January 14, 2008

Today's miles: 20.0
Frisco to Okracoke

By morning, everything felt better, newer, drier and I was in better spirits. I woke up early for sunrise and an early 5-6 mile push to the ferry terminal to try and make the 9 am ferry to Ocracoke Island – the schedule is shortened because of roadwork on the island. I passed by a successful fisherman, carrying his arm length fish towards the boardwalk. Otherwise, it was me, the breeze, and the crazy moving clouds creating dazzling morning patterns across the sky – fish scales and puffy rain clouds, and wispy distant high clouds. My friend Seth would have had a field day with all of those cloud patterns!

I got to the ferry terminal and its little oasis comfort station by 8:30 am! I was of course the only walk-on traveler. The ferry took about 40 min to get to Okracoke Island. I chatted a little with the two ferry employees about my trip and basked in their exclamations of amazement, “You’re more of a woman than me!” one said. Off the ferry, I headed straight on down the beach in the wrong direction, where I ended up dead ending in a bog. When I finally got down to the right part of the beach, I hiked for 15 miles into the chilly wild in the bright sunshine. I finally found the wimpy, fenced-in "WILD" ponies down the trail after crawling under a fence looking for them out in the scrubby, expansive “pasture.” They were right by an observation deck, looked very normal pony-like (although they apparently have one less rib than normal ponies and are therefore uniquely adapted to the islands).

At the construction zone (the road is being re-built), I walked out to the beach to walk by the waves down the long, long stretch of beach, passing up multiple ride offers from passing vehicles. After a while, my nose and cheeks began to burn, and felt smooth and stiff – I don’t know whether it is plain old sunburn or windburn. Finally in Okracoke, a biker stopped and asked if I was hiking ‘the trail’ – the trail, imagine that?! And offered me a place to stay. I navigated myself to the library and updated me blog, wimpily. Talked a bit to a guy who is planning on thru-hiking the French part of the Camino de Santiago this summer! A backpacker! And onward to finally stay with Cassie and Jason, the gracious ex-couple who not only offered me a “couch” to sleep on, but a bed and room and shower and washer/dryer AND fajitas. I stayed up until 10 pm, watching The Life Aquatic with them.

Cassie and Jason have been living in Okracoke for two years now, both having graduated from Penn State. They said that one of the neat things about the island community is that everyone seems to have a hidden musical or artistic talent. And that some people have been living there for generations of their families and have plenty of quirks and interesting family histories. We talked about the surge of illegal immigrants on the island competing for jobs and leading to people locking their doors and cars – breaking down the trust of the community.

There are so many things that make islands interesting – their role in evolutionary history especially comes to mind. But there are so many unique things to learn from them – the community that thrives on insular trust. The input-output being a clear equation of whatever is brought in on a ferry boat or pumped into the ocean. The desalination plants making freshwater.

And then there is the history of human relation to the land – from houses on stilts that could be rolled backwards on logs with the advance of the ocean, and as the islands are pushed westward by the tides, to “crotch” structures to try and keep the beach from eroding, and McMansion beach front property insured by the only company stupid enough to insure barrier island property in the path of change, the constant wear of wind and sand and sun, and regular tropical storms and hurricanes: the federal government.

These are the scenes of colonization, WWII battles, shipwrecks since the age of exploration, pirates (near Okracoke was where Blackbeard was killed by General Maynard after his crew killed his crew). Cassie and Jason also told me that Bonner Bridge scored a 4/100 on the safety scale. A little comparison: the Minneapolis bridge was 50/100 on the safety scale. I’m glad that I heard that after walking over it!! No crops at all are grown on the islands, but goddamn they are beautiful and attract some hardy, interesting characters.