For Mona Lisa
In early January of
2008, on a diamond-speckled Outer Banks
morning, I stepped into a pair of rubber chest waders and walked waist-deep into a deceptively strong shorebreak clutching a Canon 5D camera. It was a fool’s errand, a walking into the unknown unprepared and without a plan, but the intention was pure, born of a simple desire to show in pictures things I had only witnessed in boardshorts and wetsuits, pictures that remained lodged in my memory but had no outlet save exhuberant verbal descriptions. I wanted to get my camera inside the grind, to show close up the chaotic beauty of breaking whitewater, the fractal magic of mist blowing off the lip of a perfect barrel. I wanted to find a way to explore and interpret the wild and ever-shifting edge between sea and shore that makes this ribbon of sand I’d been living on so numinous. A $50 dollar investment in fishing wear seemed a small price to pay to be able to stand at that edge in the frosty air and capture the changing light over the water. My enthusiasm got the best of me however, and as often happens when looking through a wide-angle lens, I lost perspective and got a little too close to a breaking wave. It wasn’t a big wave, but it had a powerful rip which knocked me off of my feet and dragged me under. Instinctively I shot my right arm up in the air as the rest of me took a cold, wet beating. A split second later I surfaced, my head drenched, my waders filled with pebbly sand and freezing-cold saltwater, but my camera miraculously unscathed. I had managed to fire off two frames of the wave, both of which remain with me as reminders, talismans, warn-
Introduction ings -- records of my first ill-equiped attempts at bringing a vague idea to fruition. That afternoon I went online and ordered an Aqua-tech sport housing. I figured I had obtained permission -- nay, an exhortation -- from the sea gods to transform gearlust into a necessary equipment purchase. My first session with camera safely inside the housing was a revelation, like learning how to swim for the first time. It was a small step, one of countless small steps that I’ve taken on this backyard journey. The seed of the idea had been with me for years, born out of so many late afternoons surfing with a few friends, watching the low sun wrap around their silhouettes or light their faces up against a stormy horizon, and thinking, damn I wish I had a camera right now. But to actually make something out of that idea required some gestation, some thinking and dreaming, and ultimately, a little help and encouragement from others to shut up and do it already. And so it began, with one step followed by another and another, and so it has continued. It’s been a journey full of ice-cream headaches, near-misses and direct hits flooded cameras, salty sandy red eyes, summer mornings that come too early, and twilit evenings that never seem to last long enough. It’s been a journey full of days happily wasted chasing light and surf; afternoons where a phone call from a friend 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”. It’s been a journey peopled with good friends and total strangers, and total strangers
who have since become good friends. And most of all, it has been a journey of serendipidy, of surfacing with shots that I almost didn’t take or don’t remember taking at all; beautifully imperfect shots which would surely have been passed over by the editors of glossy surf magazines, 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, on and off, for nearly fifteen years. I still hesitate to call it home, as, like most of my companions here, I am a transplant; and like many here, I’m possesed with a vagabond spirit which keeps me forever leaving, but forever returning. 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, as far as I may travel. The gift of surfing. The gift of gorgeous light. The gift of a life as a photographer. The gift of a small, unpretentious community. The gift of friends and lovers, and of a deeper appreciation for my own family. And most of all, the gift of perspective: the gift of a better understanding of the ebb and flow of life’s vicissitudes -- good times, hard times, bonfires and breakups, road trips and music jams, tragedies and getaways, periods of high stress and 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 break you in two, 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 balmy 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 have learned the moods and character of each of them: the bone-chilly Northeast which rips right through your clothes and churns up the ocean, but also blows in warm Gulf Stream water and can raise the ocean temperature ten degrees or more in a single day; 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 wind, which inevitably follows the Southwest on hot summer afternoons, picks up
speed, blows in the black flies, and generally drives everyone a little crazy. And the balmy Southeast wind, 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 least, the rare howling Northwest wind, which brings freezing air and the stress of millions down from the Megalopolis. This wind brings no warmth, no fish, and poor 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. 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 fill it with photos of every Outer Banks surfer I know, and all those I don’t as well. But such pedantics would spoil the art of the legend. At least that’s the best excuse I have to offer. 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 late-afternoon satisfaction of walking barefoot over still-hot weather-beaten wood at the end of a long day in the sun;
and 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, between hardcore surfer and itinerant wave-bobber. Locals are merely visitors who never left, and surfers simply wave-bobbers who have found a better way to enjoy the sensation. Those of us who live and surf here sometimes succumb to the hubris of thinking we own the place, but all it takes is one friendly out-of-town ripper or one annoying local to remind us that 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. --CB
