When Jim's commitments at the AIHA convention ended, we headed for North Carolina, specifically the Outer Banks. It was a day-long drive to Beaufort, NC, where we spent a night before taking the two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride to Ocracoke Island.
Beaufort was a lovely little town proud of its history, and we wished we could have spent another day there. But we didn't have the time, unfortunately, so it was on to Cedar Island to catch the noon ferry.
Ocracoke is accessible only by sea or by air. The highway that connects the rest of the islands that make up the Outer Banks doesn't reach Ocracoke, and thank goodness for that. Aside from the village, the island belongs to Cape Hatteras National Seashore. And what a seashore it is, especially on Ocracoke. We spent a whole day at the shore, and except for a park service truck that drove past us on the beach in late afternoon, we never saw another person within at least half a mile of us.
Call me ignorant, but I didn't realize that prickly pear cactus grew anywhere in the US except the Southwest.
The side of the island on the sound between Ocracoke and the mainland.
At some point during the day we developed a mighty thirst and went to the Jolly Roger to share a pitcher of Bass and an order of crab cakes. Before heading back to the beach, we decided to check out the British Cemetery, the sign for which we'd seen in town. Interestingly, a British ship, the armed trawler HMS Bedfordshire, was on loan to the US Navy by Great Britain in the early days of WWII to help patrol the shores. On May 11, 1942, it was torpedoed by the Germans and sank. All hands were lost; the bodies of four British seamen were recovered and lie in the cemetery on Ocracoke. That land is Britain's in perpetuity. At the cemetery is a sign engraved with Rupert Brooke's lines:
If I should die, think only this of me
That there's some corner of a foreign field
that is forever England.
We headed back to the beach and saw ... a gathering of ibis.
As afternoon slid into evening, we were amused to see a pair of eyestalks pop up from a hole in the sand, followed--after a few false starts--by the whole crab.
Ah, Ocracoke. How I hope the island remains forever disconnected from the rest of the Outer Banks islands. How I hope it retains its empty, pristine beach and its solitary beauty.
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