Chris Bickford

The Atlantic’s famed “nor’easters” are the great double-edged sword of a surfer’s life on the Outer Banks. Their constant pounding slowly erodes the beach and breaks down the sandbars, and they can blow for days, making the ocean too rough to surf, swim, or do anything but wait. In the wintertime, they bring cold, damp, chill-you-to-the-bone winds and drive everyone indoors, where some resort to drink, some to smoke, some to TV…the dedicated hit the gym, and the lucky ones hole up with their current squeeze, engaging in indoor recreational activities.

But once the wind stops blowing, and a lighter or westerly wind “cleans up” the ocean surface, that’s when the fun happens. The crazy, confused, stormy soup of whitewater and foam organizes into clear lines of swell, and the the two roads that run the length of the beach surge with vehicles toting boards—boards on racks, boards in the back of pickup trucks, boards hanging out the side windows of compact cars. Most are heading south, to the famed breaks of Hatteras Island, though many of the locals will be hitting their favorite sandbars in town, unmolested by aggro day-trippers from Virginia Beach and Richmond, who descend on more famous breaks in droves and act like they own the place.

On a big day, the hardcore converge wherever the wave is the gnarliest–usually somewhere in the vicinity of Rodanthe, the easternmost point of the US, where the deep water of the Atlantic slams right up against the unprotected barrier islands, creating big, fast, fat-lipped beachbreak barrels that require lightning reflexes and a fair bit of cojones to ride. The most famous spot, and often the best, is S-Turns (local Rodanthe-ites call it “S-curves”), the spot at the northern end of town, now immortalized by a chick-flick that features the famous “Serendipity” beach cottage that marks Rodanthe like a beacon when you are driving south through miles of empty national seashore.

Surfers are notoriously protective of their “spots”, but I give nothing away by talking about S-turns in such detail. It is the most overexposed surf spot on the East Coast. On a good day, the dune will be lined with photographers standing behind four-foot lenses on tripods, firing away on motor-drive. The side of the road will be lined with parked cars, surfers changing in and out of boardshorts and wetsuits, chattering on cell phones and high-fiving about the sick waves they caught. There will be spectators, girlfriends in bikinis, a crew of guys who’ve already surfed drinking beers and howling at the crazy drops and sick barrels being caught offshore.

This past month, we were forced to endure 12 straight days of howling onshore northeast winds before it cleaned up. At one point, winds were sustained at about 40 mph for two days straight, and the ocean threatened to swallow us all in its anger. The fishing piers shook with the force of the incoming swells, and oceanfront houses were battered with storm surge. But finally the storm died and we were rewarded with one day of big, heavy, perfect surf…followed by one or two days of fun, juicy surf. The following shots are from those few days. We are all anxiously waiting the next nor’easter or tropical system to blow through, because since then it’s been pretty flat around here.

For a little bit more information on the project, see the post below entitled “Surf/Life”…

Even if you live here year-round, you know that the Outer Banks is a summer place. Much as we love our uncrowded and beautiful off-season, we all know that we owe everything to Summer, for without it this place would not survive. Summer is when the Outer Banks comes alive, when the cash rolls in, when the beaches fill with colorful umbrellas and pasty families that turn beet red by Tuesday, then dark tan just as it’s time to leave…Summer is when the road gets congested and everybody curses Pennsylvania drivers (it is a well-accepted public opinion around here that Pennsylvania drivers are the worst)…Summer is when the college kids come down and rent houses on our streets, crank their music in the wee hours and party on their front porches like they were still at the frat house…Summer is a time of new friends, new love, crazy nights, trips “down south”, and barbecue afternoons. We measure the years in summers, for though the off-seasons are all pretty much the same, each summer is unique. Summer is a time of hot sultry days and sea-breezy nights…a time of earth-shaking thunderstorms that sweep in out of nowhere with cooling winds, chiaroscuro skies, and a fireshow over the ocean at night. Summer is a time of transitions, life changes, discoveries…A time of longboards, flat spells, and mind-blowing sunsets. Okay, every season here is a season of mind-blowing sunsets, but summer’s sunsets have a special character about them…

