, two churches, a school, a store, farms, a gristmill, and a shingle factory.”

In what could be considered a precursor to the modern Outer Banks’ economy, the Nags Head Wood community was in part an outgrowth of serving the nascent tourism business, “summer people” who started coming in the 1830s to the sound side south of Jockey’s Ridge. History is fuzzy as to when people settled down in the woods, but some of the headstones in the Baum cemetery record deaths in the 1860s.

Compared with the open exposure to the coastal elements of much of the barrier islands, the maritime forest was sheltered by large dunes: Jockey’s Ridge on its south and Run Hill on the north. Most houses were built from timber cut down in the woods or salvaged from shipwrecks, high on a ridge away from the risks of surf and tide.

Men made a living farming and fishing. Women cleaned, cooked and peddled crabs, helped by children who were also expected to do their share of work.

Residents raised chickens, hogs and cows – it was open range until 1937 – gathered nuts, hunted, picked figs and berries, grew gardens, spun yarn, made curtains. For fun, they shared a big Sunday dinner after church, visited with friends and family and built bonfires on the beach.

“For me, this really encapsulates a moment in time, where I was very much embedded in the community.” Glass said, adding that she was impressed by the descriptions of “really back-breaking work” done by both men and women – “all the hauling, all the moving from the ocean side to the sound side.”

The people who were interviewed had grown up on the Outer Banks when the few motor vehicles on the islands traveled on sand roads and nearly everything they had – their buildings, their clothing, their food, their boats – was made or provided by their family or someone in their community. Horses, boats and walking were the means of transportation.

“They were scrappy people,” she said. “They used their resources well.”

But with the two World Wars, change came quickly. Many men left to join the military or work at the shipyards. By the time the last of the Nags Head Woods community moved away in the 1950s, people were traveling everywhere by motor vehicles and airplane and the Outer Banks was at the cusp of an explosion in tourism and development.

Glass, who works in the technical design field, fondly recalled her conversations with the older folks who grew up at such a unique place and time.

“Oh, it was fun,” she said. “The generosity of those narrators – to be willing to spend time with virtual strangers and really tell us in great details their stories, their family histories, and to patiently answer our questions – it’s really a gift to hear from that generation, particularly now because they’re no longer living. “

Compared with today’s distracted culture, Glass said, those folks in Nags Head Woods seemed to have shared more of life’s difficulties and pleasures with their friends and neighbors.

“They were proud of how they lived,” Glass said. “They lived simple lives, as they said, ‘but we were happy.’ That theme really comes through in the book.”

BEAUFORT — New York Times bestselling author Paul Greenberg will speak about his new book, “The Omega Principle: Seafood and the Quest for a Long Life and a Healthier Planet” 6 p.m. Tuesday, July 31, in Duke University Marine Lab auditorium, 135 Duke Marine Lab Road.

In “The Omega Principle,” Greenberg investigates the history, science and business behind omega-3 fatty acids, the story of which is intertwined with human health and the future of the planet.

Greenberg, author of “Four Fish” and “American Catch,” is the winner of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature, a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation and the writer-in-residence at the Safina Center, according to the university. He has been featured on “Fresh Air with Terry Gross,” TED and is the subject and co-writer of the 2017 Frontline PBS special “The Fish on My Plate.”

This summer, Greenberg is co-teaching a course at Duke University Marine Lab.

The author will be available for book signings, available on site for cash purchase only, after his talk.

Persons with disabilities who anticipate needing accommodations or who have questions about physical access can contact Courtney Edwards at Courtney.Edwards@duke.edu before the event.

Learn More

• About The Omega Principle 
• About the Author

OCEAN — A new book about the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s work to help organize local efforts to protect important places on the North Carolina coast has recently been published and is available on the federation’s website.

Glenn Blackburn, professor emeritus of history at University of Virginia’s College at Wise, wrote “Saving Great Places” based on interviews he has conducted with federation staff, board members and supporters. The complete interviews are on file at the University of North Carolina Wilmington Randall Library as part of a special collection of federation papers.

