THE HOOK 



No matter. Ill will toward the Park 

 Service is still legendary in the neigh- 

 boring communities. Rikard's perspec- 

 tive is stoic. "Until you get past a few 

 generations," he says, "there will be 

 great animosity." 



s 



tanding in the surf the next 

 afternoon, alone on miles of sand, I cast 

 a fly toward a school of pompano 

 scattering tiny baitfish from the top of 

 small ocean swells. Up the beach, 

 another group of fishers works the 

 water, but at a distance that makes them 

 appear as ants on the sand. As far as I 

 can see beyond them, there is no high- 

 rise hotel, pier, T-shirt shop, boardwalk, 

 beach house, billboard, snow-cone 

 shack, hot dog stand, private beach club 

 or restaurant, and I know that beyond 

 my scope of vision none of these mar 

 the beachfront for mile upon blissfully 

 desolate mile. Thirty feet away the 

 waves curl, and at the aquamarine apex 

 of each, just before it breaks, the 

 pompano flash like diamonds. When 

 one takes the fly, 2 inches of red-and- 

 white chenille tied to a stainless steel 

 hook, the rod dances in impossibly deep 

 arcs for such a diminutive fish. 



At such times it is difficult to argue 

 with the logic of preservation. Along the 

 North Carolina coast are too many 

 places where the lessons have been hard 

 on the soul. In my lifetime alone, there 

 was the close call at Bald Head Island, 

 nearly purchased by the state in the 

 1970s but now carved up into half- 

 million-dollar lots, and the slow death 

 spiral of Currituck Sound and Banks, 

 once legendary among hunters and 

 fishers. 



But three days with one of 

 Lookout's last natives brings into sharp 

 relief the sacrifices required to ensure 

 that this stretch of beach will remain 

 wild. Some question why current 

 leaseholders should make a private 



retreat of public land, and their argu- 

 ment has weight and substance. 



And yet, as I shuffle alongside 

 Yeomans in the gnat-filled marsh edge 

 at night, a flounder gig in my hands and 

 a flounder light in his, and hear his tale 

 of being towed behind the mailboat out 

 to the drain when he was a boy, years 

 before Barden Inlet opened, and filling 

 his skiff with clams, I feel the blessing 

 of the real and the true and the last of its 

 kind. Blessed I am to hear old island 

 ballads sung by men who recall them 

 from youth. Blessed to learn how to gut 

 a flounder from someone who learned 

 from his daddy, and he from his daddy, 

 and he from his — fishers all. 



When the last of the Lookout 

 natives are gone, the cape will be a 

 wilder shore, perhaps, but it will lose 

 more than footprints in the dunes. 



I know that I will find it impossible 

 to walk those empty dunes again 

 without seeing ghost images of a young 



Yeomans, or without wondering where 

 the whale lookouts were posted, or if the 

 Lifesaving Service surfmen ever 

 dragged a drowned sailor to the beach 

 where I parked my truck, or how it 

 would feel to square dance in a salt 

 breeze. 



One image is no ghost at all. Early 

 one afternoon on the Lookout bight 

 beach, a crew of commercial fishers 

 working a 700-yard long-haul net pull 

 ashore an enormous catch of fish. When 

 word of the bonanza spreads among 

 Cape Village, a half-dozen people pile 

 into Yeomans' truck for the ride to the 

 bight. Most of the hard work is finished 

 when we arrive, the circle of net taken in 

 bit by bit, corralling the fish into a 

 smaller and smaller web, but still the 

 fishers haul in the last of the net by hand. 



Inside it a mass of fish swarm like 

 angry bees. The fishers had hauled 

 through a school of spot, but there is 

 more. Spanish mackerel slice the water, 



The spirit of community on the cape has endured for generations. 



14 SPRING 1998 