After The Storm
The bad weather comes
out of nowhere. In the blink of a salt-rubbed eye, a perfect day at the beach -- the smell of sunscreen, the squeals of sandy toddlers and the gaggles of bikini-girls, the scorch of sunny skies and the squawk of seagulls— turns into a raging, torrential, wrath-of-god tempest. The wind picks up, the temperature drops ten degrees in as many minutes, the barometric pressure plummets, and the sky takes on dark chiaroscuro tones, ominous against the traces of warm light disappearing on the horizon. Beach lovers, rudely awakened from their seaside reveries, gather their things and scatter like crows. The wind whips the ocean into a froth of whitewater and salt spray, and the sand rises up in a burning mist. The rain, when it comes, comes horizontal and heavy. The Outer Banks, a place depicted in postcards and pamphlets as a land of blue skies and blazing sunsets — now, suddenly, a dark brooding netherworld of cloud, wind, and shifting sand. The storm will last a day, possibly three, maybe seven. Black clouds will hang heavy in the sky, the fierce ocean wind out of the northeast will permeate everything with its damp chill. Most folks will be driven indoors, to hibernate until the next patch of good weather. But here and there, up and down the shore, there are signs of life.
In front of Avalon pier, a rag-tag procession of pickup trucks, SUV’s, and beat-up sedans with racks on top rolls through the parking lot, each vehicle pulling up to a different spot along the bulkhead, and parking to face the sea. They will stay a minute or two, maybe ten or twenty, maybe an hour — engines running, tailpipe smoke wisping in the damp wind — their drivers warm inside, watching, waiting. A few intrepid fishermen brave it out on the pier, the platform trembling with each wave crashing through the rickety pilings, the spray shooting up through the planks and drenching their trousers. Clouds of seafoam roll along the sand, breakers lash against houses laid bare to the ocean’s fury from years of shoreline erosion. Somewhere down the beach, a pack of young gremlins is out surfing the slop, bobbing up and down in the chunky soup, whooping and hollering as the sea tosses them around and whitewater sprays their faces. There’s little hope of getting a decent ride in conditions like this, but the kids don’t care; it’s better than staying inside playing video games. Red flags on the beach flutter furiously, reading “NO SWIMMING”…but no one said anything about surfing. A woman in a raincoat walks past, her hand clasping tightly to the hood, body slanted sideways into the wind, a dog on a leash. A few gulls are swarming around something that
has washed up in the storm. Other than that, the beach is empty. But inside houses all up and down the Outer Banks, surfers are listening to the mechanical voice coming from the NOAA weather radio, its uninflected drone creating a soundtrack for their anticipation: ”Waves. ten to fifteen feet. Winds. east-northeast. at. thirty-five to forty knots. becoming southwest. at. five to ten. by. Sunday.” Conversations in bars, surf shops, 7-11’s and post offices revolve around speculations, predictions, high hopes and jaded doubts. Buoy readings, tide charts,Surfline, Magic Seaweed, the Weather Channel…the dedicated are piecing the conflicting reports together like so many ingredients in a witches’ brew, poring over the information like mad scientists, knowing that however hard they try, they will never know what tomorrow holds. Days of anticipation over an approaching swell often end in total disappointment. Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, beautiful clean lines of peaky A-frames or spitting barrels appear -- rippable, shacking walls of pure energy -- despite all predictions to the contrary. You just never know. The only thing to do is to wake at dawn with coffee in your cup and a prayer in your heart, and go get wet.
Without storms, there would be no
surf. The winds generated by cyclones, hurricanes, nor’easters and low pressure systems
churn up the surface of the ocean; and the nastier the storm, the bigger the surf that is ultimately generated by it. As the waves on the open ocean crash into each other, their energy focuses into swells, directional pulses of energy moving across the ocean’s surface, which close ranks, fan out, and commence a centrifugal march through the unobstructed sea. The further the swells travel away from their tempestuous origins, the more organized and regular they become. But as a swell travels across the open ocean, it eventually begins to lose some of the fierce energy that created it; and if it travels too far, it will gradually fade back into the sea. If, however, it finds itself confronted with a solid obstruction–-a rocky point, a sandy beach, a barely submerged reef–-it will crash and burn violently in an explosion of whitewater and curl, an endlessly-repeating expression of the life force that animates the universe. It is this violent but beautiful death of the swell that makes possible the art of surf. The shape of the ocean floor as it rises to meet the coast pushes and sculpts the toppling swell into an infinite variety of “breaks”; from fat, hollow, beachbreak barrels to long, sloping pointbreaks. As the wave breaks along the shore, it jacks up into a cylindrical wall before crashing over top of itself. Along the fast-moving vertical edge of this wall, surfers explore a magical interplay of gravity and kinetic energy, fusing their
movements with the changing shape and speed of the wave in a performance that is part dance, part communion, and part martial art -- with no small amount of showmanship and bluster from those who can do it well.
