ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997 TAG: 9704180028
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: EARL SWIFT LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
Pedaling from Virginia's Cape Henry to North Carolina's Cape Hatteras offers a look at oceanfront nature at its wildest and man's beach development at its worst.
In the midevening gloom they seemed shadows, smudgy black blobs against the gray of the marsh grass.
It took a long second look, as my bicycle coasted atop a dike in Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge, to make out the trash can-sized sow and three baby wild pigs rooting in the boggy soil.
My bike crunched through a patch of loose gravel. The sow spun to face me, then quickly ushered her piglets into a trot. I pedaled on, racing to cover another half-dozen miles before nightfall.
I was nearing the end of the first of three days I'd spend bicycling from Cape Henry to Cape Hatteras, a journey that would take me from crowded holiday sands to empty, windswept dunes and along some of the Atlantic coast's most historic and pristine beaches.
I would travel a narrow finger of sand stretching from the Outer Banks' true start, in Virginia Beach, to their crooked knuckle, jutting far into the Atlantic. I'd pedal 150 miles of blacktop, boardwalk, fire road and the surf's edge.
And along the way, I'd behold the best and worst of what happens when man makes a home of paradise.
At 3 p.m. on the Sunday before Memorial Day I stood at the base of the Cape Henry Lighthouse, a tower on the Army's Fort Story marking the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. Beside me stood my vehicle, an aluminum-frame, 24-speed mountain bike - a speedy, lightweight machine to which I'd fastened a duffel and two saddlebags stuffed with camping gear, clothes and food.
From atop the bike's saddle, I'd have a chance to study my surroundings with detail impossible from inside a car. Its silence would enable me to pedal among wildlife with minimal disturbance. And, for all but a short leg of the way, I'd be able to stay within sight or sound of the surf, something one can't do on four wheels.
With pencil-lead clouds gathering overhead, I pushed off from Fort Story and pedaled onto the beach at 89th Street. At the water's edge the sand, blown flat and hard, was easy riding in low gear, and I weaved my way between strollers and surfers for 20 blocks, the north end's big waterfront homes peeking over the dunes to my right.
Up here, when overcast skies chase away all but hardy beachcombers, one can ignore those homes and their rooftop decks and hot tubs and imagine the empty, wild Virginia Beach of the 1930s, when deer still populated the thickets of pine and live oak that sprang up near the sea.
The beach itself was still broad and untamed, windswept, powerful. For a while, anyway: There can be few intrusions on self-reflection quite as jarring as the boardwalk's appearance as one wanders southward along the surfline.
I rolled onto the bike path and began a 30-minute dodge-'em journey among reckless Navy lads, little kids on arabesque trike courses and clueless pedestrians bearing armloads of fast food.
At Rudee Inlet I was forced to leave the waterfront: Without permission from the Virginia National Guard to pedal the beach at Camp Pendleton, I had to travel around the camp and the Navy's adjacent Dam Neck base.
With the sun sinking fast and rain sprinkling, I emerged from a chain of subdivisions and glided back to the ocean. Just how untamed the Atlantic remained, despite man's colonization of its shore, became clear as I pedaled toward Back Bay: Water rolled past twisted and toppled bulkheading to swirl around the base of house after waterfront house. Many bore condemnation notices. Some were delicately balanced, like seabirds, atop bent and splintered pilings, their destruction seemingly seconds away.
The Back Bay refuge creates a six-mile buffer between Sandbridge and False Cape State Park, traversible only on foot or bike. I crunched along its sand-and-pebble roads as dusk began to settle over the swamp, passing the pigs, swerving to avoid a big doe that leaped directly into my path.
I reached False Cape Landing as the dusk gave over to night, and pitched my tent in the dark. When I'd made a reservation two days before, I had snared the last available campsite; False Cape, among the least-visited of Virginia's state parks, was supposed to be full.
But the day's cool temperatures and rain had apparently scared off my fellow campers. I had the park to myself.
A tattoo of light drizzle on my tent's nylon walls woke me shortly after daybreak, but by the time I ate breakfast and repacked my gear it gave way to intense sunshine. I rode south through the empty park to Wash Woods, the long-abandoned site of a settlement 300 strong at the century's turn, and grunted through soft sand to the ocean.
I was alone. No sign of man in either direction, just blue sky over blue water striking golden-gray sand. I stood at the edge of the surf for a while, marveling that on a holiday weekend I could enjoy such a magnificent setting without company.
I didn't have a chance to get lonely. Wash Woods is 2.3 miles north of the state line, and halfway there, I could make out foreign objects on the sand ahead. As I drew closer to the fence marking North Carolina, their shapes became familiar: Trucks. Jeeps. Dozens of them.
Carolina's northernmost, roadless coast had been transformed into a mammoth 4-by-4 beach party. Families, fraternities, couples and packs of teen-agers whizzed by on ATVs and pickups as I labored against a stiffening headwind
Riding in the hardpack at the surf's edge, I pushed through ever-greater wind and clouds of barbecue and the fumes of Jet-Skis and old CJs. By the time I covered the 10 miles to Corolla, and the beginning of blacktop road, the effort had me whipped.
