By Connie Leinbach
Pat Garber reluctantly left Ocracoke a few years ago but the island has not been far from her heart.
A prolific writer about Ocracoke, where she lived from the early 1980s until 2021, Garber has published several books on the flora and fauna of the island as well as chronicles of her young life and those of her ancestors.
A naturalist, when Garber, now of Goochland Courthouse, Virginia, lived on Ocracoke, she was primarily a writer, but she also had stints as director of the Ocracoke Preservation Society, was a federally licensed wildlife rehabilitator and was a licensed volunteer with North Carolina’s Sea Turtle Stranding Network.
Her two most notable books from living here are “Ocracoke Wild” (1995) and “Ocracoke Odyssey” (1995), both still in print.
She has just published a new book, “Beach Walking with Thoreau,” in which she chronicles walking the length of Ocracoke’s beach one winter, just as Thoreau had done back in four “strolls” along Cape Cod, Massachusetts, from 1849 to 1857.
Best known for his classic work “Walden,” Thoreau chronicled his walks in a book simply titled “Cape Cod.”
In Garber’s slim volume, she describes her walk in three sections.
Ocracoke’s beach is shorter than that of Cape Cod and Ocracoke is not as cold as Massachusetts in the winter.
She compares what Thoreau saw and contemplated with the Ocracoke beach and sprinkles in notes on the flora and fauna and some island history.
“I realized that Thoreau had, in the nineteenth century, done what I had often done in the twentieth–walking long stretches of ocean beach, searching for understanding, and putting thoughts on paper,” she writes.
And her musings form a delightful read about Ocracoke’s wintry beach.
The book is available on Ocracoke at the Ocracoke Preservation Society museum, 49 Water Plant Rd., and at Buxton Village Books in Buxton, Dare County.
