Nags Head

The name appears on early maps, and nobody is sure where it came from — one of the places called Nag's Head on the English coast, or the legend that islanders tied a lantern to a horse and walked it along the dunes so that ships would mistake it for a safe anchorage and wreck on the shoals. The last story is probably invented, but wrecking and salvage were real parts of life on this coast, which lies beside the shifting shoals that sailors call the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Nags Head became known as a resort around 1830, when the only way to reach the island was by boat. Growth quickened in 1855, when Dr W. G. Pool bought 50 acres of oceanfront land, divided it into plots and sold them to friends. The wood-shingled cottages built along the ocean in the late 19th and early 20th centuries survive as the Nags Head Beach Cottages Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and nicknamed the Unpainted Aristocracy.

The Wright Memorial Bridge of 1930 brought cars to the northern Banks. Nags Head was incorporated as a town in 1961. In 1973 bulldozing began on the sound side of the great dune of Jockey's Ridge; a local resident, Carolista Baum, raised the alarm, and the dune became a state park two years later. Since then the town's story has been one of growth in rental houses, repeated hurricanes and nor'easters, and a long effort to hold the beach in place with sand pumped from offshore.

Nags Head's culture is the culture of the Outer Banks: wind, water and the sea. The steady winds that drew the Wright brothers to the dunes a few miles north still bring hang-gliders to Jockey's Ridge, where the world's largest hang-gliding school teaches beginners on the sand slopes, and kiteboarders and windsurfers to the shallow sound. Surfing has a long local following, and the piers are social places where people fish at dawn and gossip through the afternoon. Charter boats leave the nearby marinas for the Gulf Stream, and a big tuna or marlin on the dock is still an event.

History is performed here. Roanoke Island across the causeway has staged The Lost Colony in summer since 1937, with a break during the Second World War, an outdoor drama about the English settlers who vanished in the 1580s. The Wright brothers' first flight is marked each December at Kill Devil Hills, and the Elizabethan and colonial past is woven through place names, from Virginia Dare Trail to Manteo.

The year-round community is small, and its people — bankers, in the old local word — are known for a dry independence formed by isolation, storms and a tourist economy that empties out each autumn. Church, the volunteer fire company and the school in Manteo bind it together. Manners are easy and unhurried: a wave from the car, a chat at the fish market, no hurry at the restaurant. Visitors are welcomed as the livelihood, but asked to respect the dunes, the turtle nests and the right of way at the boat ramp.

About 3,200 people live in Nags Head all year, in a town that stretches for miles along the island and holds many times that number in July. Most of its houses are holiday rentals or second homes, and the economy runs on them: cleaning and maintenance crews, property managers, restaurants, surf shops, fishing charters and the building trade. Many workers commute from the mainland or from Manteo, where housing is cheaper, and the shortage of affordable homes for year-round residents is a constant subject of local politics.

The day follows the sun. In summer the beach fills by mid-morning, the piers and the sound take the late afternoon, and the restaurants are busy from early evening. The change-over day for rental weeks, usually Saturday or Sunday, brings queues across the bridge and an exodus the other way. In the off-season the town turns inward: shops close for the winter, locals walk the empty beach with dogs, and the fishing community has the water to itself.

The permanent worries are erosion and water. The ocean has been taking the beach for generations, and the town has made projects to manage the erosion a priority. Storms close the beach road, overwash the dunes and occasionally take houses; sea-level rise and the flooding of the only road south are discussed as questions of decades, not centuries. Dare County governs much of local life, and the town's older children go to middle and high school in Manteo on Roanoke Island.

Seafood is the point. The sounds and the ocean supply blue crabs, shrimp, flounder, sea trout, spot, bluefish and, from the Gulf Stream, yellowfin tuna and mahi-mahi; oysters are a winter food and soft-shell crabs a treat of late spring, when the blue crabs moult and are fried whole and eaten in a sandwich. The classic plate is a fried or broiled seafood platter with coleslaw and hushpuppies, the fried balls of cornmeal batter served everywhere in coastal North Carolina. Clam chowder in the Hatteras style is clear, made with clams, potatoes, onion and bacon and no cream or tomato, and is a genuine local dish.

Fish markets on the causeway and the beach road sell the day's catch to the thousands of rental houses with kitchens, and cooking at home is as much a part of a Nags Head week as eating out. Eastern North Carolina pork barbecue — chopped whole hog with a thin vinegar-and-pepper sauce — reaches the Banks from the mainland, as do sweet tea and the biscuits and grits of a Southern breakfast.

The town's restaurants range from decades-old family seafood houses and diners to newer places serving tuna and fish tacos, and most of them close or cut their hours in winter. Beer and wine are sold in supermarkets; spirits only in the state-run ABC stores, as across North Carolina. Doughnuts from the chain that began up the Banks in Duck, and ice cream on the beach road after dark, round out a summer day.