This Book is a prototype. It is intended as a sample for use in editing, fundraising, promotion,and select previews. It is not intended for commercial sale or distribution. It is not the final version of the book. Book size, page count, and printing quality are not indicative of the final version, which will be printed in duotone on Scheufelen Phoenix Motion Xantur paper and hard-bound, measuring approximately 9x12 inches. Take, view, enjoy, and please pass your comments on to me. Thank You,
Christopher Bickford
3. prelude 10. Prelude
22. Genesis: Outer Banks
25. after the Storm
38. After the Storm 58. The Five Senses of the Sandbar
81. The Ghost Dance 107. Excerpts from an indian Summer
124. The Campfire Legends 127. Shooting the Pier 128. Avon Sunday 130. The Waves of September 11
153. Oral History 155. The Rise and fall of the Gov’ner’s surf club 159. The Bonner Bridge incident 172. Rogue’s Gallery 176. MAP
Prelude Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere.
Prelude It was, from the beginning, a fool’s errand. On a diamond-speckled Outer Banks morning, many Januaries ago, I stepped into a brand-new pair of rubber chest waders and walked into the ocean, clutching a two thousand dollar camera. I didn’t mean to go far. I just wanted to get a little closer. I wanted to explore, with this light-gathering machine that had become my life’s obsession, the chaotic beauty of breaking whitewater, the fractal magic of mist blowing off the lip of a perfect barrel, the marbled-meat formations of seafoam being sucked back into yet another explosion of swell onto shore. I’d seen all this and more, in boardshorts and wetsuits, surfing and swimming in the vast playground of the Atlantic. Sublime moments, come and gone in the blink of an eye. I wanted pictures. I told myself, just a few feet into the ocean. That’s all. But my enthusiasm got the best of me. High on the visual distortion of a wide-angle lens, I lost perspective, and waded too close into a dredging shorebreak wave, whose backslapping rip knocked me off of my feet and sucked me under. Instinctively I shot my right arm up in the air as the rest of me took a cold, wet beating. Seconds later I surfaced, my head drenched, my waders filled with pebbly sand and freezing-cold saltwater, my camera miraculously unscathed. I had managed to fire off two frames of the wave, both of which remain with me as records, talismans, warnings from my first ill-equiped attempts at bringing a vague idea to fruition. That afternoon I went online and ordered a waterproof housing for my camera. Two days later, it arrived at my doorstep: four pieces of moulded plastic, four metal clamps, an assortment of buttons, all sealed tight with silicone and O-rings. To think this thing would
keep my camera functioning inside a churning, pounding vortex of oceanic fury seemed ludicrous. But, as countless water photographers before me have done, I assembled it, slid my camera inside it, latched it up, and took a leap of faith. It was a small step, one of myriads that I’ve taken in the course of this endeavor. The idea, to capture this world of dune and barrels, wind and rippers, had been with me for years, spawned from countless late afternoons surfing with a few friends, watching the low sun wrap around their silhouettes or light their faces up against a stormy horizon, seeing them launch their fiberglass water-rockets into the sky. But to actually make something out of that idea required some gestation, some thinking and dreaming, and ultimately, the tacit permission of the water-gods to swim my camera into their world and brave the consequences. The distance from my house to the ocean is less than a quarter of a mile. Frrom there the road goes north/south, and it is along this road, NC Highway 12, that I traveled, following the surf, following the light, following the crew, riding shotgun or solo, sniffing out pictures season by season. Hardly an epic journey, but a journey all the same. A journey of flooded cameras, salty sandy red eyes, summer mornings that come too early, and twilit evenings that never seem to last long enough. A journey of ice-cream headaches, near-misses and direct hits, days happily wasted chasing light and surf, afternoons where a phone call or a brief look at the ocean could give me cause to drop all business, no matter how pressing, in pursuit of what I could always rationalize as “art”. A journey peopled with good friends and total strangers, and total strangers who have since become good friends. And foremost, a journey of serendipity, of surfacing with shots that I almost didn’t take or don’t remember
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taking at all; beautifully imperfect shots, many of which would surely have been passed over by editors, but which, seen together as a whole, have taken on a life and painted a picture all their own. I have lived on the Outer Banks for over fifteen years. I still hesitate to call it home, as, like most of my compatriots here, I am a transplant; and like many here, I’m possessed by vagabond shoes, always longing to stray. I’ve traveled widely and extensively, working on other projects and assignments, exploring the world with a photo-machine, barnstorming my way into situations through bluster, connections, and dubious credentials. But as far as I range, and as many times as I’ve taken the measure of some far-off locale and thought, I could live here, I have always returned to these shores. Despite my inner protests about life on this sandbar -- and there are many -- the place has held on loosely to me, offering small gifts to keep me coming back. The gift of surf. The gift of spectral maritime light. The gift of a life as a photographer. The gift of a small, tight-knit, unpretentious community. The gift of friends and companions, and closeness to family. And the gift of perspective. Living on the fluid edge between land and sea, one develops an intuition for the ebb and flow of life’s vicissitudes -- good times, hard times; bonfires and breakups; weeklong gales and bluebird days; periods of high stress, periods of extreme boredom-- they all come and go like so many waves upon the shore, some of them perfect and beautiful, some of them so small you don’t even notice them, some of them big and messy and powerful enough to drown you, but with luck and wits and will, you survive. Life here is a strange combination of regular and irregular rhythms, a drumbeat with shifting accents that always comes back round eventually to the one. And, like that crazy drummer with his sneaky