T
he surf on the Outer Banks is of a variety generally termed beach break, as opposed to more exotic formations such a reef break or point break. The shoreline is one long, straight stretch of sand, with no bays, promontories, or hard stone of any kind to buffer the wind, or to hold the sand in place. What makes surfing possible here are small hill-sized bumps of submerged sand that collect around piers or form in random spots along the beach from the shifting ocean currents. These underwater dunes -- known commonly as sandbars -- lie just offshore, and as the tide shifts they rise closer to the ocean’s surface, forcing the incoming swells to break over top of them. The shape and position of the sandbars affects the shape and quality of the waves that break there. Some sandbars are steep and evenly-shaped, like cones, forming A-frame waves that break on both sides -- or as they say, rights to the right and lefts to the left. Others are shaped like long wrinkles parallel to the shore, and throw up fast, hollow, tubular waves which are extremely difficult but exhilarating to ride. Some sandbars have low rises and soft edges, and create long, slow, easy waves
-- until the giant swells come and they become big-wave magnets. As a result of these different qualities, different breaks attract different kinds of surfers. Some sandbars have little bumps closer to shore perfect for executing aerial maneuvers, and are sometimes nicknamed “showoff sandbars”. Some hold only steep, critical waves, and anybody out on a crowded day who doesn’t know how to handle them will get the stink-eye from the local crew. Somewhere up the beach there is usually a soft, gently breaking sandbar, which almost always holds friendly, fun waves and a friendly, fun crowd of locals in the water. The hard-core shortboard crew tends to mock the crowd that hangs here, donning the break with such titles as “Old Man’s Beach” or “Rogaine Reef” due to its preponderance of older longboarders and stand-up paddleboarders. But stay and watch the local talent there and you’ll catch some fancy old-school maneuvers by young longboarders crosswalking and nose-riding, and the growing pack of SUP enthusiasts popping 360’s on their 8-foot paddleboards. Or head south to the sucking sandbars of Hatteras Island and watch the pros pulling into spitting barrels with an ease and skill that takes a lifetime to master. Something for everyone, provided you know your limits. Some days it’s pros and freaks only, when the waves get double-overhead and the residue of the storm is still churn-
ing up the water, and the current can suck you a mile down the beach in a matter of minutes. Other days it’s waist high and kook-friendly, so long as you mind your manners. After a particularly violent storm, the sandbars shift, requiring an exhaustive reconnaissance and re-mapping of the shoreline to find the spots where the wave is breaking the best. Once the surf begins to clean up after a storm, the cell-phones start lighting up, as the crew fill each other in on where they’ve checked and how it looks. On the morning of a cleanup, the dedicated set out at dawn and may drive hours up and down the beach before suiting up, trying to find the spot where the wave is breaking the best. A good sandbar can last a year, sometimes longer; often a spot will die for a year or two and then re-emerge with a slightly different size and shape to it. Some die slow deaths, some die quickly in big storms. There are certain spots that consistently attract good sandbars, and other spots that just magically appear one summer or fall in unexpected places. The window of opportunity for good surf on the Outer Banks is small. The surf starts off sloppy and confused, too big, too much whitewater….and slowly it becomes cleaner and cleaner…for an hour or two, maybe three, it’s perfect. Peaky A-frames coming in one after the other, enough for everybody, smooth as silk…
Then, as soon as it comes together, it begins to die. The tide comes in, the swells diminish in size and power, maybe the wind shifts once again and blows everything out. “You missed it this morning” is a common gloat the hardcore like to throw out to their I-got-wasted-last-nightand-slept-til-noon brethren, who still manage to get out and have a good time surfing the tail end of it. The next day, the ocean will be flat, or choppy, or just not quite good enough to bother; and the crew will disappear until after the next storm.