“What got me started on this project was my admiration for a number of people — Todd Miller, Willy and Feather Phillips and Ann Braddy in the peat mine fight; Lena Ritter in the Stump Sound fight; Frank Nesmith and Bill Ducker in the Bird Island campaign; and many others — who did something really important for the North Carolina coast and need to be remembered,” Blackburn said.

“Saving Great Places” focuses specifically on five projects the federation and coastal residents took on to protect the North Carolina coast. The first chapter focuses on the organization’s first big environmental victory — stopping a proposed peat mining operation that would have destroyed wetlands and affected fisheries in the Albemarle-Pamlico peninsula. Todd Miller, executive director and founder of the federation, helped organize successful local opposition to that proposed operation from 1982-84.

The book also covers the federation’s work to protect Permuda Island in Stump Sound in Onslow County in the 1980s and Bird Island in Brunswick County in the 1990s and early 2000s. In both cases, the federation helped provide a voice for local opposition to proposed developments on the islands. Both places are now protected in perpetuity.

The book’s fourth chapter explores how the federation from 2003-07 worked to get the North Carolina General Assembly to approve new solid waste legislation, thereby stopping the development of a landfill proposed for Navassa, a predominately black community near Wilmington.

Its final chapter is devoted to the federation’s successful fight against Titan America LLC, a Greek-owned company that wanted to build a coal-fired cement plant in Castle Hayne in New Hanover County. The federation helped organize community efforts from 2008 to 2016 to prevent the plant from being constructed.

“We are honored that Glenn chose to write a book about the federation,” Miller said. “I hope readers will see that each effort to protect great places along the coast had in common a dedicated and determined group of people who worked the front lines to make sure that these critical areas were not developed or destroyed.”

The book is available online at nccoast.org/savinggreatplaces.

In a book published by the University of North Carolina Press, “North Carolina’s Barrier Islands: Wonders of Sand, Sea, and Sky,” nature photographer and ecologist David Blevins offers a visual journey to North Carolina’s barrier islands through more than 150 photographs of the dynamic areas. From snow geese midflight to vistas along otherworldly dunes, Blevins has captured the natural diversity of the North Carolina coast in detail.

The full-color images were photographed in Currituck Banks, the Cape Hatteras and Cape Lookout National Seashores and islands of the southern coast. The book not only captures the beauty of these natural features, but also serves as an appeal for their conservation in the face of an uncertain future.

The book also features photographs of wild horses from along the state’s coast, dazzling sunsets and text that explains the history and value of the barrier islands. Detailed captions accompanying the photos illustrate the natural scenes, inviting the reader to walk along the beaches, dunes, marshes, tidal creeks and maritime forests with Blevins.

The book documents the effects of encroaching human development, including a photo of a destroyed N.C. 12 on Hatteras Island, where Chickinacommock Inlet once existed, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. Another photograph shows the contrast between the wild, untouched dunes of Bird Island compared to the developed shoreline of Myrtle Beach in the distance.

Coastal wildlife captured in the photographs mostly documents birds, including sanderlings looking for food along a shoreline, brown pelicans sitting on their eggs in a nesting colony, a tricolored pelican perched on a branch and royal terns standing guard over their chicks. The elusive painted bunting makes an appearance towards the end of the book, like a present best saved for last.

Among the book’s most unique photographs is that of a loggerhead sea turtle making her way back to the water with the Milky Way in the night sky above her.

Blevins is also the author of “Wild North Carolina: Discovering the Wonders of Our State’s Natural Communities.”

Learn More

• Buy the book through University of North Carolina Press

I probably should own a Kindle, but I don’t. I’m too enamored with cookbooks in my hands. More than 100 volumes line above-cabinet shelves encircling my kitchen. Each time I write a Coastal Review food story, I get to dive into the pages of my absolute favorites. They’re the books about North Carolina and Southern cuisine. They bring me home and, oftentimes, to tears of joy and nostalgia. Sometimes, I keep one on the pillow next to me when I turn out the lights.

Each of these books helps tell the story of Eastern North Carolina cooking. They are essential reading for anyone who loves our coast.

Coastal Carolina Cooking

This list is in no particular order, except for this book. Each time I read it, which is often, I can clearly visualize North Carolina home cooks stew-frying a mess of spots and sweet potatoes. I can hear their brogues and dialects, see the sunlight brightening their happy kitchen curtains.

