"Down East" Peninsula: Cedar Island

Author: Thomas James Martin
Published on: July 15, 2002

During the first week of December in 1979, I decided to photograph Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I chose the dead of winter because I wanted to visit the Islands when there would likely be few tourists attempting to camp in the chill, 40-50 mile an hour gales that swept that part of the coast at that time of the year.

I decided to take the scenic route on this expedition and planned to catch the toll ferry to Ocracoke at Cedar Island in Carteret County (See map). I noted at the time that the route would take me through an area of which I knew little, a small cone of land jutting out into Pamlico Sound known as the "Down East" peninsula. Yet, visiting those piney woods and saltwater wetlands on the Peninsula near Cedar Island, which is across Pamlico Sound from the Ocracoke, I found a place where I crossed over into that twilit border between past and present, self and other, being and nonbeing.

The area is also famous for the Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge, a well-preserved tidewater ecosystem, encompassing thousands of acres of marshlands and pine hammocks, as well as hundreds of species of wildlife, especially birds. This land is a birding dream. Herons, egrets and ibis are abundant, though you will also see, willets, oystercatchers, black skimmers, plovers and sandpipers and many other species.

Awed with the area I spent some time there exploring and photographing the region before I caught the ferry to Ocracoke. Time seemed to have stopped; the old South seemed to peek out of the countryside like a quick glimpse of a grand lady's petticoats. The area abounded with Spanish moss, old colonial period homes, as well as thousands of acres of longleaf pines, from which North Carolina gets its nickname, the Tarheel State, as pitch and lumber from the trees were used for naval stores and ship construction in the early days of the colony.

Cedar Island, where only 350 or so people live, is a land isolated by its remoteness and ties to a past that goes back to settlements in the early 18th century. The older residents there still speak a variation of Elizabethan English known as the "High Tider" dialect.

As I explored and photographed that secluded land, the landscape seemed held in some dusky mystery, as if some little-known, ancient god had rubbed the earth with salt from humid air and swampy marshes; perhaps, seeking to preserve the teeming wetlands and obscure, crumbling manses out of time.

On that ageless island, time seemed to pass so slowly that stillness seemed the only conclusion to time itself. It was a place where to listen to the cry of a tern or haunting echo of a wintering loon, or to gaze on the dark needle grass in evening, was to experience the profundity of an unwavering world held fast in the sentience of sound and water and wind.

I wish I could pour that moody countryside and friendly people into your heart, but the atmosphere, being beyond words, I offer these few images...

There were many water lilies (Lotus) in fresh water ponds. The print you see to the left is a color slide printed on black and white paper.

As one approached the village of Cedar Islandfrom the South on NC Highway 12, I noticed this abandoned storefront. The print has been sepia toned.

"Jigs" was passing through also, staying at the same campground. He played a great guitar.

This railroad crossing is on the "Down East" peninsula before crossing over to Cedar Island intrigued me with its hint of magic and mystery. I kept waiting for a unicorn or other mythical animal to appear in the distant haze.

Eventually, I caught the ferry and rode for for almost three hours to Ocracoke Island where I pitched my tent that night on a small dune on the Atlantic Ocean in a near Arctic gale that seemed almost hurricane force in its intensity.

Somehow, the tent and I survived the night. The next day I straightened out the tent, and trying to keep my hands from freezing, began photographing in black and white the startling tones and shadings of the Outer Banks.

But that's another story. . .

Editor's Note: Not the least of the reasons that these barrier islands, known as the Outer Banks, are famous is that the Wright Brothers chose those high, windy dunes for the first flight of a self-propelled airplane. The Outer Banks are also famous for the Lost Colony, the first English settlement in the New World, as well as the lair and legendary burial place of the infamous eighteenth century pirate, Blackbeard.