T
he ocean takes all comers, from burnt-out punks to born-again Christians; from pre-teen gremlins to guys in their sixties and seventies, even eighties. Girls, too, lots of them -- charging big waves, walking longboards with effortless style, or just floating on their boards with the backs of their bikini bottoms rising out of the water, driving the boys to distraction. There are summer surfers, Sunday surfers; guys who won’t surf if it’s too cold to trunk it; guys who will ALWAYS paddle out, even on the iciest days….there are brat packs and lone wolves, world-famous globetrotting professionals, and mellow stoners who just want to get wet and catch a ride. In the summer, there are tourists –- loads of them –- trying to figure it out on rented styrofoam boards, or clogging some spot with a surf school. And whenever the surf is
really good, the Virginia Beach crew rolls in like a band of Turks, charging it at the best spots, pulling crazy aerial maneuvers, and generally acting like they own the place. The level of talent is high; and at certain spots, if a heavy crew is out, it can feel downright intimidating if you don’t know what you’re doing. Generally, however, the vibe is friendly, or at the very least polite, and everybody is just stoked to be surfing. But if it’s too aggro you can just head on down to the next break, or the next town. There are miles and miles of beach, and the large majority of waves, even on a good day, go unridden. Many locals prefer to keep to their own little spot, the one closest to their house or their job, regardless of whether it’s better elsewhere. The home break might not be the best break, but it saves time from running up and down the beach doing all that searching. And besides, that’s where your buddies will be, and being out in the water with your mates is half the fun. Surfers the world over know that it’s not just about the ride. Ask anybody who has logged untold hours paddling against the current, taken it on the head more times than they can count, and sat forever shivering, waiting for the next wave. All for a twenty-second thrill? Not exactly. We celebrate the peak action, but it’s the in-between moments that really make surfing a life. Getting a new board shaped. Running into
an old friend out in the water and catching up between sets. Sharing forecast info with the guy at the bank. Throwing on a warm flannel shirt after peeling off a cold wetsuit. The smell of Sticky Bumps, resin, and sunblock. And the visuals. The god-light, the green room, the white sparkles of midday, the orange glory of late-afternoon. There are few more sublime moments to experience in life than that of sitting out in the lineup on a perfect Outer Banks day with three or four friends, sometime around sunset, watching the world turn into a blazing canvas of reds, oranges, yellows, magentas, blues–sometimes even greens–and catching wave after wave as the day begins to fade. On a glassy evening, with just a touch of humidity in the air to obscure the horizon, the ocean reflects the colors in the sky so perfectly it feels as if you are swimming in a sea of light.
A life of surf
is not conducive to the rhythms of the workaday world. Surf has no schedule. It comes on a Monday morning as often as it comes on a Sunday afternoon–which is why very little ever gets done on time around here. If the surf is up, or the fish are running, responsibilities will get put on hold. Kids will play hookie, construction workers will walk off the job site, even realtors will sneak in a midday session. The work will
get done, eventually; but the swell won’t wait for quitting time. You have to strike when it’s hot, even if it means pissing a few people off. Surf-consciousness breeds a certain nonchalance about the rest of the world that can drive outsiders crazy. Sometimes it tests families and relationships, the surf life; but more often than not it builds them and solidifies them. Grandfathers go surfing with their grandkids, husbands and wives paddle out together, church groups and restaurants represent out in the water. It is a language that ties people together– talking about the last swell, the next swell, what the wind is doing, where you last had it good, where you’re thinking of going for your winter surf trip… We are blessed to live here on the Outer Banks, we all know it. But like the surf itself, the very ground on which we live and build our homes is fickle. Every big storm takes a house or two with it. Inlets have been cut and closed, entire towns have been covered in sand, the ocean is rising, and the sand is slowly migrating southwest, leaving the oceanfront infrastructures in constant peril. We have blatantly ignored the warnings about houses built on sand, and some of us have paid dearly for it. Arguments flare about what to do when a big storm rips up the beach road or a beach gets eroded to nothing. “You can’t fight mother nature” some
say. To which others reply, “without our beach, we are nothing”. The debate will continue to rage until we are all washed away.