In the 1980s, authors Nancy Davis and Kathy Hart traveled from Currituck County south to Brunswick County to document traditional cooks and their recipes. Coon stew, baked shad roe and molasses popcorn are the kinds of old-fashioned recipes they gathered. The slim tome contains no photographs. Pencil sketches depict each cook. A map delineates their locations. You won’t find contemporary restaurant dishes, just down-home family food. “They can hardly believe you are asking about their recipes,” Davis and Hart write, “ones that were passed along from a relative or neighbor and are as much a part of coastal tradition as boat building and net making… They told us about their families, their traditions, their way of life – all in the context of food.”

University of North Carolina Press, 1986. $19.99

Mariner’s Menu: 30 Years of Fresh Seafood Ideas

Back in the early 1970s, North Carolina Sea Grant tapped Carteret County cooks to develop seafood recipes that would help fishers and seafood processors market the catch. In Morehead City kitchens, author Joyce Taylor directed the mostly women. The crew had a lifetime of knowledge about traditional North Carolina seafood cookery, but they also developed and tested new ideas. Sea Grant published their efforts in this seafood bible in 2003. It’s not just full of recipes. How to select, handle, clean and store seafood as well as various cooking methods such as poaching, broiling, clarifying butter and flaking fish are included. Recipes range from classic crab cakes and shrimp bisque to contemporary orange-marinated snapper. The work of these cooks continues and is documented regularly at the Mariner’s Menu blog, marinersmenu.org

University of North Carolina Press, 2003. $29.95

Island Born and Bred

Harkers Island has changed rapidly over the past decade or so. Development has placed new residents between longtime family homes. Island traditions are preserved in this part cookbook, part history of Harkers Island. Each chapter starts with a different aspect of island life: early settlements, churches, schools, legends, traditions, change. Find recipes old and new, some illustrated with simple sketches: a shoreline baptism, men building wooden boats, Nettie Lewis Brooks in a bonnet sitting on the “pizer,” the name islanders gave their porches. The book contains a dictionary of island expressions. Recipes speak to family meals built on the local bounty and eventually modern conveniences. Chicken and pastry, baked bluefish with onions and potatoes and raisin pie share space with cheese balls, three-minute barbecue sauce and no-bake banana pudding.

Harkers Island United Methodist Women, 1987. $1995

Holy Smoke

North Carolina’s coastal plain is not all about seafood. “One friend from down east has gone so far as to claim that barbecue is the great sacrament of our people,’” authors John Shelton Reed, Dale Volberg and William McKinney write. They trace barbecuing all the way back to the Old Testament and then through to Native Americans grilling fish in the 1500s on the Carolina coast and finally to the pulled pork eastern and western North Carolinians argue over today. Vintage menus, photographs and interesting quotes – “All differences are made as nothing by the benign influence of the barbecue” – pepper the text along with recipes for real-deal sauces, side dishes and desserts.

University of North Carolina Press, 2008. $30

Outer Banks Cookbook: Recipes & Traditions From North Carolina’s Barrier Islands

While everyone else rushes to the Outer Banks for sun, fun and fishing, author Elizabeth Wiegand is drawn to its food. No matter if she shares a recipe from home or one from a restaurant, Wiegand promotes local ingredients, namely seafood fresh from North Carolina waters. The opening chapter tracks Outer Banks culinary history, starting with Native Americans who dried oysters near Buxton before explorers arrived and continuing to modern-day tourists craving grilled mahi tacos. Find recipes for the Humble Hatteras clam chowder that has sustained so many generations of fishers right up to new American grilled wahoo with charred tomato, chipotle and guajillo sauce. The key lime pie visitors crave at popular Basnight’s Lone Cedar Café in Nags Head is in there, too.

Globe Pequot, 2008. $20.

Southern Food

John Egerton chronicles the South’s food ways in what may be the best book on the subject. When I’m researching recipes, say Muscatine jam or hushpuppies, I find them paired with history, factoids and commentaries that put the dishes into perspective. The opening chapter, Pass and Repast: A Gastronomical View of the South, roves through time and various places, helping readers discover how their local food traditions took hold. I most relish the short selections in the margins. Black-and-white photographs and quotations from books, articles, poets, journalists, authors and ordinary people humanize the text and echo the emotions you feel while reading.