This summer on the Outer Banks was a bit slow. The economy is down, both the summer kids and the weekly family renters can’t afford much more than rent anymore, so the restaurants and bars have been pretty quiet. It’s also been a strange time for my little community of friends, as many of us are dealing with changes, transitions, scaling back on extravagance, finding other ways to make money, dealing with personal and relationship problems…For me this summer was the culmination of a long and difficult period of change, and I suffered kicking and screaming all the way through it. Eventually life forces you to deal with loss; it is part of the passage of life. Some losses are easier than others, but one thing is guaranteed, and that is that no loss you have yet suffered in your life will be the greatest. Life saves that one for the end. And as some people wiser than me have often said, it is those difficult passages in life that offer the greatest opportunities for communing with your deepest self, and discovering places in your soul you’ve never explored before.

I have been blessed with a number of caring, insightful friends who helped me through this time, and for them I will always be grateful. Most of them are represented in this post, and this is my little thank-you for them. The compassion and thoughtfulness they have shown me have been life-affirming, and I only hope I can return the favor any ole time, and we can keep spreading that thing outward in our world, because that’s the thing…

Here’s a little excerpt from the book companion to the “Alchemy Cards”, a set of Tarot-inspired divination cards using archetypal symbols. My friend Michelle pulled the “Open Heart” card for me one afternoon at the beach, and it became my symbol for this time:

“Love is as close as the air we breathe, as natural as the rising and falling of the waves, as simple as the sun’s rays caressing the earth, yet with our dualistically inclined minds, we make it something complicated, remote, and ultimately, unattainable. Indeed, ignorance about the true nature of love is the single greatest cause of human suffering. So, let us be more careful and contemplative in our approach to love. Imagine for a moment that love has two dimensions: the horizontal, confined and enclosed by time and space; and the vertical, representing the infinite, eternal link with the spirit. Human love often gets caught up in the horizontal zone, fostering the desire to own, possess, and control one’s “love object”. Such strategies, motivated by fear, are doomed to fail.

“Aphrodite offers love to humanity from the vertical plane. Her love is unbound by time; it is endless, eternal, and deeply fulfilling. It embraces each of us every moment of every day. It resides in the cave of our heart and expands outward, unconditinally, once the virtue of self-love has been mastered within the soul body of the individual. The archetypal qualities of Aphrodite’s love arise from the transcendent realm of non-duality and freedom. Unification with her love engenders wholeness, for she bridges the polar opposites of masculine and feminine within her golden light.

“You are invited into the golden chambers of the Love Goddess. Let the elixir of love that that Aphrodite pours into your heart chalice overflow with sensuality, freedom, generosity, and unconditional love for yourself and others…Dare to be the rapturous beauty that lives in your heart.

Amidst all the blues and hard times, we did manage to have some fun this summer. Tiki parties, music gigs, concerts in Virginia, happy hour at the Harveys’, the first annual OBX Pier-to-Pier swim, frisbee afternoons on the beach, and lots of small surf. Having fun in the summer is an obligation here sometimes; sometimes you’d rather sit on the couch with the A/C cranking and feel miserable about your sorry life. But you live at the beach. You are required by law to play…

I’ve been wanting to do a project around the surf culture on the Outer Banks for years: something that captures the essence of lives spent following stormclouds and obsessing about wind forecasts and tide timetables to catch a few hours of good swell…something that expresses what it feels like to live on this strip of sand and be involved in a perpetual conversation with the forces of nature at their most basic and elemental.

There are better places in the world to live if you just want to surf–Hawaii, Indonesia, Southern California, Costa Rica…the list goes on and on, and many denizens of the OBX will spend large portions of their lives chasing waves in other parts of the world. But most of them come back, not so much for the surf, I don’t think, as much as for the personality of the place. Not the culture, for there is little of that here. I’m talking about the personality of the spirits that inhabit this place: the wind, the clouds, the sand, the seagrass, the stumps of driftwood, the weathered cedar shakes on houses that could tell some killer storm stories if they could talk.

The surf here is unpredictable, to put it kindly. The sandbars shift after every big storm, necessitating a never-ending vigilance for the “new spot.” We remember past years in terms of where the good sandbars were. Laundromats, Buccaneer, the north side of Avalon Pier…to the casual observer these places would not seem remarkable, indistinguishable bits of an endless stretch of straight beach in either direction as far as the eye can see. But to guys who live to suf the Outer Banks, each spot has a different personality, and every sandbar is unique and always changing.

