Down the Wild Cape Fear: A River Journey through the Heart of North Carolina

Chapter 15

241 The route to the actual Cape of Fear on Bald Head Island is circuitous and expensive. The cape, of course, is a shifty piece of real estate. In this part of the world, sand migrates south and west, as a rule, according to currents and tides, but storms tend to plough through these low islands, moving thousands of tons of sand in hours. The relentless undertow of large wave trains sucks sand off beaches and furrows it into shoals offshore. And dredging the long fairway into the ship channel undoubtedly contributessomething—nobodycanagreeonexactlywhat— to the whole restless equation. So think of the cape as an indeterminate place, partly submerged , where land turns into treacherous water. The Frying Pan Shoals extend more than twenty miles offshore.There used to be a light tower marking the outer fringe of the shipkilling sands, but it’s been decommissioned and sold off to a private individual. I once helmed a forty-six-foot sailboat under power through a shortcut across the shoals, heading north to Sag Harbor. The captain navigated. All I had to do was drive. But steering through that narrow, twisty patch of water was unnerving . On either hand, only a couple of boat-lengths away, the steep, four-foot-high breaking waves frothed and slapped down. We crawled slowly across Cape Fear through a little furrow in the shoals, and I was glad when we finally found open water again and the depth-sounder read first twentyfive feet, then forty, then sixty, and at last off the continental shelf, no bottom. To get to that remote spot, the Cape of Fear at the far southeastern tip of Bald head Island, we begin in Southport, my wife, Jill, and I. That’s where the Bald Head Island ferry terminal is located, at Deep Point Marina. There is no bridge to Bald Head, no public ferry, and even docking your own boat in the Bald Head Island harbor will run you $20 an hour. We purchase round-trip tickets, $23 each, and settle in to wait on the observation deck, shaded by a peaked pavilion roof.The benches are curved and comfortable, and there are white rocking chairs, the staple of beach-town porches every15 242 The E stuar y where. The benches and rockers fill up with families and kids, a frisky yellow lab and comical French bulldog, and businessmen clearly looking forward to a week on the golf course.They converse in the accents of South Jersey, New York, Virginia, and the Midwest. When the ferry arrives, a hundred or more passengers, including us, swarm aboard as staff members rush cargo wagons full of baggage down ramps and into the cargo bay. Many of the passengers will be trammed off to vacation rentals once they arrive on the island. I spent a long weekend on Bald Head Island a couple years back while researching and writing a story about the “Bald Head Mounties”—inspired by a photo. It’s an arresting image, one of a suite of photographs posted above a glass-­ covered display case in the Smith Island Museum of History near Old Baldy Lighthouse: A tall young rider wearing long-­ sleeved Coast Guard blues, high leather riding boots, and an infantryman’s helmet sits astride a horse rearing up on its hind legs in the surf, a dramatic Lone Ranger pose. But it’s not the Old Baldy Lighthouse on Bald Head Island, the sentinel marking the Cape of Fear (author photo) Chapter 15 243 Wild West.The mounted guardsman is Jack Murphy, all six feet, five inches of him. The horse is King. The time is World War II. The place is a beach on Bald Head Island. Murphy was one of an adventurous band of farm boys, cowboys, polo players, retired cavalrymen, stunt riders, and jockeys that made up the“Coast Guard Cavalry,” who scouted the beaches for trouble, armed with rifles and radios, first responders against invasion. The display case holds his scarred, lace-­up cavalry boots and a rusty helmet found on the beach that matches the one in the photo, physical reminders of an era of vigilance against an enemy coming from the sea. It’s hard to imagine now an idyllic island vacation community, a place of quiet natural beauty and peaceful contemplation, as the outpost of a war effort. Hard to realize after all these years of security, even after...