Casablanca, out there on the moonlit 

 bight, and when he speaks he moves his 

 hands as if he were dancing. I remember 

 that he draws his lips tight into a grimace 

 and his forehead lines with a nervous 

 furrow, times when I know he is thinking 

 of the troublous four or five years to 

 come, when his lease runs out on the 

 Cape Lookout house he has loved and 

 tended for 40 years. 



I remember the last words he speaks 

 to me, heartfelt as the slice of pear he 

 hands me one day, the crescent of fruit 

 balanced on a salt-corroded penknife 

 blade. "You come back here," he says, as 

 he carries the last of my gear to the ferry 

 after three days of storytelling, net fishing 

 and flounder gigging. "You got a place 

 here. Anytime. Anytime." 



And I wonder: How long will he? 



T 



JLhree barrier islands comprise Cape 

 Lookout National Seashore, which 

 cradles Core Sound off the mainland 

 shore of Carteret County. From 

 Ocracoke, the islands run northeast to 



southwest, in some places as narrow as a 

 few hundred feet, rarely wider than a 

 half-mile. South of Ocracoke Inlet is 

 Portsmouth Island, 22 miles long from 

 the haunting remnants of 1 8th-century 

 Portsmouth Village to New Drum Inlet. 

 Core Banks stretches another 23 miles to 

 the checkmark-shaped "hook" or bight 

 of the cape proper. Across Barden Inlet 

 from Cape Point, a 3-mile-long spit 

 angles sharply north-northwest, and the 

 sandy elbow it forms cradles the tip of 

 another island, Shackleford Banks, where 

 forested dunes stretch 9 miles nearly due 

 west to Beaufort Inlet. 



When locals refer to Cape Lookout 

 — the V of sand that is home to the light- 

 house, the old Coast Guard station and 

 remnants of the old Cape Village 

 community scattered among the dunes — 

 they call it "the cape." Outsiders tend to 

 refer to it as "the hook." I meet Yeomans 

 at the near geographic center of this 

 hook, at the circa 1895 U.S. Lifesaving 

 Service boathouse he'd renovated. It 

 hums with activity. 



"Most fish I've ever seen to the 

 cape!" he announces at my arrival, 

 beaming with equal parts exuberance and 



exertion. "Been that way all summer!" 

 Two men mend net in the front yard; 

 another cleans flounder. On a screened 

 porch where dozens of old bottles line the 

 walls, a single pedestal fan keeps warm 

 air oozing over wet skin, and a woman in 

 a bright pink warm-up suit plays solitaire. 

 During spring and fall, someone is 

 always coming or going at the Yeomans 

 place, and even he can't keep straight 

 whether two or three are going off-island 

 today or tomorrow and when exactly the 

 next four or five are due to arrive. "Come 

 on in, come on, put your stuff down and 

 let's go," he cries. "I'll take you any- 

 where you want to go, just tell me." 



I drop a duffel bag and fly rod on 

 the front porch and clamber into a four- 

 wheel-drive pickup outfitted with 

 wooden bench seats in the bed and 

 oversized tires. A sandy trail runs in 

 front of Yeomans' house down to the 

 bight beach, and we grind across sand 

 hard as concrete here and soft as me- 

 ringue there. 



Yeomans is short, wiry and excit- 

 able. In the last five years, he has had his 

 left knee replaced with five pounds of 

 stainless steel and his right hip replaced. 

 But still, he crows, he gigged flounder 

 last night from the bight beach nearly to 

 the lighthouse and back "and never felt a 

 thing!" As we chum through the dunes 

 and scattered thickets of pine and myrtle, 

 Yeomans tells me how he came to have a 

 place of his own on Cape Lookout. 



In 1958, the U.S. Coast Guard 

 announced its intention to sell or raze 

 several structures in the Cape Village 

 community, so Yeomans bought the 

 Lifesaving Service boathouse. He rolled 

 it 500 feet north with two telephone poles 

 and a pickup truck, pulling the structure a 

 few feet, pounding the poles back into 

 position, pulling again. The house now 

 lies in a sandy swale behind dunes 

 pocked with the remains of World War II 

 machine-gun nests. To the north, a thick 

 tangle of myrtle trees blocks the view to 

 the bight, but this is a recent impediment. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 9 



