Driving to Robeson County was synonymous with going home, and part of being at home—in addition to rich food, doting elders, and long church services—was to be surrounded by water. Much...
Change of State
Through all of this the river froze. Little by little, day by day. Evenings brought new frigid lows and with these arrived new forms of ice. Each morning I crawled out of my tent and went...
Called to Water
Many folks treasure water and all it offers. I live on an island off North Carolina, part of the Outer Banks, and water actually governs our lives. Ocean tides determine much of what we can...
From the Other Camp
On the last night of the last summer I spent at Camp Crowther, with college a week ahead, I walked out onto the promontory above my father’s cottage to watch the sun go down over the...
Chasing Summer on Nantucket
For in a place built on shifting sands, at the mercy of wind, rain, even fire, everything is painfully temporal. So we create and cling to the illusion of immutability. We slap stickers on...
Photographing Water
Landscapes are a pleasure to shoot. You capture beauty for a moment and can retrieve it at any time to look at it again. It freezes time for eternity.
Water Reflections
I can represent states of water, I can interpret views of water, but water (like air) is an amazing force of our planet’s nature and when I try to capture it - it’s elusive.
The Wild Horses of Shackleford Banks
It is known that thousands of horses roamed the entire length of the Outer Banks from Beaufort Inlet north to the Chesapeake Bay until well into the 20th century. On Shackleford, the...
The Past Shapes the Future
Excerpt from Time and Tide: The Vanishing Culture of the North Carolina Coast (Blair, 2023) The year was 1524, and Captain Giovanni da Verrazzano and his crew of fifty were just off...
Bookin’ with Angela C. Sutton
On January 1, 2024, host Jason Jefferies was joined by Angela C. Sutton, author of Pirates of the Slave Trade: The Battle of Cape Lopez and the Birth of an American Institution, which was...
Water and summer are intimately related. But beyond our memories of beach vacations, the great oceans, seas and rivers uniquely convey the historical record of lives lived and lost on their waves and along their shores. From the whalers of Nantucket to the fishermen of the Outer Banks, from the Arctic to Africa, the writers and artists in this issue invite you to contemplate the world of water.