Surf's up.

• Author: Kinney, David
• Position: Up Front

That fishermen had recently spotted a 16-foot great white shark cruising off Oregon Inlet didn't surprise me. The weight of all that concrete and asphalt would soon capsize this stretch of the Outer Banks, I figured, spilling tons of toothsome, sunscreen-basted flesh into the ocean. It'd likely happen in the summer, when Dare County's population, I'm told, swells tenfold, ballooning from little more than 30,000 to better than 300,000.

I'd driven to Nags Head to speak at a chamber awards luncheon. Going to the Outer Banks, I normally hang a right at Whalebone Junction, tacking toward the national seashore and points south. Heading north was like making a wrong turn and finding myself back in Charlotte, sans the six-hour commute. This, I sighed, was not the Outer Banks I had cherished for so long. It certainly bore little resemblance to the place my wife and I first saw and fell in love with on our honeymoon 35 years ago.

If the traffic hadn't been such that it forced me to keep both hands on the wheel, I would have slapped myself for harboring such stupid thoughts. How foolish to think a place, a peopled place, should be suspended in time. How selfish to want to shackle it to a memory that forgot how most of those people, perched perilously on strips of shifting sand, had no choice but to try to eke out a hard living on what the sea provided. And what the sea provided, it could take away. Even the land itself.

That, despite all the development and the wealth and options it has brought, hasn't really changed. In my comments the next...