Beach Snow

Snow on the beach creates a layer of silk. It’s not the pockmarked skin that rain brings, but an impossibly thin sheet draped over the face of the shore. One barely-touch from your big toe summons the fleshy white sand underneath. I never conceptualized a snowy beach; the words don’t even blend. But there it was, spitting at the delicate triangles between my eyes and nose. Snowflakes cackled their way into the sapphire ocean.

My group of eight friends planned the trip two months ago. We chose the Outer Banks as a central point in our swath of locations, potential weather be damned. I decided to fight the general March forecast with optimism, bringing a car full of crop tops and an inflatable kayak. The town of Avon responded with a 33-degree wind chill.

This is why North Carolinians go to South Carolina’s beaches.

When I tell northerners I’m from North Carolina, some pipe up about their colorful experiences on Cape Hatteras. They talk about a restaurant in Nags Head or a shark they saw in Kill Devil. “I’ve never been to the Outer Banks,” I say. The statement is often greeted with shock; the Outer Banks are seen as the best of what North Carolina has to offer.

I can see why. The craggy capes are steeped in undeniable uniqueness. Crops of fluffy sea grass anchor miles of massive, sacred dunes. Wind-beaten shrubs line the hard-to-access roads, never reaching higher than twenty feet due to regular punishments by wind currents and forest fires. The houses here are crafted from brittle gray shingles, as if each  were erected from a tangle of driftwood. Natural and man-made developments carefully and continuously echo one another, breathing and bathing in salty air. Even the CVS has a wide roof and splintered look.

North Carolina will forever baffle me. I mentally layer the Blue Ridge Mountains over this wet, shrubby expanse like a low-exposure photograph. I wrap the vision in Charlotte’s skyscrapers and wonder how this state is real. In second grade, we learned about landscapes. We learned the differences between “mountains,” “coast,” and “piedmont.” All my teacher had to do was split a map of North Carolina into thirds. “We live in this middle section,” she said. “The piedmont.” The mountains were in the left section and the coast was on the right. Charlotteans could go to either one in a weekend.
I’m grateful that the Outer Banks make for a wildly inconvenient drive. I love how the poorly-maintained road tiptoes carefully down the center of a shockingly thin barrier island, passing miles of swampy fields and driftwood bridges before reaching towns with names so old, they’re foreign. I hope that snow and fires and gators crystallize the love for this place within many people, but deter mass migration. The sacred stubbornness of the landscape keeps the coast holy.