THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 28, 1994 TAG: 9408250184
SECTION: CAROLINA COAST PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Coastwise
SOURCE: Ford Reid
LENGTH: Medium: 58 lines
If you walk the village streets of Ocracoke you will see a great and wonderful testament to survival.
There you will see scores of small trees, gnarled and twisted but undaunted by years of persistent winds punctuated by the occasional violent storm.
They are mostly Atlantic white cedar, called locally juniper, and like the people who first settled the Outer Banks centuries ago they are tough little buggers.
If you are lucky, while you are visiting you may get to experience the sort of storm that has shaped and strengthen these little trees. Not a hurricane, mind you. Believe me, you do not want to experience a hurricane on these thin strips of sand.
Of course, nobody comes to the shore wishing for a storm. You want beach days, one after another, with cloudless, blue skies and soft, onshore breezes. You want to bake in the sun, splash in the surf and build sand castles.
But a storm, especially a good blow from the northeast, will teach the vigilant observer more about life on the edge of the ocean than a thousand beach days ever could.
We live in a world where we try to control everything. Our houses have air conditioning and insulation that blocks noises from the outside. We water our lawns when it doesn't rain enough and we uproot anything that dares try to grow without our permission.
We have even tried, from time to time, to control the ocean with sea walls and other ludicrous devices intended to stop the tides and currents from doing their work, work that is destructive to the world that we have tried to build.
That is a battle that we have lost, a battle that we are destined to lose again and again until we learn that the secret is not dominance but peaceful co-existence.
The weather is something that we have not learned to control and, if we are lucky, we never will. Our lives need variety, uncertainty and adversity and the weather provides that in spades, particularly along the coast.
To see the wind and the sea raging is to feel the awesome power of nature, to know what it has forever meant to be alive on this planet. That is a feeling that most of us miss in our daily live, but it is a feeling that is probably necessary to our mental health.
Perhaps it is the bad weather as much as the good that draws so many of us to the coast. Sure, there is bad weather everywhere. But only on the ocean do you have such a clear view of it.
You can watch the storm develop and the sea go from calm to roaring and back again to calm. You can feel, even taste, the air changing and you can watch as sky and water move and transform from second to second.
Or, if the forecast calls for nothing but sunshine and light winds, you can walk the streets of Ocracoke, looking at the trees and learning valuable lessons. by CNB