THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508250088
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 78 lines
IT FELT LIKE 1975 recently on the Outer Banks, 1975 when I was a college sophomore waiting tables at the Sportsman's Diner in Kill Devil Hills, and the beach still belonged to a lucky few of us. The summer of '75: back before fast food, hang-gliding, shopping malls, condominiums, trendy Duck or Corolla, and people, people, people.
There wasn't a dry cleaners to be found, no one had yet heard the word ``cineplex,'' and Andy Griffith sometimes popped in unexpectedly to sample the local seafood. (I should've been ``up'' that night; instead my waitress-buddy Pam got his table.)
Fast-forward to 1995. More than 200,000 people evacuated North Carolina's northern string of barrier islands Aug. 15, seeking shelter from slow-approaching and unpredictable Hurricane Felix. By Aug. 17, the sun was out, the winds had died down and the beaches had the look and feel of 1975, when the dance craze was the hustle, ocean swimmers feared ``Jaws'' and the legendary Nags Head Casino, not a big kite shop, stood across from Jockey's Ridge.
It was a winter's day in glorious summertime. I hit the five-lane 158 bypass, a sleek 55-mph two-laner in '75, juked the oldies up and the sun roof down, and cruised the neon strip, becoming a teenager once again. Not one turning car slowed me down. Not one. Gracious. What freedom.
Marveled my middle-aged friend Dennis at Wink's Supermarket in Kitty Hawk: ``I set the cruise control at 62 coming over the (Wright Memorial) bridge and didn't have to brake until I got here.'' That's about 10 miles.
By Aug. 19, of course, the vacationing hordes in minivans had returned, like the locusts, to burst my time-travel bubble, and I was forced to admit again: It's not 1975. But it was sublime while it lasted.
Now, when the TV network news vultures set up their cameras to record the inevitable washout of another old cottage teetering on Kitty Hawk's eroded stretch of sand, some locals - especially those with history, like myself - actually dream about destruction. We don't want anyone to get hurt, and yet the hurricane has become a fantasy symbol of our salvation. (Merchants excluded.)
``It's too bad Felix didn't wipe out Pine Island'' in ostentatious, over-developed Corolla, my friend Donna, of Kill Devil Hills, lamented; while Maria, who lives in Nags Head, suggested that her childhood retreat, the now ``precious'' Ocracoke, could use a swift overhaul courtesy of Mother Nature.
Deserted miniature golf courses . . . boarded-up shopping strips . . . and the temperature in the 80s.
Many years ago, as a vacationer, I learned from the locals to do what county disaster officials don't want vacationers to do during hurricane alerts: To stay put. I've ``survived,'' as the bumper stickers and T-shirts attest, hurricanes Charlie, Hugo, Emily and now Felix. Unless a category-3 hurricane were headed rapidly in my direction, I doubt I'd ever leave. Besides missing the thrill of the storm, its fury and its calm, I'd have to endure the pandemonium of evacuation, especially unholy traffic jams. I'd rather gamble on the hurricane.
While tourists flee in panic at the first startling news of ``mandatory evacuation'' - a free-for-all, rather than an orderly town-by-town evacuation - we residents sit tight, preparing for the typically long haul of tracking the storm. Even ``new'' locals who have evacuated, returning only to discover that unnecessary plywood is easier to put up than take down, have learned: After issuance of an evacuation order, we usually have hours and hours to tune into the Weather Channel, and make a calm decision about if and when to leave.
``Tropical storm, tropical storm,'' we sometimes scoff, knowing that a mean nor'easter does more damage.
In the meantime, we sit back and enjoy the restless grandeur of the ocean - that's why we're here, after all - and the eerie hush in the air. I love walking in the wind. It renews me.
I'd like to believe that the beautiful, wide-open Outer Banks of 1975 still exist, but I know, in my heart, that they have yielded to an ugly commercial honky-tonk stretch not to be reclaimed . . . except in winter or when a hurricane destroys it. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma, book editor for The Virginian-Pilot, lives in Southern
Shores, N.C. by CNB