Witness Trees

In September of 1718, the swashbuckling Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, threw a giant party on the sandy bayside banks of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, in what became the largest pirate gathering to ever take place in North America. Calico Jack, Robert Deal, and Charles Vane were among other bloodstained attendees at the two-week star-studded bonfire. My invite was lost in the mail, but I imagine it was a loud, smelly, joyous affair. In fact, Blackbeard regularly anchored off of Ocracoke, and it was there he met his fate several weeks later at the sword hand of British naval lieutenant Robert Maynard. The pirate’s head, graciously supported by a spike, watched over the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay for several months, a blunt, stationary ending for a man who rarely ceased to move.

Several centuries later, well after the respective golden ages of pirates, beheading, and beheading pirates, the beach where the swashbucklers raised hell is protected by the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust. The organization put in a modest trail system, not much more than a narrow path that winds around a sweetly unsettling human-and-horse gravesite towards a small strip of sand. Otherwise unassuming, the beach is guarded by an ancient live oak tree, a classically drooping southern beauty that has remained rooted in place through shipwrecks, hurricanes, Union troops up the Banks, German U-Boats in the harbor, and now a slow but mighty invasion of pastel-colored golf-carting tourists and a changing climate. Sitting in its massive shadow with a handful of young families and grizzled fishermen last summer, I couldn’t help but think about the giant’s centuries of stillness. What might it have seen? In New England, where I now live, these uncut warriors standing alone deep in new-growth forests are called ‘witness trees’; they are tangible reminders that even the most peaceful-seeming landscapes hold histories. If Ocracoke’s own tangled witness tree could talk, what would it tell us? Can it feel the rising tide?

My parents have been ferrying to Ocracoke from Cape Hatteras since 1985, back before they could boast of a 40-year marriage, two kids, and a pair of old salt-and-pepper dogs to match. It’s on that tiny barrier island that my brother and I learned to bike, paddle, steal cookie dough from the bowl, play Scrabble, catch frogs, shoot the moon, dodge waves, treat jellyfish stings, manage pneumonia, drive on the sand, and, as of late, outlast a flood. Most of the best memories of my life are sandwiched within that salty perimeter, three miles wide and sixteen miles long. I think it’s the reason that I moved to the coast as soon as I could after graduation. There’s a little knot inside me that was formed in a place that smelled like the sea and dipped twice in saltwater, and now it’s stuck fast. I don’t think I’ll ever live away from the ocean again. I’m hooked on its churning beauty, its vast reflectivity, its utter indifference to human affairs.

The last time I went to Ocracoke was the first time that I’ve seen long lines of sandbags in place of some of the vanished dunes. Driving away from the ferry dock towards the island’s village, we could see that a fine layer of beach was still determined to cover the mottled asphalt despite the new infrastructure. A recent storm had clearly had its way with the Banks, but it was jarring to witness the aftermath on such a calm day. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. The towns of Buxton and Rodanthe, some of Ocracoke’s next-door neighbors, have lost 31 houses, most initially built hundreds of feet from the shore, to the ocean in the last six years. Four fell this January alone. In fact, on Ocracoke the summer prior, my parents and I had stared out the windows as brown water slowly inched up the steps of our raised rental. Our house was tucked snugly back into the village, about as far away from the ocean as you can get, but still the tropical storm flooded out the whole neighborhood. I watched chip bags, yard signs, and flip flops float through the pool of a yard. No ferries ran for several days; there was no place to go.

It could be my chosen career 一 you can’t teach ocean science and conservation without the haunting flickers of despair 一 but sometimes, when I think about Ocracoke, I can almost hear the ticking. Anyone on the island with the money to do so is putting their house or business on stilts. It twists my insides to think about the vulnerable, beautiful barrier islands up and down the coast and around the world that are succumbing to rising water levels and accelerated storm surges. Their centuries of ships and settlers and wild things and stories to tell, gone in the wind. And I’m just a vacationer; I’m not one of the 800 people that live on Ocracoke full-time. My home in coastal Maine, while threatened by flooding and erosion and sea level rise and inconsistent transportation, too, has not yet reached the crisis levels of the Banks. Ocracoke may cradle the ghosts of myself all bundled together, but it has never held my whole life. I’m grateful for whatever time I have left to strap my bike and boards to my car and cruise south to reconnect with my family’s past. I’m lucky that I can leave.

Maybe the lesson is that these fragile, constantly-shifting islands were never meant to be permanently settled. Maybe it’s that we should be grateful for what we have while we have it. Maybe it’s that we need to get better at letting things go. For me and many others, this year has held an astonishing, crushing amount of change and grief. Whether it’s a physical place or not, I think that we all have had some version of an Ocracoke, and we’ve all lost some version of an Ocracoke. Whether it was paved over or picked up and moved or left behind and simply forgotten, there’s a place inside you with a gnarled witness tree and a story to tell. I can only hope that when the waters someday settle, we are able to pick up the pieces and move forward, with all of the wisdom, grace, and love to be found leaning back against the rough bark of a big old tree.