Witness Trees

In September of 1718, the swashbuckling Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, threw a party on the sandy bayside banks of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, in what became the largest ever North American pirate gathering. Calico Jack, Robert Deal, and Charles Vane were among the bloodstained attendees at the two-week star-studded bonfire. It was a loud, smelly, joyous affair. 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. His spiked head watched over the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay for several months, a blunt ending for a man who rarely ceased moving in life.

Several centuries later, well after the respective golden ages of pirates and beheading pirates, the beach where the swashbucklers raised hell is protected by the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust. The nonprofit installed a narrow path that winds around an unexplained human-and-horse gravesite toward 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 an invasion of pastel-colored golf-carting tourists and rapid sea level rise.

Sitting in the tree’s massive shadow with a few young families and grizzled fishermen last summer, I thought about the giant’s centuries of stillness. In New England, uncut oaks and pines standing alone deep in new-growth forests are called ‘witness trees.’ They are tangible reminders that even the most peaceful landscapes hold histories. If Ocracoke’s own tangled witness tree could talk, what would it say? Can it feel the rising tide?

My parents have been ferrying to Ocracoke since 1985, back before they could boast of a 40-year marriage, two kids, and a pair of old salt-and-pepper dogs to boot. It’s there that my brother and I learned to bike, paddle, steal cookie dough, play Scrabble, catch frogs, shoot the moon, dodge waves, treat jellyfish stings, manage pneumonia, drive on the sand, and, more recently, outlast a flood. Most of the best memories of my life are sandwiched within its salty perimeter, three miles wide and sixteen miles long. It’s the reason I moved to the coast as soon as I could after graduation. There’s a little sailing 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.

I first saw long lines of sandbags in place of the island’s vanished dunes in 2024. A recent storm had had its way with the Outer Banks, and it was jarring to see the aftermath on a calm day. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The nearby towns of Buxton and Rodanthe have lost 32 houses, most initially built hundreds of feet inland, to the ocean in the last six years. Four fell this January alone. Last summer, my parents and I 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, but still the tropical storm flooded the neighborhood. I watched chip bags, yard signs, and flip flops float through the pool of a yard. No ferries ran for days.

Now, when I think about Ocracoke, I hear the ticking. Anyone on the island with the money to do so is raising their house or business on stilts. It hurts to think about the vulnerable, beautiful barrier islands around the world succumbing to rising water levels and accelerated storm surges. Centuries of ships and stories and wild things, gone with the wind. And I’m just a vacationer; I’m not one of the 800 people that live on Ocracoke full-time. The island 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 barrier 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. I think that we all have had some version of an Ocracoke, and we have 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 of you with a gnarled live oak and a story to tell. I can only hope that when the waters someday settle, we can gather the pieces and move forward with all of the wisdom and grace to be found leaning back against the rough bark of a big old tree.

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