File:Coast watch (1979) (20651129222).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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keep a 20-foot channel dredged through Oregon Inlet, and that should attract larger trawlers to the Wanchese docks. But that's only part of the jetties' benefits, according to Etheridge. Build the jetties, and fishers who use Oregon Inlet might not have to pay higher insurance rates than other boat owners. Build the jetties, and fewer people will die. "I've picked up bodies," Etheridge says, "and signed affidavits for bodies that were never recovered." No doubt a stabilized inlet would make passage safer for fishers. No doubt it would increase opportunities to land fish in North Carolina rather than Virginia, a benefit to watermen, seafood processors and the Wanchese Seafood Industrial Park. But beyond that, the doubts remain, driven by charge and countercharge, study and analysis and findings from all quarters. Even the most neutral observers are exasperated with the process. As I leave the Outer Banks, I drive north over Bonner Bridge, craning my neck to peer past the guardrails at the swells breaking over the inlet's oceanside shoals. From the top of the bridge, I see the sandy plain of Bodie Island's growing spit stretching far into the distance, then necking down to the narrow hourglass constriction directly under the bridge. Down there is an Oregon Inlet perspective I haven't yet experienced, so I pull onto the sand road just up Hatteras Island from the bridge and head south again toward the inlet. Driving alone on the beach always makes me nervous, and my jitters aren't eased by the painted sign warning of its impassability at high tide. I drive past the vegetated dunes and onto the barren sand of the accreting flats, then to the very edge of the spit at the foot of the towering Bonner Bridge. It is a calm day by Oregon Inlet standards, but wind- driven sand still sifts across the flats, distorting the shapes of distant beach- combers like heat shimmer in a desert. Gulls hover in the wind, diving to pick up pieces of fish battered on the shoals and trapped in the shallow water. I can see the corroded metal gallows of
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The growing sand flats on Bodie Island lie under the soaring Bonner Bridge, which is itself threatened by the shifting channel. the Lois Joyce, sunk in December 1982 and now just a few stones' throws from the moving shore. Across the inlet is Pea Island and the gray smudge of the groin like a smear of smoke on the water. That's where the line has been drawn, I think, and not with a finger in the sand but with boulders 9 tons heavy. These are the two telling perspectives of Oregon Inlet. One the wild shore, shifting, shaping and reshaping like a living entity, breathing for all the embayed waters behind it. And the other the rocky emblem of man's efforts to control that malleability. On this day, just a thousand yards separate them, and the gap is closing. Somewhere I've read that in past times inlets weren't even named unless they were a year old. Who could tell when nature would conspire to close them? I remember Etheridge saying that he could recall days as a boy when there was but 3 feet of water in Oregon Inlet. Some days you could cross to fish the outside waters, and some days you couldn't. The natural way of things. And I remember the resignation in his voice as I leave the Wanchese docks. "We're trying to satisfy everybody," he says, "and you know that ain't gonna work." Which is one way of saying that all interests regarding Oregon Inlet are caught between a million tons of rock and a hard place. And one more time I think of Midgett, who watched the wind and water transform his world. He couldn't comprehend such a thing as a mile-long jetty. Computer modeling of hydrological forces and cost-benefit analyses would be utterly lost on the man who witnessed the birth of Oregon Inlet. But he would know the raw face and the unleashed force of nature, and I wonder what he would think of it all. □ COASTWATCH 13

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