N 35° 8’35.12″ W 75°53’9.32″ Google Earth location
Ocracoke Island, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, is an interesting place, and on several visits I saw this exact same tableau – I couldn’t tell you exactly when this particular image was taken, but sometime in the early nineties is close enough. There was something evocative about it to me, and when you go to the aerial view you’ll start to get an impression why. First off, Ocracoke is a very narrow island, so you can call this a creek if you like, or an inlet, or a bay, but it’s safe to say the length of this body of water isn’t significant in any way. Moreover, there are no houses or structures of any kind in the area, and barely a path to this mooring spot without even a dock, basically in the middle of nowhere on an island that’s 85% undeveloped and bare. It just seems odd that there was always a boat there, and if you use the Google Earth program to roll back the dates, you can see that it’s there about half of the time, still.
To me, it gives some idea of the atmosphere of the island, which is a tourist destination yet brings to mind a seaside fishing village from a century ago in many ways. Sure, there are roads and hotels and souvenir shops, mostly around the little harbor, but there’s also someone’s boat tied up in the middle of a salt marsh far from any indication of owned property. Hopefully, the image is carrying the laid back impression that I always got while visiting.
Which has, woo, been a while. I was thinking that I hadn’t been down there since I moved back into the state, but I checked my image stock; I’d been back there with Jim Kramer in 2006, so it’s only been 17 years since my last visit. I gotta stop doing things like this – I don’t need the reminders of how time is passing…