No Road Will Take You There

I watched for the island, but all I could see was bright blue water, flat and big as the sky. I stood on tiptoe to see over the railing of the ferry. I’d never been to my cousin’s island home and didn’t know what to look for.

“Hannah, look! There’s Ocracoke Island!” Mom called out. At first all I could see was a dark bumpy line where the sky and the water touched. As the ferry got closer, I saw sand and low brushy trees, and then the dock.

The boat horn blared. I covered my ears.

I covered my eyes too, the minute we got off the boat, when the first thing I saw was my cousin Skip holding a squirming crab between his thumb and finger, and dancing around on his wet, sandy bare feet.

“Skip! Don’t be a pest!” said Aunt Mim, as she gave us big hugs. Then we piled into the car —without the crab.

“How was the ferry, Hannah?” Uncle Jack asked. “Only way to get here is by ferry or plane!”

“Fun!” I said. As far as I could see were sand dunes and grass and scrubby pines.

Uncle Jack saw me looking. “Ocracoke is really just a big sand bar,” he said. “It’s part of a group of islands called the Outer Banks. They’re barrier islands, between the ocean and the mainland.”

“This side’s calm,” said Skip, “but wait till you see the big waves on the Atlantic side!”

“Maybe you’d like to see who was here on the island before people ever settled it,” said Uncle Jack. He turned the car off the highway. We stopped where a dozen shaggy ponies were eating grass near the beach. “Wild Bankers, we call them.”

I gasped with delight. “Oh, can I pet them? I love the brown one with the white star!”

“Wild ponies,” said Skip. “Get it? It’s not a petting zoo!”

“OK,” I said. I took a deep breath. I hoped I could have fun with Skip this week, but I wasn’t sure.

“But where did they come from?” I knew ponies weren’t like squirrels and deer and raccoons, the kind of animals you see everywhere in North Carolina.

“Maybe they swam ashore from shipwrecks hundreds of years ago,” Uncle Jack said. “They might even be from the lost colony of Roanoke. Nobody really knows. The ponies are protected now, but we used to have beach races with them when I was a kid.”

I wished I could pet the brown pony’s woolly mane, even if I couldn’t ride her along the beach, but soon we were heading back down the long, straight highway. There wasn’t a single building, restaurant, or shopping mall to be seen. “Most of Ocracoke is protected as a national seashore,” Uncle Jack told me and Mom. “The village of Ocracoke is the only place people can live.”

And the village was tiny! A few narrow streets with stores and restaurants, some neat old houses, and lots of fishing boats in the harbor. “You’ve come at a good time,” Aunt Mim said. “Not too many tourists yet. It gets so crowded here in summer!”

Uncle Jack slowed down to pull into a driveway. “We’re home!”

My sandals crunched on sand and broken white oyster shells when I got out of the car. I thought I smelled fish. A great big tree spread over the small white house. “A live oak,” Mom said, admiring it. Through the branches I could see the flat blue sea stretching to the sky.

I picked up my backpack and followed Skip inside. Something smelled warm and good, like peach cobbler baking in the oven.

“Bet your house doesn’t have a hole in the floor!” Skip whispered to me.

“Of course it doesn’t!” I said.

“Ours does,” Skip said proudly.

“No way,” I protested. “Why?”

“All these old houses were built with them,” he said. “So they wouldn’t wash away in storms. People cut a hole in the floor with a plug in it. Then if the water rose, they could knock out the plug and let the waves fill the house. When the water drained back out, they just cleaned up, put in another plug, and went on living there.”

Suddenly Skip flashed a grin at me. “Come on,” he said. He bounded back outside. “I’ll show you around town.”

“Just us?” I hurried to catch up.

“Sure,” he answered. “We can walk everywhere. It’s safe. That is, if you’re not afraid of pirates—”

“Pirates aren’t real!” I said.

“They are! Or at least, they were! When ships came across the ocean to America, Ocracoke was the first land they saw. But the captains didn’t always know where the water was deep enough for ships. Even now the sand bars are always shifting around. So there were lots of shipwrecks — and lots of pirates to rob the ships.”

We had reached the docks, but the boats looked like fishing boats, not pirate ships. We watched for a minute, then Skip pulled me forward. He sure had a lot of energy!

“Do you like fudge?” he asked. “We have the best fudge store just up this street. I’ll treat. And then I’ll show you the lighthouse, and my school, and where Dad gets our fish, and the old cemetery, and—”

Now it was my turn to grin. My island visit had begun, and Skip wasn’t so bad after all!