beats, the spirits that dwell in this place will creep up unannounced and throw out a dazzling sunset, or a crystalline moonrise over the ocean, or a week of weather so perfect it makes you giddy -- just when you’d made your plans and bought your ticket out of here. In my years on the beach I have seen the slow creep of development add hundreds of houses and dozens of commercial buildings to the landscape, and I have watched the relentless pounding of the surf claim its fair share of houses and old hotels from the shoreline in return. I’ve endured harsh winters and slogged through sizzling summers, enjoyed freaky January warm fronts, and witnessed electric August storms lighting up the night for hours on end. I’ve ridden out several major hurricanes, two of which cut inlets straight through this thin strip of sand that we have built our houses on, stranding the communities to the south. And, as everyone here does, I have gotten to be on intimate terms with the winds. I’ve learned the moods and character of each of them: the bone-chilly Northeast, which rips right through your clothes and churns the ocean into an aquatic battlefield of whitewater and salt mist, but also blows in tropical currents from the Gulf Stream and operates as the most consistent source of surf, year in and year out. The steady Southwest, which carries the scent of farms and swamps from the mainland, grooms the ocean to a fine sheen, and in the springtime brings the scent of honeysuckle, which you can smell out in the lineup on those rare perfect days when all the forces align. The humid South, which follows the Southwest on certain hot summer days, picks up speed, and turns a sparkling morning into a blown-out afternoon. And the balmy Southeast, which blows a fine Caribbean mist up the coast on late fall days, promising Indian Summers that can last clear on into January. And last but not
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least, the rare howling Northwest wind, which brings freezing air and the stress of millions down from the Megalopolis. The Northwest brings no warmth and little surf; but we would be nothing without it, for it is along the ghost-path of this wind that our visitors come every summer, fueling the service economy that allows us to live in this place and chase our waterborne dreams. When I first set out to portray this world in pictures, my intent was purely impressionistic. The first series was peopled by silhouettes, mostly taken at dawn or dusk, moody and strange, like the myths and legends of shipwrecks, lost colonies, and sand-covered settlements that haunt this place. Over time, the faces forming those silhouettes became clearer. And faces became people: people with lives and histories. And as they continued to come together, swell in and swell out, I began to think about the importance of the ocean as a place of community. And as I shared my work with others, it became apparent that not only was I creating a little world of my own with these pictures, but I was representing a culture; and incumbent upon me was a certain responsibility to get it right, and to do them proud. That being said, this collection of images is by no means a comprehensive document of life on the Outer Banks and its surfing community. Rather, it is an entirely subjective impression, filtered through my own experience and peopled with a cast of characters that either through conscious collaboration or pure happenstance came within my focus while I was working on the project. There are many talented and important people in the local surf world who are not represented here. Were there enough pages and enough time, I would make this book three times its current size and get everybody in here. But such pedantics would spoil the art of the legend. Or at least that’s my
defense. By the same token, not everyone represented in these images is a “surfer”, or even lives here. But every single one of them has sunk their toes in our sands, played in our waters, and felt the lateafternoon satisfaction of walking barefoot over still-hot weather-beaten wood at the end of a long day in the sun. Just as the border between land and shore twists and shifts and contains a bit of each in the other, so too are the blurry distinctions between tourist and local. Those of us who live here sometimes succumb to the hubris of thinking we own the place, but almost all of us come from somewhere else; and more to the point, nobody owns this place. There are no private beaches on the Outer Banks, and no pay-to-enter schemes to restrict access. By law and by mutual understanding, we’re all part of the same sunburnt, salt-pruned, surf-stoked dysfunctional family, and we all deserve a fair share of the gift of these shores. It is in that spirit that I make this, my humble offering to all who know and love the ocean, whether it be right outside your door or thousands of miles away. Even if you have only seen it in pictures and dreams, it is my hope that these images evoke something of the experience of being lifted up on the ledge of a breaking wave, the excitement of finding yourself propelled along its face, even the sweet satisfaction of getting crunched and taking the force of the ocean’s might right in the chest. And for those of you who know these waters well, who have put in your time and who live and breathe the Outer Banks and have the sunbleached hair and the weatherbeaten skin to prove it, well, I hope that I’ve done you justice, and that in these pages you’ll recognize a bit of the salty world you and I, whether reluctantly or with all the pride in your soul, call home.
