Each summer my family spends a week on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, a 70-mile stretch of barrier islands along the coast of North Carolina. The islands are so narrow that you can see and hear the Atlantic Ocean swelling through the curves of the sand dunes and turn 180 degrees on the spot to look at Pamlico Sound, which spans the gap between the islands and the mainland.
The beaches are broad and clean and unencumbered. The hardy residents have done a fantastic job of keeping commercialization off the islands and nearly all of the businesses, restaurants, grocery stores, and even gas stations are locally owned and operated. Within the towns, everything is within biking or walking distance. The elaborately-porched cottages stand high on stilts, armored against the eastern wind by dark wooden shingles. It’s simple, unrefined, and real—the people who come here come for the sea and nothing more, because nothing more is there and nothing more needs to be.
Every facet of island life is defined by the sea. Its presence is constant and constantly influential. It’s the vibrating, swirling, crashing force which has called, seductively, to each and every salty soul suspended in its grasp on the narrow shore. Its call is so strong, in fact, that it can routinely swallow up the rickety haven its disciples have created on the narrow shore and still maintain its hold. With every major storm, the Atlantic Ocean overtakes the dunes and sends homes, boats, businesses, and roads spilling into the Sound. As the storms clear, the devoted disciples faithfully emerge to rebuild their paper houses and happily await the next surge.
We’re helpless, humans. We like to think of ourselves as serene masters of this world, creating stunning technologies and barreling through landscapes with the bloated delusion that our superficial purposes matter, that our impacts matter and will last. But the truth is that the only true masters are the forces of nature and marvel or degrade as we might, we are subject to their whims. As gracious inferiors, the most we can do is live mindful of this fact and make every effort to respect, acknowledge, and enjoy our role in the balance.
Enjoying time in Hatteras necessitates an awareness of the temporality of the stark human comforts stationed there and a gradual, meditative refusal to depend on them. The same is true in any case of growing close to an environment. We must accept the supremacy of the natural world and learn to cede our control. Our time here is short, but we’re blessed to bear witness to the truly divine eternal forces ebbing and flowing across and inside the earth. These eternal forces bewitch us, baffle us, and challenge us but time after time, when they call, we answer.
Here’s an old favorite for the week, pretty fitting I think.
I encourage anyone and everyone to check out the artist, Andrew Bird.
Going back, I realize that this post was a little grim. That wasn’t necessarily my intention, though I do think that the topic of human weakness has the tendency to be interpreted in that light. I understand why that is, because facing that fact is akin to facing our mortality and the mortality of our species as a whole. However, I wrote this post from the most emotionally detached perspective I could achieve in an attempt to impartially comment on our role in the grand scheme of things. That detachment admittedly resulted in the rather cold, unsympathetic conclusion that our existence on this planet is superfluous to its survival. I didn’t mean to sound dark or fatalistic here, but I did want to assert that our presence on this earth is something to cherish and to marvel at because for as much as we depend on the earth, the earth does not depend on us. One way to express this gratitude, I think, is to take care of this gift we’ve been given through environmental consciousness.