Tide, wind, and storms are a constant source of conversation, and hurricane season brings an added sense of anticipation–which more often than not ends in disappointment, as the storm heads inland to drench Florida or batter the Gulf Coast, or gathers speed and peters out once it hits colder water. Generally there’s plenty of swell, between the nor’easters, the offshore low pressure systems, and the named storms in the fall. It’s the conditions that are elusive: a prevailing northeast wind in the winter makes for sloppy seas, a prevailing southwest in the summer can keep the surf about ankle-high for weeks on end…the perfect combination of good swell, a light west wind, and a good sandbar at low tide haunts surfers’ dreams here like visions of the holy grail. But it does come, and plenty often. You just have to look for it, and the more you look, the more you find. And in the meantime you can surf the sloppy stuff or bust out your longboard when it’s knee-high and clean as cut glass…

It’s hard sometimes to do a project in your hometown. The demands of the day, or social obligations, or just plain laziness conspire to keep projects like this on the back burner forever. Add to that the fact that when the surf is good, you usually want to surf, not take pictures. But certain sacrifices have to be made for the sake of art…Life is so difficult sometimes, these decisions that plague mankind: surf or take pictures, surf or take pictures…

The following photos are sketches more than anything. I’m trying to get a sense of the palette of the project. This summer the surf has been particularly flat, and hurricane season has so far not produced anything epic. The few good days we’ve had, I’ve been working, or out of town…or surfing…But I’ve managed to get a few photos that hint at how I’ve been imagining it. Black-and-white, moody, a little nostalgic…the sense of how the Outer Banks was “back in the day”…again, that’s something that haunts us all as well. In some ways, it’s always back in the day around here and not much really changes, other than the sandbars. Drive down to Pea Island and points south and it still looks the same way it did when Blackbeard roamed this coast. But at the same time, there is a pervading sense that it was so much better around here ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. Back when great beachfront bars like Atlantis and Papagayo’s and the Carolinian were still around, and up-and-coming bands made regular appearances. When the locals ruled the roost and tourism was still centered around couples, young families, and small mom-and-pop oceanfront hotels. When there was plenty of construction work to keep every surfer and fisherman employed year-round…when the road to Corolla was still just a sand track. Old-timers will tell you that the fishing was so much better, and that you couldn’t dip a bucket into the ocean without filling it to the top with giant jimmy crabs…and some will even boast that the surf was better. All the good storms go south now, global warming maybe…

But enough of that. I’m not sure how literal I’m going to get with that sense of nostalgia. Right now it’s enough to just get out there more with water camera and swimfins, and see what happens. But at least, at last, I’ve started.

This past September 11 marked the 7th anniversary of, well, September 11. I happened to be in New York with not too much to do on that day, so I made a visit to ground zero to pay my respects to the dead. I almost wish I hadn’t. The site was still barricaded, fenced off, surrounded by police officers. There was little fanfare to memorialize the day, other than some people singing Jesus songs and passing out fliers saying “Prayer works miracles”…a hip looking couple was slouched on the wall of the church across the street, lazily holding up an “Investigate 9/11″ sign…tourists were gawking through the fences to get a glimpse of the rubble, craning their necks and climbing up the steel mesh to get a better look…and various kooks paraded through the crowd carrying signs ranging from “The End is Near” to “Write-in Paris Hilton for President”.

It was, I suppose, an apt representation of the mood of our country in these times: desperation leading to a triumvirate of sad reactions: religious extremism, paranoia, and smug apathetic absurdism…Seven years later, and we are still uncertain as to how to move on in the wake of that tragic day…

As night fell, however, a different mood began to infuse the city, no doubt inspired by the re-igniting of the “Tribute in Light” installed to honor those who lost their lives in the attack. Suddenly, from everywhere in the city, you could see the twin towers of light piercing the sky, and suddenly, we were all in it together. Somehow there was hope, a sense that, though it may be taking longer than any of us may have anticipated, we are rising from the ashes of that day. The light of our collective hopes and dreams seemed to be represented by those two towers of light, piercing through the solid rock of the city and into the heavens. It was a magical night, a perfect fall evening, with a cloud cover that stopped the two rays of light in mid-air, as if they were indeed ghosts of the departed towers. In a small park by the river’s edge in Williamsburg, a quiet group sat watching the Tribute in collective awe and reflection. None of us said anything to each other beyond simple pleasantries, but we all felt the power of this communal act we were involved in, the act of watching, remembering, and dreaming of a better future.