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Genesis: Outer Banks From sea and storm this land was formed, and to sea and storm, it shall one day return. When human beings were taking their first steps onto the African savannah, the area that is now the Outer Banks lay under hundreds of feet of water. As those ancestors multiplied, branched off, and went forth through the continents, the earth cooled, and a vast portion of the seas were sucked into the expanding polar ice caps. Most of what is now Canada and Northern Eurasia were buried under glaciers. Hunter-gatherers that had ventured north in milder times were forced south to eke out a living in more temperate zones. The oceans dropped hundreds of feet, and coastlines spread out into the sea, joining islands and peninsulas and creating settlement opportunities and migration-routes that have long since disappeared underwater. On the Atlantic coast of the Western Continents, the falling seas exposed a vast stretch of land reaching 70 miles out into the ocean from its present boundary. The terrestrial space now occupied by the Outer Banks was then an unremarkable, yet-to-be imagined line on a wide coastal plain, covered intermittently by bog, forest, and savannah. Then, sea-currents shifted, wind patterns changed, the earth warmed. Glaciers began to melt, and then to recede, and the waters rose. Coastal settlements had to be abandoned, islets were cut off from the mainland. In Europe, Mesolithic pilgrims escaped the flooding plains of Doggerland and the Adriatic and dispersed into the birch forests that sprang up in the fresh deglaciated uplands, chasing auroch and venison, populating the great boreal peninsulas and islands of Scandinavia and the North Sea. Wandering Asian tribes walked east across a giant land-bridge into the Americas, and the Bering Sea filled in behind them, stranding
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them on a vast unpeopled continent. On the eastern edge of that continent, the low country surrendered to the melting waters. The first humans to reach the coast encountered a vastly different landscape than the one we know today, but what exactly that landscape looked like is hard to say, so rapidly was it changing. Doubtless they were humbled and awed by the moody, land-eating sea they encountered. Eventually, some seven thousand years ago, the climate stabilized. Sea-level rise slowed to an almost imperceptible creep. A new coastline was roughly sketched out. What had once been mighty river valleys were inundated with sea-water, creating a vast estuary system of bays, deltas, and tidal coves. As the the ocean waves chewed into the headlands of these estuaries, longshore currents drove the sandy detritus up and down the shore, creating spits in wrinkles along the tide-line. In major storms the ocean would push against and wash over these spits, slowly building them into dunes and cutting their backs off from the mainland. As the dunes became higher, longer, and more stable, they fused with one another, creating the long stretch of sand we now call the Outer Banks. On the west side of these Banks, a lagoon formed, and without access to the sea the sediments from the rivers piled up on the bottom of the lagoon. Today, in the waters of the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds, the average depth is no more than six feet, across an estuary thousands of square miles wide. Similar -- if less extreme -geological events occured all up and down the coast, and formed a barrier island system stretching from New York to Mexico, fed by the confluence of river sediment and ocean sand, and shaped and molded by wind and waves. All of it, a mere five thousand years old. A nano-blip
in geological time. Most of these islands continued to move inland with the rising sea-levels and prevailing winds, but the Outer Banks grabbed hold and remained stuck out into the Atlantic, as if snagged on something underneath, something slowing their westward movement. If these islands were formed as part of a grand design, it was certainly not for human habitation. Geographers call them barrier islands to connote a purpose, and that purpose is generally considered to be to protect the mainland. They have always been difficult places to live, and settlers have always known them to be thus. Even the inhabitants of the legendary Lost Colony had originally intended to build their New World in the friendlier waters of the Chesapeake Bay, and would have done so were it not for the whims of a recalcitrant sea-captain. Aside from a small group of Croatan Indians living in the sheltered woods behind the Great Cape, and the occasional hunting party from the mainland, early explorers found the Outer Banks to be uninhabited. And for good reason. It is nearly impossible to grow corn -- or any other vegetable suitable for human consumption -- in the sandy, salt-battered earth here. And while the waters teem with the bounty of ocean and marsh, they are also extremely dangerous. Shoaling channels and heavy seas have claimed more than enough lives for the region to earn the title of Graveyard of the Atlantic. Since first mapped by explorers, twenty-six inlets have existed on the Outer Banks, usually pierced open in a matter of hours by violent hurricanes, and then closed up over decades by the slow southwestern migration of sand and seed. The new millenium alone has already seen two such inlets formed, impressing upon those of us who live here the dramatic mechanics of barrier island change. For the first two centuries of