L
ife here is precarious; and temporary, we all know: one of these days, one of these storms will sweep through and blow this little strip of sand to smithereens. We all know it is coming. We joke about it, resign ourselves to it, construct possible scenarios for other lives in other places, should we ever lose our home here. Given sufficient warning, many of us will pack whatever we can into our trucks and head for the mainland; some of us, like the old sea-captains of yore, will just let the storm wash over us and take us out to sea; for all it has given to us, it seems only fitting that it would one day take our lives in return. Until that day, however, there are fish to catch, waves to ride, and many perfect days left to sit on the beach and stare off into the horizon, watching the weather change.
The Campfire Legends Who started the bonfires, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure the first few were illegal. We sure as hell didn’t get permits. They were pretty spontaneous, usually an excuse to finish off a keg that someone had bought for a party the day before, or lifted from the restaurant they worked at. The only thing I rememberabout those early ones, aside from the music, was losing pair after pair of flip-flops, and pushing truck after truck out of the sand. Pretty soon it became a monthly event, and we had the location wired: since beach driving was allowed in Kill Devil Hills but not in Nags Head, and fires were permitted in Nags Head but not Kill Devil Hills, we set up the bonfire right south of the line between the two towns. You could drive your truck on to the beach in KDH, head south to the town line, and back the truck up so that the tailgate faced the imaginary line in the sand that separated the two municipalities. Fifteen yards or so south of that, we’d build the fire, in Nags Head, with a legal permit. We didn’t have social media then; people just came through word of mouth. Often you wouldn’t know what night it was going to be, but somehow you’d end up there anyway. It was the music that kept them going for so long. Everyone played, or
sang, or beat on something. We’d have eight guitars ringing sympathetically in the night air, three or four djembes pounding rhythms into the sand, and twenty or more voices belting out rock and roll songs at the top of our lungs. It was a wall of sound, with four-and-five-part harmonies, and a couple of off-key singers filling in the spaces between. Every bonfire attracted a few guest musicians: session players from Nashville, bluegrass pickers from the mountains, classical violinists, saxophone virtuosos. If we had recorded any of those sessions they might not have sounded like much; but to be there, in the middle of that rough circle, friends to the left and lovers to the right, surrounded by that mighty sound, with the keening of the wind and the crackle of the fire and the occasional bleats of gulls chiming in, the laughter and cheers after a particularly good tune--there was something primal, something universal about it. Like we were participating in a ritual that humans have performed for ages untold. True, we weren’t singing ancient folk songs or doing rain dances, but we were playing the music of our age, music that meant something to us, turning radio-songs into folklore, reversing the evolution of popular music. Young Americans. Spirits in the Night. My Best Friend’s Girl. Thumbin’ my way into North Caroline. Yeah, I got a first class ticket, but I’m as blue as a boy can
be. Around the fire, these songs became our oral tradition, our shared culture. Even on the coldest nights we would gather, and let the fire and good vibrations warm us body and soul. In the fall, when the water was still warm, we’d go for full-moon surf sessions. Any time of the year, regardless of the water temperature, three or four people would end up skinny-dipping. Sometimes we’d all jump in, in various stages of undress. Relationships were begun and ended at those bonfires, friendships forged, opportunities taken. Spirits were passed around in flasks, sensemilla mixed with wood-smoke, the ocean air and the freedom of being barefoot and outdoors and slightly intoxicated at night. Things happened. Strange things. One night a bearded guy came screaming through the crowd, buck naked and high on Lord-knowswhat. He ran around the fire three or four times, spouting gibberish, then ran down to the beach and jumped in. We saw him come out and run down the beach a few minutes later, still speaking in tongues. The next d we found he’d been arrested after banging on a poor old lady’s front door for nearly half an hour in the middle of the night, still buck naked. When the cops came, he jumped up on the windshield and screamed at the guys inside before they could get out and constrain him. It was Kelly Roberts who came
up with the idea of “Campfire Legends”. Or maybe it was Jesse Fernandez. I’m pretty sure it was Kelly. Anyway, it was the unofficial name that we gave to the bonfire band. We had half-stoned visions of going on the road, in a bus, only performing around bonfires. Concerts would be free, out in farmers’ fields and whatnot, and we’d get by with donations, the old passing of the hat. A band of modern-day troubadours, traveling through holes in the post-modern landscape. Once we almost booked a gig in the backyard of the Outer Banks Brewing Station, but we couldn’t get around the legality of building a fire. Why the bonfires ended, I don’t know either. Getting permits became harder, the winters were getting colder, Some of the Kitty Hawk crowd started having jams up around Eckner Street, with tiki torches, but it wasn’t quite the same. People were marrying off, or going through big nasty breakups, or leaving the beach for New York or Richmond or Europe. These days everybody works too much. Or plays too many paying gigs in bars. Or maybe we’ve just moved past the days of the Campfire legends. That’s just how it goes. Summer fades and life goes on, so get what you can before it’s gone. Hey, buddy, that sounds like a song...
