Everything changes here

Text and photos by Michael Lydick

The dunes at South Point shift a little every time I return—sometimes a gentle reshaping, other times a dramatic redrawing of the horizon.

A ridge I once climbed at sunrise might be flattened by winter storms; a bowl of sand where I sat and watched the pelicans glide may be buried under a new crest by summer. Out here, nothing stays where you left it.

The wind and tide take what they want and give back something entirely different, without explanation and without sentiment. It’s a quiet reminder that this 14-mile stretch of Ocracoke has never belonged to anyone for long.

The island remakes itself as it pleases—just as it has with the businesses, the homes, the people, and the memories I once thought would stay put. To love this place is to accept that it won’t stop changing, even when you wish it would. Most everything that thrives here has wings or fins, is coming or going.

Everything has changed here since Hurricane Dorian (Sept. 6, 2019) and its seven-foot wall of water. Then came COVID-19, the work-from-home mandates, and a wave of newcomers who could suddenly live anywhere.

Nearly every house now stands on stilts. Nearly every business has changed hands. Nearly every record has been broken—home prices, occupancy rates, even the familiar boundaries of the season itself. What used to feel like a May-to-August rhythm now spills back into April and forward into September. Even the usually empty Variety Store parking lot is gridlocked with Mad Max-esque tourists, engines revving and tempers flaring as everyone jostles for a patch of asphalt further and further into the fall and winter when NRPOs like me come here to hibernate away from the cacophony of the world.

The paint on our newly purchased home had barely dried before Dorian’s walls of water came surging through our neighborhood. In a daze, shuffling around like a storm-struck zombie, I went searching for my garbage-can holder and found it sitting in front of Arek and Pam’s house. For a brief, ridiculous moment I accused him in my head—imagining he’d swiped it in some hurricane-opportunist frenzy—before remembering that seven feet of rushing water can ferry a hundred pounds of lumber a hundred yards without asking anyone’s permission.

I connected with Arek Djigounian and his wife Pam the moment I met them. We were all in that post-storm, what-the-heck-just-happened, what-do-you-need mode—NRPOs wandering Cabana Drive together, comparing notes on losses and miracles.

Arek knew every line of every episode of Seinfeld, and when he looked at the devastation and deadpanned, “The seas were angry that day, my friend,” it was the only thing in the world that made sense. We snapped together instantly—like Lego blocks separated at birth. I loved him immediately: those monstrous Armenian shoulders shaped by years on Navy aircraft carriers, those oceans he’d seen that I’d only dreamed about. In the wreckage of Dorian, surrounded by this ocean we became the hurricane’s adopted sons.

When you get to be our age, new friends don’t come around that often, and we both quietly understood how rare and precious our time together was. For me, it was a five-hour commute to the ferry; for him, 90 minutes. We’d steal whatever moments we could—meeting out on South Point for drum when they were running, bluefish when they weren’t, and Spiny Dogfish on cold MLK weekends when the water punished every cast.

The ritual always ended the same way: a stop at 1718, where Arek refused, every single time, to let me pay for the tart cherry ciders I loved. As much as Arek cared for me, he cared for this place—these places—even more.

He knew who Raul was at the Variety Store. He knew to call Woody and who Woody even was when the roof leaked or a window needed replacing. He knew everyone and everything here in a way only true islanders or old souls ever do. We both loved this place that way and I loved him more because of it.

I hugged him on March 31st in front of the Ocracoke Oyster Company. He had extended his hand after lunch with our wives for a shake, but I wrapped my arm around those enormous shoulders instead—pulling him in and telling him I loved him. Then he and Pam headed to the 1 p.m. ferry back to Elizabeth City.

The next day—April Fool’s Day—the phone rang to say he had just kept going, all the way off this earth. His larger-than-life heart had stopped. And I sat there with a second flood of water–pouring out of me this time–soaking my shirt and the keys of this keyboard still. The last text to him from my denial laden fingers asking, “ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?”

He used to say “No bueno” whenever things went south—when they ran out of his favorite beer, when the blues were biting off our rigs, when the weather turned on us without warning.

“No bueno,” he’d mutter, half annoyed, half amused. Now, the island and all of its changes feel no bueno to me. I barely recognize my own street, lined now with eight campers and travel trailers that weren’t there before Dorian.

I also barely recognize the tourists, who arrive in waves and leave my house—and so many others—thrashed and trashed after Airbnb work-from-home-weekends that blur into one long season. The people whose names I knew at the businesses I loved to frequent signed papers, got checks, and either retired or moved away entirely.

Eduardo is leaving next. The coffee shop is for sale. And if I sit still long enough, tapping these words out, I can almost hear Arek’s “no bueno” drifting down from somewhere above, carried on the same wind that reshapes these dunes.

It was all easier to bear—the good changes and the bad—when I was sitting across from him at 1718 with a Tart Cherry Cider he would inevitably insist on paying for. Or when we were planted in our beach chairs, watching our mullet-loaded lines disappear into the surf, waiting for something to tug us back into the moment.

I’d grumble about whatever was bothering me, and he’d fire back with a simple, steady “No bueno,” and just like that we’d move on—two middle-aged men staring into the healing waters of the Atlantic. We were going to retire here in a few years. Be on this island full-time. Be here when the drum returned in fall and spring. Watch the July fireworks together, big shoulder to smaller shoulder.

But everything changes here. The dunes grow and shrink. Channels in the Pamlico shift left and right, deepening and shoaling with every storm. The island gives freely—memories, fish, clams, and a lifetime supply of sand ground into the carpet of my truck.

But it also takes. It exacts a toll from anyone who stays long enough to love it. Sometimes the price is too high. Others have lost far more than I have and still carry on—generations of pirates, pilots, and resilient souls who know this place better than I ever will.

Even still. I miss my friend.

Ocracoke property owner and Ocracoke Observer contributor, Michael Lydick and his family, live mostly in Winston-Salem.