
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, November 12, 1995                   TAG: 9511130083
SECTION: SPORTS                    PAGE: C12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TIMES CHANGE, BUT YOU STILL CAN BANK ON THE OUTER BANKS

The first time I visited the Outer Banks of North Carolina, Nags Head was a modest town of weathered buildings built on stilts, and the bridge that now links it with Hatteras Island had not been built.

You crossed Oregon Inlet on a ferry, the same way you now reach Ocracoke Island from Hatteras. If you tarried too long to catch the last ferry back to Nags Head, you spent the night in the sand.

Bob Preston, whose family settled in Fincastle, (he graduated from Virginia Tech in 1927) was the first modern surf guide along the Banks. No telling how many nights he spent in the sand. I know one evening we roared up to the last ferry in his World War II vintage Jeep just as the gangplank was being raised.

Preston's Jeep was his ``boat.'' He would cruise the sandy beaches that poke into the belly of the Atlantic looking for sloughs that held channel bass - or red drum, as he called them. You got the feeling that finding a slough was almost as much of a thrill for Preston as catching the fish it held.

So up the beach Preston drives, and there, bathed in the blood-red sunset, he spots a slough, ``a lovely slough, really pretty, just gorgeous,'' he says. ``We've got 30 minutes to fish it.''

It can take more than 30 minutes to land a 40-pound drum, which explains all those nights spent sleeping in the sand.

Preston was a guy who did what many outdoorsmen only dream of doing, moving to the Outer Banks as a year-round resident. He often described himself as ``too tough to die, and too ugly,'' but death caught up with him several years ago, before the breakneck development in Nags Head: the fast-food joints, the miniature golf, the towel shops, the chain motels, the traffic jams. He would have hated all that.

Autumn - from now into December - is a dandy time to visit the Banks, especially if you are an angler. The crowds have thinned, the surf seems to quicken its pace and the sloughs hold drum. The jumbo-size bluefish are subject to blitz any second, and last week striped bass showed up in numbers not seen for more than 20 years.

Pat Garber is another Virginian who lived the dream of settling on the Banks - in the mid-1980s - much later than Preston. She chose Ocracoke, on the southern end of these barrier islands, its remoteness still giving it a measure of protection from the development that has changed other sections of the Banks.

``I knew that I wanted to live at Ocracoke within the first hour that I set foot there,'' she writes in her new book, titled ``Ocracoke Wild: A Naturalist's Year on an Outer Banks Island.''

A couple of hours after arriving, she had found a campsite for her tent and a job cleaning motel rooms. Neither the hordes of mosquitoes nor the hurricanes could drive her away.

``I was suffering the aftermath of a painful divorce, and the lonely, primitive life we led was what I needed,'' she said. The ``we'' included her Siamese cat and Doberman.

``With only a small kerosene stove for heat, we all hunkered down under piles of blankets as the cold northeast winds swept around us''.

Garber's book is a collection of stories she wrote on the Banks, with subjects as varied as piping plovers and blue crabs; storms and sailboats; hatching turtles and merciless winds.

The Outer Banks were old even when the United States was young. They are so old that more than a dozen years ago the people there were celebrating the 400 anniversary of their settlement.

And even though the Banks have changed - and not always for the better - the sand, the sea and the surf are changeless.

At the close of her book, Garber writes about the sand of Ocracoke and how she comes to realize that she - and the same can be said of Bob Preston - is part of the eternal sands of time:

``I saw the sands pouring slowly through a giant hourglass, and as I watched, I saw that the sands were running out. Then, just as the last grains of sand trickled through, I saw the hourglass turn, and the whole process began again - formation and destruction, birth and death, creation and extinction.''

Garber's book is published by Down Home Press, P.O. Box 4126, Asheboro, N.C., 27204. It sells for $13.95.

by CNB