The Outer Banks, Sand, Wreck, and Weather

From the Virginia line south to Cape Lookout, a chain of narrow barrier islands hangs off the North Carolina coast like a loose thread, separated from the mainland by sounds so shallow that, in places, you can wade across. These are the Outer Banks: three hundred miles of Atlantic beach, almost no natural harbors, and some of the most treacherous water in the Western Hemisphere. The zone where the warm Gulf Stream meets the cold Labrador Current just off Cape Hatteras has been wrecking ships since the first Spanish and English vessels entered these waters in the fifteen hundreds.

Sailors called it the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Estimates put the number of sunken vessels off the North Carolina coast at more than five thousand. The Monitor, the famous Union ironclad, went down in a storm sixteen miles south of Cape Hatteras in December of eighteen sixty-two.

German U-boats sank nearly seventy Allied ships in these same waters during the first months of nineteen forty-two, close enough to shore that residents could see the fires. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, first completed in eighteen seventy, stands about one hundred ninety eight feet tall, the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States. By the nineteen nineties, erosion had brought the sea to within one hundred feet of its base.

In nineteen ninety-nine, engineers moved the entire structure on a system of hydraulic dollies, relocating it twenty-nine hundred feet inland from where it had stood. It took twenty-three days. The Banks themselves are transient, reshaped by every major hurricane, migrating slowly southward over geologic time.

The towns on them, Ocracoke and Hatteras and Avon and Rodanthe, carry that impermanence in their architecture and their calendars. They are beautiful and precarious in exactly equal measure.