University of North Carolina Press, 1987. $32.95

The Southern Heritage Cakes Cookbook

American revolutionists rejected the royals, and Southerners made the layer cake their crown. That’s how it seems to me. Coconut cake, carrot cake, red velvet cake, pig pickin’ cake, no Eastern North Carolina groaning board is complete without layer cakes weighing down one end of the table. The mile-high frosting delivery systems sweeten many of this book’s pages. My copy dates to the original 1983 printing. Its age enhances old photos and the vintage advertisements for eggs, cocoa and other baking essentials slipped between recipes. The narrative and anecdotes tell the history of cakes. In times long past, layer cakes were one of the few creative outlets for many Southern women. Hence the reason we enjoy so many delightful varieties.

Oxmoor House, 1983. Prices vary at Amazon.com

Joanna Cole will read from her latest  “The Magic School Bus” at the N.C. Coastal Federation’s ice cream social Saturday. Photo source: Shanghai Family

WRIGHTSVILLE BEACH — “We’re being frizzled again!” said Arnold, riding a heat wave head-first towards the Earth. The character from the children book series, The Magic School Bus, is on yet another wild field trip with his whacky science teacher, this time learning about climate change. For those who have grown up with Ms. Frizzle, this Saturday is your chance to meet the woman behind the famous fictional teacher and hear about her last book.

Join Joanna Cole, the author of The Magic School Bus series, and the N.C. Coastal Federation for an ice cream social on Saturday at the Fred and Alice Stanback Coastal Education Center on Wrightsville Beach. Fans are encouraged to dress up as the characters and bring their favorite book from the series or buy one at the event for Cole to sign.

The Magic School Bus is a series of children’s books about science. The award-winning series has been published around the world in several languages with over 58 million books in print.

“Although people consider these books factual books, I consider them more conceptual books,” said Cole. “They’re about how the world works.”

Kids don’t have to be interested in the water cycle to have fun reading about the adventures that Ms. Fizzle, the science teacher, takes her students on to learn about science. In a bit of role reversal, it is the teacher who wants to go out of the classroom and the students who would rather stay inside taking spelling tests where it’s safe.

“Her enthusiasm carries the class to where no class has gone before!” said Cole. That is, to the bottom of the ocean and to the far reaches of the solar system and now around the world to witness the effects of global warming.

Her latest book, The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge, is the most politically-sensitive subject that the series has touched on to date, and her next book is about evolution.

The Magic School Bus book series is read by children from around the world. Joanna Cole and her illustrator Bruce Degen pose with a group of school children in China.  Photo sources: Shanghai Family

“The Magic School Bus series, we consider it to be a contribution to science literacy,” said Cole. “We didn’t want to avoid a subject because some people were denying that it was factual.”

In The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge, Ms. Frizzle drives a flying school bus to the Arctic and then around the world to see how the planet is changing. They’ll go high into the atmosphere to see carbon dioxide molecules and slide down a sunbeam to the Earth as they learn about the greenhouse effect. By the end of book, kids will learn about fossil fuels, alternative energies and, of course, what they can do to help.

Cole, the illustrator Bruce Degen and the publishers at Scholastic weren’t afraid of a little controversy. In fact, Cole said, “We wanted to write about something that was controversial.”

“I said to my editor, ‘Global warming is not really controversial and by the time this book comes out it won’t be a controversy anymore.’ Well I was wrong about that,” said Cole.

The book was published in 2010, and Cole believes now that climate change has become “undeniable in people’s everyday experience,” there is greater awareness of its urgency.

“Kids are no exception,” she said. “Kids should know about it and talk about it and they should talk to their elders about it. They can be a real influence because it’s their world that’s being changed.”

Scattered throughout the books are boxes labeled “kids can…” that suggest how kids can make a difference by conserving and recycling and others labeled “a little can do a lot” with interesting facts, like “If your town recycled 2,000 pounds of aluminum cans, it would save enough energy to heat the typical home for 10 years.” At the end of the book, the students are writing letters to their Congress people, inspiring their school and involving their town.

