What I Saw Today on the Way to Work

I really love to drive the Beach Road when I travel to and from work, or simply from place to place up and down the coast on work errands. I can keep my eye on the surf conditions. But today I saw a succession of things which underscored what it's come to now, especially for those living on the Beach Road in Kitty Hawk, say between Old Station (Black Pelican) and Kitty Hawk Pier. It reminded me of my childhood on the beach.

Many of you have heard us talk about moving sand around before in this blog. So let me set the mood before I describe what I saw.

Remember when you were a kid building a sandcastle on the beach at the very edge of the wet tide line? We usually started by building a mound dug from a small trench or moat in a semi-circle around it, the future castle replete with drip-sand towers. This was something worth protecting and defending from the ocean's ravages. On the ocean side of the moat we would then build a seawall from sand dug from the first moat and another moat to the ocean side of this new sand wall.

All the while the ocean wash would occasionally roll up over some or all of our new structures built ever so close to the water in the tidal zone. We would quickly repair our sandcastle and if the tide was outgoing, find we could then embellish the castle with more elaborate detail. However if the tide was incoming, we would call for our friends' and work furiously together to stop the onslaught, digging the moats deeper and the sand seawalls taller. And despite our best efforts, the ocean would roll right through anything we built. As little children, this is how we learned not to build our sandcastles in the tidal zone, unless we chose this conflict with the ocean. And if we did, we always knew we were doomed to its overwhelming power.

What I saw today as I drove along the stretch north of Old Station after a high tide, were quite a few Bobcats (the mini front-end loader/bulldozer-type equipment) parked or hard at work around oceanfront homes, a bulldozer, a contractor with dump trucks delivering sand to a particularly endangered section of Beach Road sand dune, and people with shovels helping defend both the Beach Road and homes along the way. I thought of my childhood learning where to build our sandcastles.

Of course this is way over-simplified. When most of these homes and the Kitty Hawk Beach Road were built, the beach stretched before them was far wider, with the pack sand (sand wet or dry depending on the tide)in the tidal influence far to the east. Now the pack sand is beneath many of these homes and on even a garden variety-type northeaster like the one we just had---a measly 20-knot blow---ocean overwash reaches the homes on the west side of the Beach Road.

But the bustle of activity and the call for help to defend what had been built years before, is identical to what I felt as a child protecting my very own sandcastle. So when it blows hard northeast here this time of year, the TV newscasters run down from the Tidewater area of Virginia and the Greenville area of North Carolina and train their cameras on the modest old homes along this stretch hoping to capture sensational live shots of the ocean taking homes from their piling perches.

The ocean forms escarpments in the new sand trucked in along the frontal dune. That sand is in turn, dragged seaward to help form new sandbars and many times better surf breaks. Or the sand is simply transported south toward Oregon Inlet and is deposited at other sandbars. Our mission is to find the new breaks and do our solemn duty to insure its waves are ridden. I shall do my part, I promise...more later. Keep at it.