Seafarers of yore braved the storm-tossed waters off the Mid-Atlantic capes with the help of lighthouses that still stand sentry here. They relied on the beacons of Cape Henry, Currituck, Bodie Island and Cape Hatteras when groping along the dangerous coast at night, and on the towers themselves for bearings by day.
Hardly necessary now. A few miles past the Currituck Light, I realized that today's mariner scarcely encounters an unlighted stretch of beach north of Oregon Inlet. Where the sand was interrupted only by dune grass just two years ago, million-dollar homes now cluster. Water towers, far outnumbering lighthouses, mushroom from once-empty dunes.
The folks running Currituck County may be pleased to see this development, and admittedly the new homes in Corolla and Sanderling and Duck are high-end, classy affairs. But as I rolled on, passing scores of deep-porched vacation getaways affordable only to the best-heeled, I couldn't help but lament the loss of the wild north end of the recent past.
Corolla's solitude is being squeezed away with private cul-de-sacs and professional landscaping and designer interiors. The barrier spit's wildness, its mysticism, its magnetism, has been platted and managed and sculpted and made safe and comfortable. And, some would argue, destroyed in the process.
I pedaled on, hugging the shoulder as a seemingly endless caravan of off-road trucks quit the beach and headed south for Nags Head. The winds intensified. As I passed the Sanderling Inn, they lifted so high that I pulled the bike into a restaurant's gravel parking lot and called a friend in Manteo to come get me.
I'd made only 25 miles since breaking camp, less than half of my goal for the day. Reaching Cape Hatteras would mean traveling 90 miles in one go.
Tuesday morning brought good news. The southerly wind that had made pedalling so difficult was supposed to clock around to the northwest, giving me a tailwind to Hatteras
I blasted south on the two-lane North Carolina 12 through shady Duck and Southern Shores, a long string of off-roaders headed the other way. Before long, I reached a fork.
Kill Devil Hills and Nags Heads are unusual, as beach towns go, in that their centers of activity are completely divorced from the water. North Carolina 158, along which all but a handful of the communities' shops and restaurants are dotted, is a drag strip gouged down the center of the spit, blocks away from either sea or sound. Its offerings aren't concentrated anywhere; fast-food joints have proliferated along one stretch, but otherwise its surf shops and eateries and gas stations and cheesey souvenir dives are scattered without rhyme or reason along its length.
One message you can take away from this arrangement is that these are towns oriented to the automobile, for surely there are few roads outside Virginia Beach less friendly to pedestrians.
I swung off the bypass and rolled onto the Beach Road, a mostly residential two-laner shouldered against the water's edge. It seemed gripped by a morning-after headache: The few people I saw out of doors moved very slowly.
The miles buzzed by. I stopped for lunch and, feeling confident, got quickly back on the road, reaching Oregon Inlet just after 1 p.m.
The Bonner Bridge, stretching across the inlet to Hatteras Island, marked the tip of a single continuous spit of sand that I'd been riding since Sandbridge. Now I hugged the two-lane bridge's right side, struggling to stay clear of the motor homes and dumptrucks that roared by just inches to my left.
By the time I crested its high hump, the wind had, as advertised, shifted to the northwest, and with gathering speed I coasted onto Hatteras Island and into the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Stopping to rest was inadvisable, I soon learned: When I stepped off the road and into the grass, mosquitoes swarmed me. I killed a half-dozen with my first slap, dashed back to the bike and kept pedaling.
The wind intensified and I whipped ever-faster through the refuge, the placid waters of the sound visible beyond the marsh grass to my right, the sound of the ocean pounding past the dunes on the left. Speeding motorists occasionally brushed past a bit too close for comfort: A massive dumptruck sounded its horn just before running me off the road near Rodanthe, and a Jeep passing slow northbound traffic nearly hit me head-on a bit farther south.
But the miles down the island passed quickly. By 4 p.m., shortly after I left Avon, I could see the candystriped Hatteras lighthouse gleaming on the horizon.
Standing at its base a short time later, watching surfers brave the churning water offshore, I was sore, stiff and somewhat relieved to have reached the trip's end.
But more than that, I felt thankful that the fast-paced development that is changing the Outer Banks, and years ago changed Virginia Beach, is balanced by preserves like Back Bay, False Cape and Pea Island.
They guarantee that at least some stretches of our beautiful coast will remain so. And that's a guarantee that will grow ever more valuable as the differences between the Outer Banks and their Virginia big-city sister become harder and harder to detect.
LENGTH: Long : 182 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: SANDRA BROWN KELLY THE ROANOKE TIMES. The 150-mileby CNBbicycle trip ended at Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which for decades
has been a beacon for beachgoers on the Outer Banks of North
Carolina. color.