Here are two pages in The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge where the fictional class learns about the greenhouse effect by traveling on sunbeams and heat waves. Photo: Tess Malijenovsky

“Will the Earth really be okay, Ms. Frizzle?” Asks the class at the end of the book.

“I hope so,” said the Friz. “Our only chance is to work together – every person, every city, every country.”

“When you’re writing about climate change it’s pretty hard to be funny,” Cole said. Yet Cole manages to tell the multi-faceted nature of the climate challenge in a light and humorous tone and in a fun and easy read.

For each Magic School Bus book that Cole writes, she spends about six months reading scholarly articles, journals and books about the subject. When the manuscript is complete and after all the illustrations are drawn, the book is sent to an expert on the subject for feedback.

Joanna Cole believes kids are no exception to the discussion on climate change. Photo source: Five On the Fly

“We’re sticklers for accuracy,” said Cole of herself and the illustrator, Degen. “We even keep up with the information and make corrections as the years go by.”

When astronomers decided that Pluto would no longer be considered a planet, The Magic School Bus Lost in the Solar System had been out for several years, and Ms. Frizzle had visited Pluto-the-planet in the book. Cole and Degen later changed the story and illustrations to reflect the updated information.

The book series attracts a much larger age range than one would think. Cole says that she originally intended to target third graders. But since the first one was published in 1986, she’s learned that children as young as 3-years-old to college students and professors read her books.

“It’s not surprising to me that adults would learn things from not only The Magic School Bus but any good children’s science book,” Cole said.

Cole had been publishing children’s books for 16 years before she wrote the first Magic School Bus book. Her first book was about cockroaches because she loved catching and inspecting insects as a child.

“I loved science as a child and I had a wonderful science teacher named Ms. Bear,” Cole said.

Cole modeled Ms. Frizzle after her seventh grade science teacher and Degen made her look like his geometry teacher. Cole said that Ms. Bear wasn’t quite as “nutty” as Ms. Frizzle, but like the fictional character she had a great enthusiasm for her subject.

You can learn more about Cole’s writing process and listen to her read from The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge this Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. at the education center on Wrightsville Beach. More details about the price of the event can be found here.

Reprinted from the Outer Banks Voice

There is no denying our choice to live on barrier islands places us at odds with nature.

Like Holland’s lowlands or Venice’s island/canal world, our geological existence has been but a wink in the eye of time.

Whether man’s engineering feats, be they windmills and dikes, flood gates and canals, or replacing sand on the beach, can succeed or even be contemplated should be the true center of debate as we plan our future.

Instead, opponents of attempting hold back the forces of nature most often frame the argument in terms of class warfare.

Those who directly benefit from the beach — the “rich folks” who own the homes and businesses near the oceanfront — are pitted against everyday residents.

Proponents of manmade intervention can be just as stubborn. They ignore data indicating rising seas or climate change, while failing to realize that the present form of the northern Outer Banks is barely 500 years old.

Proponents would rather debate whether man or nature is causing climate change, an argument that sadly breaks down all too often along partisan lines.

Enter a refreshing change in the dialog about our present and future.

In 2011, Stanley Riggs and three colleagues, Dorothea V. Ames, Stephen J. Culver, and David Mallison published The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast: Evolutionary History, Present Crisis & Vision for the Future.

Riggs is a geologist and distinguished research professor, heading up a research program at East Carolina University that draws support from the U.S. Geological Survey, the National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife and UNC-Chapel Hill.

Riggs uses data from our past and present about climatic conditions without getting into the middle of whether such changes are natural or man-caused processes.

The Battle for North Carolina’s Coast is a relatively quick read. There are barely 100 pages of actual text, and those are filled with numerous graphs and pictures, reducing the amount of prose even more significantly.

To understand our present crisis and aid our future planning, Riggs et al spend considerable time on our geological and climatic past.

