Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge, NC

The biennial family beach trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina has become weighted down by its own history in some respects. There are comforting traditions that go back many years, and there are other things that occur with annoying regularity. My wife’s entire family has been doing this since before we all had children, and now most of our children are grown and off to college. But the show must go on.

One thing that must ALWAYS happen each time we come to this place is this: While my spouse and in-laws are getting drunk at 10am on the beach, I escape to a place of shadeless abandon at Pea Island Wildlife Refuge. Insofar as I take refuge here once every two years, I suppose that ranks me among the wildlife, though it seems a little less wild to be here than to be day-drinking and swimming in the waves. I do find great comfort here in a place where the sand and the sun and the waves are my only companions—aside from the literal wildlife. And my new interest in birds has opened my eyes to more of the wildlife that’s on display here.

There are few places along the East Coast where you can have the ocean all to yourself. This is one of them. For miles and miles.

Rangers riding in “gators” will occasionally drive down the beach to make sure no one is disturbing the nests of plovers and other seabirds. With the enormous heatwave, it was surprising how much cooler the temps were on top of the dunes or to the west of them, away from the ocean and rising sun.

Alas, poor elegant jellyfish. How did such a lot befall you? Of course, you’re short-lived creatures, as things of great beauty must often be. Why must the beautiful perish? I ask it too often.

This elusive and equally elegant fellow was quite lanky and camera shy. My Merlin bird app could not seem to identify him, but when he takes flight, you see that he’s a beautiful mix of gray and white with a long, formal-looking tail and long wings. Very erect and proper-looking. I’ve seen these birds all along the island, but they don’t appear in any of the island’s wildlife guides.

As e.e. cummings said: 

whatever we lose

(like a you or a me)

it’s always ourselves

we find at the sea

And birds.  You find them, too. I find myself a little better among the trees, for I’m a woodland creature. But there is nothing like the ocean—its grandeur, its mystery, its smell and sound and sight. 

See the dark protuberance in the water? That’s the boiler of The Oriental, a Union supply ship that sank here in 1862. It adds just a touch of eeriness to the place.

At Pea Island, there’s a visitor center where I typically buy a T-shirt (different style each year). There’s the beach on one side and the sound—or bay—on the other. The bay walk was painfully hot, but it passes through a nice arbor of live oaks.

You can’t tell from any of these photos, but this is a red-winged blackbird—one of the common birds back home, which I did not expect to find here at the coast. He flew right at me, but I didn’t flinch because we were having a moment. Then he perched on this dead treetop and spoke for about three minutes while I listened. Then he flew directly at me again, and again I did not dart away, though his red epaulets made him look fierce as he approached in rapid flight. Then he flew off over the marshy pond. 

I wish his red patch and yellow stripe were visible in these photos.

The bay side has turtle ponds. Moss grows on the backs of some of these aged fellows.

I also saw a sea otter, but didn’t get a pic in time. 

And this fellow? Amazing creature! These sand crabs have eyes on top of their heads so that they can see in every direction at once, and they move in a scuttling walk—backwards, forwards, sideways. I’m a little jealous.

 

Otter Creek Wilderness Revisited

It was in November of 2020 that a different friend and I first visited Otter Creek, a large wilderness area inside West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest—easily my favorite of our now-beleaguered national forests. (The Trump regime has plans to monetize all of them for private gain.) We had a good enough visit, but limited ourselves to the southeast quadrant of the forest, missing out on its vast interior. 

After an absence of 5 years, I returned to Otter Creek with another friend—the previous one having succumbed to the siren call of getting a new job and trying too hard to prove himself by NEVER taking vacation days. Ah, but bitterness aside, this was actually a better trip. The summer days are still mild and breezy. The mountain laurel was just coming into bloom. The light mountain air was scented with freshwater and the spicy smell of an Appalachian forest. And to make matters even better, it only rained at night while we were sleeping warm and dry in our various tents—his pictured on top and my hammock tent just above. We erected a clever rain shelter by the fire but never needed to use it.

We hiked 5 miles from the south entrance almost to the middle of the wilderness area. There were plenty of places to fish and swim in the freakishly frigid water—which thing we did. In our three days there, we met not another soul except a local fisherman on Thursday and another on Saturday. But really, can you imagine it? 20 miles from Dolly Sods, where cars with out-of-state plates line every dirt road for miles, here we were the only tourists in sight. It’s true that this wilderness area lacks the broad, sweeping vistas offered by the Sods. In places, it’s just dense rhododendron thickets. In other places, it’s rocky creeks, and brooks, and tributaries. It’s all very woodsy, with none of the open meadowland of the Sods, but still so beautiful. The creeks that bubble wildly over the great stones are all worth exploring. 

Otter Creek itself is the centerpiece of the wilderness area and a magnificent body of water. But my favorite was the wild Possession Camp Run, which comes tumbling down the mountainsides in a series of narrow waterfalls. The Possession Camp Trail takes you from the area where we camped on Otter Creek all the way to the top of Green Mountain, where there are no views. Now tell me, how does a brook in the deepest forest get the name “Possession Camp Run”?  What kind of possession are we talking about here? As one who takes an interest in religion and spirituality, I hope the word refers to the folk religion of Appalachia—as in possession by demons or the Holy Spirit. I hope there’s some earthy tale of camp meetings and snake-handling and sawdust trails in the waning days of the Second Great Awakening. But I’m pretty sure “possession” probably refers to something far more banal, like ownership of a piece of land. Still a great name, “Possession Camp.”

On the banks of that selfsame run, there’s evidence of the area’s industrial past—whether logging or coal mining, I don’t know.

My friend caught a few brookies in Otter Creek. The photo below is the campsite at the top of Green Mountain, at the end of Possession Camp Trail—nice spot where demonic possessions may or may not have occurred. The photo below it is one of the many waterfalls on Possession Camp Run. I was supposed to bag the as-yet-unclaimed peaks on the nearby Stuart Knob and Bickle Knob, but my friend was in a hurry to get back to Pittsburgh.