recalls. "People were tying themselves 

 together with a long rope, so nobody 

 would get lost. They were headed for 

 high ground." 



Guthrie joined the group for a mo- 

 ment, but left it when he suddenly felt 

 drawn away for what might have been 

 his last glimpse of the house he'd 

 grown up in, his father's house. 



"Just when I got back down there, 

 that's when the water broke open Bar- 

 den Inlet. Then it stopped rising and 

 started dropping down." 



It was as if a dam had burst. The 

 swollen sound had split the land 

 barrier and carved a new inlet be- 

 tween Cape Lookout and Shackleford 

 Banks. 



Harkers Island was spared, and its 

 people untied themselves and went 

 home to what was left of their houses. 

 The hurricane had swept Guthrie's 

 house off its foundation, but set it 

 down whole. His neighbors helped him 

 lift it back astride its underpinnings. 



"Only thing is, the doors and win- 

 dows never fit just right after that," 

 Guthrie says. "Things just don't hold 

 a straight line." 



For Guthrie, that September night 



was a turning point in the life of 

 Harkers Island. It was, he says, 

 almost as if when the water rushed out, 

 the twentieth century rushed in. The 

 inlet made it easy for sports fishermen 

 and tourists to use the island as a 

 jumping-off place, and brought about 

 more change, Guthrie believes, than 

 the bridge, which was built in 1941. 



"It was the worst thing that ever 

 happened," Guthrie says about the in- 

 let. But he hasn't always felt that way. 

 "I was one of the first that went to the 

 government and asked them to dig it 

 out," he says. "We thought it was go- 

 ing to make it easier to get in and out. 

 And it did, but everybody else started 

 using it, too. And each year it gets a 

 little wider, and now it's about to take 

 the lighthouse with it. If we'd just left 

 it alone, that inlet would have long ago 

 filled in." 



Along with the boats came a steady 

 flow of sand and saltier seawater, 

 which changed almost overnight the 

 fishing in Back Sound. 



"There used to be an oyster rock 

 yonder, where there was always a mess 

 of oysters," Guthrie says. "But since 

 that inlet broke open, and the sand 



came washing through there, you can't 

 do any good there." 



Clams, oysters and scallops were 

 plentiful in the sound before the storm. 

 Shrimp were so thick in the water that 

 they fouled nets and made enemies of 

 the fishermen, who called them 

 "bugs." Mullet swam in schools that 

 Guthrie says would have covered a 

 half acre. 



"When I was born here in nineteen- 

 o-one, there were less than a hundred 

 people living here," he says, "and 

 everybody at the time made a living 

 out of salt water." 



In his house, there is an automatic 

 clothes washer. There is also a televi- 

 sion. Down the street are a movie 

 theater and a new bank. But the house 

 is the same house, his father's house. 



"This is an old house and an old 

 style," he says, rocking on his porch. A 

 stiff breeze off the sound makes 90 

 degrees feel like 75. "But I wouldn't 

 trade it for any mansion on the road. 

 Every morning I get up and see my 

 own kingdom here. . ." His hand 

 sweeps out toward the sound, hovering 

 like a gull in the wind: "... the 

 water." 



Fishermen keep nets and traditions well-tended 



If you take the road to Harkers 

 Island, you won't find anything exotic 

 or even especially scenic through your 

 car windows. From the road, it is 

 another pleasant Down East com- 

 munity. There are 667 houses. Of 

 these, 549 are used all year. Half are 

 plain, frame cottages and the rest are 

 about equally divided in number be- 

 tween brick houses and mobile homes. 

 The island, low, flat, and tree-shaded, 

 is stretched out in the waters of Back 

 Sound, sheltered from the Atlantic by 

 the jutting elbow of land formed by 

 Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks. 



"If you go to Harkers Island with 

 the notion that you're going to find 

 this quaint, old-timey fishing village, 

 forget it. It's just not there," says Jim 

 Sabella, a Sea Grant researcher and an 

 anthropologist at the University of 

 North Carolina at Wilmington. "It's 

 only when you've lived there for a 

 while, and you get to know the 

 families, that you see the older way of 

 life coming through." 



It is a way of life that lures young 



people, especially daughters, home 

 from the cities, and one that attracts 

 well-to-do outsiders into rustic retire- 

 ments spent among boats, nets and 

 porch swings. In 1900, there were 

 fewer than 100 people living on the 

 island. Now, there are 1651. 



Fishing is not the whole of life on 

 Harkers Island, but it's the founda- 

 tion. And it's the starting point for 

 Sabella and his research associate, 

 Marcus Hepburn, when they talk 

 about their two-year, Sea Grant study 

 of the island. 



Sabella and Hepburn wanted to be 

 able to tell the agencies charged with 

 regulating the state's fisheries 

 something about the people they are 

 regulating — their values, their history 

 and their culture. But Sabella and 

 Hepburn also wanted to know what's 

 likely to be left of places like Harkers 

 Island when the twentieth century 

 gets through with them. Harkers 

 Island was singled out for the study, 

 Sabella says, because it is fairly 

 representative of the state's fishing 



communities. 



"There, in a relatively small space, 

 we could look at many different types 

 of fishing and many different sizes and 

 types of fishing craft," Sabella says. 

 "The same kinds of fishing are done in 

 other parts of North Carolina, but not 

 all of them in the same place." 



Sabella's research associate, Marcus 

 Hepburn, lived on the island for 21 

 months, made over a hundred fishing 

 trips (for what he terms "participant 

 observation"), and talked with almost 

 every family that's called the island 

 home for a generation or more. During 

 those months of fishing, visiting and 

 careful interviewing, Hepburn began 

 to uncover a side of Harkers Island 

 the tourists don't see. The only way to 

 come to know the island, he believes, is 

 to come to know it in the same way its 

 people have: by way of the water. 



So Hepburn climbed aboard the 

 boats and went fishing. The great 

 variety of gear and techniques astoun- 

 ded him. There are 143 commercial 

 fishermen on Harkers Island. Fewer 