Here’s is N.C. 12 on Hatteras Island on Aug. 28, 2011, after Hurricane Irene. Stan Riggs thinks keeping the road intact may no longer be possible. Photo: Randy Mitchell, Army

Our past includes more than 23 periods of time over the course of one million years where glaciers have advanced and retreated, greatly altering our coastal shoreline.

Our barrier islands are in the approximate middle of where the Atlantic Ocean has waxed and waned. Our mainland has extended as much as 30 to 60 miles eastward, with barrier islands moving eastward along the continental shelf.

Other times, when glaciers retreat, can bring the oceanfront closer to the present mainland, with barrier islands moving landward as the waters advance.

Interspersed with these long-term geological changes are short-term changes involving the powerful storms that regularly visit our shores.

Riggs tracks, as much as current data allows, the cycle of hurricanes and nor’easters going back about 300 years, with more reliable data from the late 19th century forward.

It is these storm cycles, which also seem to wax and wane in frequency and power along regular cycles, that can alter the islands’ profiles radically over short periods of time.

Finally, Riggs takes us through the history of the islands since Europeans first visited about 500 years ago and demonstrates how current changes appear to be altering the islands at a more rapid pace, similar to the way our current configuration appeared 500 years ago.

He notes how inlets and the width of islands have changed significantly, coming and going, moving westward and southward in just that short period of time.

Tying the two geological and climatic cycles together, Riggs notes we are experiencing both an increase in storm frequency as well as evidence of rising sea levels that might herald the start of another global warming cycle over the (very) long term.

The book then describes the two types of barrier islands that compose our outer shoreline. Some of the islands Riggs calls “simple.” These are narrow strips of land without much underlying superstructure and therefore very susceptible to change by storm systems.

The authors, from left: Stan Riggs, Dorothea Ames, Stephen Culver and David Mallison. Photo: ECU

Other islands and parts of simple islands are classified as complex. These islands have a different substrata, are significantly wider, higher in elevation and feature westward dune lines.

Riggs proposes different future courses of action for the two systems.

South of Oregon Inlet, Riggs states the mostly simple structure of Pea Island and other parts of Hatteras are no longer worth saving. The lifeline of those villages, N.C. 12, can no longer be moved westward in many places.

New inlets will continue to open, Riggs feels, and building one new bridge, such as the span over the new inlet created by Irene, doesn’t preclude other inlets opening up just “down the road.”

Riggs acknowledges that the option to replace the Bonner Bridge with a long span from South Nags Head to Rodanthe, leaving Pea Island to Mother Nature, is one possibility, albeit very expensive.

As an alternative, Riggs proposes “A String of Pearls” with population centers focusing on the more complex substructures supporting Rodanthe/Salvo/Waves, Avon, Buxton, Frisco and Hatteras villages.

The islands could be served by high-speed ferries, private charter boats and other methods, including mainland parking lots where cars would be left and only people would be transported to these locales.

Some smaller islands might evolve into sparsely populated luxury resorts, eco-tourism sites or primitive camping areas, while the main villages would take on a character and economy similar to Ocracoke Island.

He envisions “world-class ecotourism” destinations similar to those adopted in other areas of the world.

Along our northern beaches, Riggs acknowledges that development has made these economies more similar to larger coastal resorts.

He calls these areas “Islands of Opportunity” and even states some areas might benefit from “holding the shoreline.”

Even so, Riggs sees sea-level rise and increasing storm cycles as very real threats between now and the turn of the next century.

He believes the political and economic discussions for the next generation should entail considerable planning and attention to detail regarding our underlying shoreline framework and requires detailed adaption policies in our planning.

He also advises creation of rolling buffer zones that would call for buildings on pilings to allow storm water to pass and even feed the west side of the islands.

The book offers no panacea, and Riggs and his co-authors freely admit their ideas may not be accepted as economically, politically or even technologically acceptable.

But his ideas are worth bringing into our present discussions. The year 2100 is less than two generations away. Thinking only about the short-term has been a constant human failing.

This book deserves a read by all coastal residents, including those residing along our past (and perhaps future) shoreline in Elizabeth City, New Bern and other towns.

Related Stories

• Geologist Offers New Vision of N.C. Coast
• Sea-Level Rise? Get Used to It
• Seas Rising Faster Along Northern Outer Banks