File:Coast watch (1979) (20633797096).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_11 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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THE HOOK
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He waits for me at the old U.S. Lifesaving Service boathouse he converted to a summer cottage 40 years ago. Within moments of our meeting, I learn why he wasn't bom on the cape: The island had no midwife in 1921, so Yeomans drew his first salty breath on Harkers Island. He was boated home to the dunes of Cape Lookout. By the time Yeomans was bom, the Cape Lookout Post Office had shuttered its windows (1911, after only 14 months in exist- ence), the last whale had been killed there (1916) and the Lookout school- house had closed (1919). But a vibrant little community remained tethered to the roadless, bridgeless island. And even though the Yeomans family had a house on Harkers, it stayed in the Cape Lookout camp three seasons out of four, going "off-island" only for Sunday morning preaching. "I was raised right here to the cape," Yeomans says proudly, defiantly. He lived there until the age of 6, when he had to move to the mainland for schooling. But still he returned — weekends, summers, evenings after school and mornings before. When I think of the cape, I think of its mazes of marsh creeks, of dune fields unscarred by roofline and rolling to the horizon, of meadowlarks calling from the scrub, of the tide pouring in over my bare feet and over the sand of the spit where pelicans huddle. But I think as well of Yeomans' blowsy face, framed with ears listing toward the overly large and a cockade of crew-cut hair white as an oyster shell. Hurricanes are etched in the wrinkles around his eyes and blazing August days writ in the dark blotches across his brow. I remember that he closes his eyes when he tells me about the square dances in the big house they called 8 SPRING 199H

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