Nags Head

September 21, 2008

David Alan Harvey casts an eye on the Outer Banks.

Down here in the Outer Banks of North Carolina a cold wind blows. When the wind clocks around from the north, everyone here closes their shutters and prepares for the worst. 15-foot waves will pound the shoreline, and whoever built a summer cottage on the ocean front is at risk from the beach erosion which just goes with the territory. These barrier islands “move” with the wind and water and geologists say flat out that folks just aren’t supposed to live here.

Still, Nags Head, historic home of sea pirates and now fishermen and surfer boys, is home to 30,000 full-time residents. Many of these residents are war veterans since the Norfolk Navy base is only an hour to the north and Fort Bragg, the “come and go point” for ground troops in Iraq, is only two hours west. I spent two days photographing fishermen at the Nags Head fishing pier, a symbol of man’s willingness to put something out into the sea which cannot possibly last, and a combo of “food source” and sport for so many locals.

Diane Gimmer has tears in her eyes. She is a cook at the restaurant at the end of the pier and her husband is a Corporal on a U.S. Marine “quick response team” in Iraq. “He has not even met two of his grandchildren,” she says. “He has been in Iraq for 9 months and 3 weeks, and I worry about him 24 hours a day. It just isn’t fair. I want him home.”

North Carolinians know times are hard. Feeling the effects of war combined with a failing economy has taken an emotional toll. But several fishermen told me that when times get really tough, they can come down here to the pier and quite literally catch their dinner: “These seas are not as full of fish as they used to be, but there is still plenty of food in these waters.”

A raging sea has beauty. As I wandered up and down this pier, I felt these U.S. citizens were trying to get as far away from “reality” as possible. Folks who live down here generally feel “apart” from the “hustle and bustle” of mainstream America. Most came here to “get away.” The fishermen standing at the end of the Nags Head pier are surely as far away as they can get. “These storms bring in the big fish,” one told me. Yet just as he said that his line went taught, he set the hook, and he pulled in a little “spot fish.” “Too small to keep,” he said and threw it back into the sea. “I will wait for better times,” he said.