Shooting the Pier In the early years of the millennium
, Kitty Hawk Pier was a derelict space. Hurricane Isabel had chewed off half of its length, and the remaining structure looked as if it could fall into the ocean at any time. A chain-link fence spread across the dune from one end of the property line to the other. "Do Not Enter" signs were placed at the entrance to the parking lot, and blown sand had covered up the concrete of the old lot. But nobody paid much attention to all that. Sand-trails in the dune grass every thirty yards or so led to skilfully-cut holes in the fence, and in the summer the parking lot was hopping with locals and tourists alike, kicking it Outer Banks style, riding the blunt edge of the law. Surfboards and beach umbrellas moved in and out of trucks and wagons, moms lathered sunscreen on squirming tow-headed kids, and light summer winds mingled with salt and sun on everyone's skin to produce an ineffable collective sensation of freedom. In the summer of 2004, a small sandbar had formed around the pier, a perfect low-tide summer longboarding sandbar. It peaked almost directly under the pier, which meant that depending on the conditions there were waves on both sides of the pier. And on most days that summer, a perfect, clean,
waist-high right-hander peeled from the south side of the pier all the way under and through the pilings. Only one thing to do with a wave like that. Shoot the pier, all summer long, like some old Kodachrome snapshot from the '60's. Most days the wave wasn't big enough for the rippers, so the longboard crew pretty much owned it. A series of offshore low-pressure systems kept the little rollers coming in almost daily, and the winds stayed light and often glassed off right around sunset. We would stake out a spot just above the tide-line, set up beach-chairs in a semicircle, haul down a cooler with beer and water and Cokes and chips. We'd stay all afternoon, coming in from the water occasionally to grab a drink, check in with the girls. The burners would adjourn to somebody's truck for a little top-off. Then it was back into the water. Everything felt new that summer, even though we'd all lived here for years. I was riding a 9-foot nose-rider that Jesse Fernandez had shaped for me, with Endless-Summer stripes painted along its length and the iconic Wave Riding Vehicles logo on the deck. Underneath, he had penciled in "The Mighty Bickford" next to his signature and the board specs. The nickname was an old joke between us, and had more to do with my ability to get a bonfire jam hopping than with my questionable surfing skills. Even-
tually, the board became known as "TMB", and it was perfectly shaped for shooting the pier. Mostly I surfed with Tom Vick, and we would vie with each other for the highest wave-count through the pilings. We were like dogs who never tired of chasing a ball. Shoot the pier, ride to the shoreline, walk back under the pier, paddle back out, shoot it again. It was an easy, effortless ride, just the way life seemed to be that summer. One afternoon I caught a sweet chest-high roller that had a little bump on the outside shoulder, and as I rode through the pilings it heaved up and tossed me smack into one of the old barnacle-encrusted posts that holds up the rickey remains of the pier. I sputtered, stood up in the waist deep water, and saw my board wrapped around the post, snapped in two, the lamination on the deck still holding the board together like a bent popsicle stick. I had a little bruise on my shoulder, which healed fast enough, and a few barnacle scrapes on my arm, which shed entirely too little blood to mark the occasion. The Mighty Bickford was no more. I borrowed boards from Jesse and Tom the rest of the summer, though by then there wasn't much summer left. In the fall the Hilton bought the pier and the property that went with it. They put a fence around the
perimeter of the lot, slapped up a big vinyl hotel, and renovated the pier as a classy wedding venue. Meantime hurricane season was on and we traded our trunks and longboards for wetsuits, shortboards, and trips to Rodanthe. It was time to get serious. I haven't seen a lot of that summer crew in a while. I still have the board though, folded over where it split, shoved in the back of a storage space. It's yellowed and rotting, but you can still make out, just barely, Jesse's signature and "The Mighty Bickford" in pencil underneath the lamination. Every now and then I'll take it out just to look at it, and try to remember what it was that made me mighty. Jesse's always telling me I need to take better care of my boards. They'd last a lot longer, he says. I know he's right, but the dings and discolorations, they tell stories. Even if you can't ride the board anymore.