As I walked through the night to the source of the lights, from Brooklyn across the Williamsburg bridge, through Chinatown and the Financial District, past Ground Zero to the Battery Park garage, that ghostly feeling became even stronger. Thousands of particles of the ever-present New York dust that hovers and floats above the city without our ever noticing were illuminated by the Towers, turning rubble and waste into a flock of angels, dancing heavenwards towards that hole in the sky.

For some, it still feels like yesterday. For all of us, I think, time seems to have taken on a different character since 9/11, as if some portion of every day since then is still the day after. It may always be like this, at least until our generation passes and the catastrophic events of that day live on only in video, photographs, family histories, and apocyrpha. But out of every tragedy arises hope and new beginnings, and the future of our country may depend on how, when we are through with our grieving, we move on. We can choose to move on in fear, paranoia, extremism, or apathy…or we can move on with hope and vision, and honor the dead by creating a better world for the living.

A couple of weeks ago I went down to New Orleans, following some hunches and thoughts about Carnival towns. I’d been reading a lot of literature about the Crescent City, some Andrei Codrescu, Tom Piazza, Lafcadio Hearn, etc…and the more I read the more intrigued I got about the whole New Orleans mystique and how it might relate to the work I’ve been doing lately. The funky soup of Spanish, French, Caribbean, African, Native American, and Southern American influences; the histories of licentiousness, voodoo magic, free black communities long before “emancipation”; the 300-year tradition of Mardi Gras and the Carnival spirit that expresses itself year-round in second-line parades and celebrations for just about anything that can be celebrated; the almost-religious devotion to food, with a language all its own: po’ boys, beignets, mufalettas, crawfish, gumbo, file, jambalaya; and of course, the music–the jazz, the funk, the blues, cajun and zydeco, the dancing in the streets…

Then of course there is the precariousness of New Orleans, which somehow adds to its allure: its relationship to tragedy is more real and more raw than any other city in America, even New York. The water that threatens to swallow New Orleans–either from the north over the banks of the Mississippi, or from the south in the form of great tropical cyclones–is at the same time the cause of its incredible stew of influences. The French came down the Missisippi from Arcadia, the slaves came on boats through the straits of Florida…The Spanish had a direct line from New Orleans to Havana and from there to all points beyond…

As I read and pondered, there just seemed no end to the peeling layers of strangeness and allure that lay inside that crook in the Mississippi. So with my last remaining bits of free time and money before the spring wedding season kicks in, I booked a room in a little guesthouse in the Marigny Triangle called the “Bohemian Armadillo”, and flew down.

For better or worse, events in my personal life and issues with my health turned this trip into more of a retreat than a project. I rented a bike and rode out to Bywater and the Ninth Ward to see the wreckage of Katrina, still very present almost two years later. I bought a leatherbound journal in the French Quarter and nearly filled it with thoughts about life, career, relationships, the future. I got my tarot cards read–twice–by a guy named Norman in Jackson Square. And I spent a lot of time sitting in the doorway of my place, which opened into the street, just staring out and wondering what the hell was I doing with my life…My new friends at the Armadillo, Rachel and Maia, took me out for a fun night on the town, and kept me from getting lonely. Unfortunately, nothing could keep my mind from spinning into a deep sad place where I could do nothing but weep over lost love, and know all too well that I’ve nobody but myself to blame for it.

But I’m not done with New Orleans. I believe I’ll be back next winter, for Carnival, Louisiana style, and hopefully I’ll have more time and more presence of mind to explore deeper, make more friends, and get a firmer grasp of the whole thing. The visual elements have already taken root in my mind, and though it’s not my best work lately, I found a few photo moments that hold promise for something bigger. And I think, if I can just keep my head together, it could be some interesting work.