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European-American settlement, the hardy lot that lived on these dunes considered the mainland-facing soundside to be the front of the island, and the exposed ocean side to be the back. Settlements were built around small marshland harbors and inland forests protected by the elements. Mailboats ferried people back and forth across the wide estuary to and from the mainland, often having to wait out violent storms before crossing. Sometime in the nineteenth century, the Outer Banks’ greatest modern resource -- the two-hundred-mile beach that spans its eastern flank -- was first tapped, by planter-aristocrats seeking to escape the malarial summers of the inland South. Slowly, over the course of a century and a half, the vacation industry grew, settlement and construction increased exponentially, and grass and trees were planted to make the place more hospitable. Many aspects of the Outer Banks that we consider to be endemic -- large swaths of the maritime forest, the double-dune system that runs from Carova to Ocracoke, the magnificent Silver Lake on Ocracoke Island -- were engineered, with both private and federal funds, over the better part of the twentieth century. Were the Banks to have remained as they were found at the time of European settlement -- low-lying, virtually desert-like humps of moving sand -- they would seem very inhospitable indeed. In the 1960’s, close on the heels of the California surf revolution, pioneers like Jim Bunch, Bruce Shepherd, and Bob Holland cast a new eye on the ocean and began to exploit what has become, in the twenty-first century, perhaps the Outer Banks’ most mythical resource: Waves. From then to now are all the surfyarns to be told here and elsewhere, all the tall tales of epic winter swells, rides of a lifetime, and hurricanes with names like
Floyd, Isabel, Irene, Katia, and Sandy. Surf culture on the Outer Banks is hardly half a century old, and for most of that time it has remained on the periphery of the vacation industry, its images perfunctorily slapped on the cover of tourist magazines, its momand-pop shops squeezing a profit out of sales of flip-flops, t-shirts and name-brand hoodies in order to keep the racks stocked with boards, leashes and wetsuits for the locals. But in that time the Outer Banks have developed a mystique -- a legend, if you will -- in the larger surfing world. It is a place most surfers have heard of, and increasingly seen photographs of, but which few outside a tight-knit band of east-coast wavehunters have actually surfed. Among those few, however, giants have paddled. In the 1980’s, a 12-year-old Kelly Slater came up from Florida to cut his teeth on heavy waves in the shadow of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. It was arguably this place that moulded him into the eleven-time-and-counting world champion that he has become. In the 1990’s our first native superstar, Noah Snyder, burst on the scene, and put the Outer Banks on the map. And today, Buxton’s Brett Barley is re-defining what it means to be a surf-hero, using the latest technology to document solo sessions at hidden breaks along the Hatteras coast and broadcast the evidence worldwide through online surf media. All while staying home to raise his family. It’s hard to keep Outer Bankers from coming back home, as much of the world as they may see, as many perfect waves as they may surf on exotic shores. Something about this place gets into your bones, makes it hard to live anywhere else. But it comes with a price. Erosion. Sea-level rise. Climate change. These are fighting words in the political arena, but on these beaches it’s just a part of life. The long view of geology and archaeology makes two things very clear: the earth is
constantly changing, and humans have always wrought massive change upon the environment, from deforestation to species anihilation to agriculture to air pollution. Yes, absolutely, our presence affects geography and climate in innumerable ways. But without us, the climate would still be changing, and whatever our fate in the millenia to come, the earth will continue to change long after we are gone. When we build infrastructures upon unstable earth, and that earth begins to crumble under them, we call it erosion, as if to assert our centrality against the natural processes of movement that characterize every inch of the ground beneath our feet. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, continental drift -- these events have constantly shaped and re-shaped the land, and the movement of sand on coastal boundaries like the Outer Banks is no less integral or significant a process. It has always happened, and will continue to happen, despite our heroic efforts to stem the tide. The oceans will continue to rise, until other geological events reverse the process, and then they will fall again. But you and I will be long gone before then. In any case, the surf will continue to come. From summer southwests to autumn tropicals to winter storms now being named things like Athena and Nimo, we’ll get waves. Cottages will crumble, the road will be breached, the sand will migrate. But we’ll still get waves. If sea level rise continues as predicted, these islands will once again be submerged some nine hundred years in the future. But the waves will continue to come. Nothing will stop the movement of the ocean, and the movement of the land, short of a solar event of apocalyptic magnitude. Our time on this sandbar, and its time on earth, are but brief sentences in the annals of epochs. The beginning, the middle, and the end, all slipping into one another, like the churning shoreline that fuels our passions.
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