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Cedar Island: A Photographic Essay

© Thomas James Martin

During the first week of December in 1979, I decided to photograph Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks of North Carolina (See note below). I chose the dead of winter because I wanted be alone, and knew that few tourists would be willing to brave the chill, 40-50 mile an hour gales that swept those isolated islands that time of the year.

I decided to take the scenic route on this expedition and planned to catch the toll ferry to Ocracoke at Cedar Island in Carteret County (See map). I noted at the time that the route would take me through an area of which I knew little, a narrow cone of land jutting out into Pamlico Sound known as the "Down East" peninsula. Yet, visiting those piney woods and saltwater wetlands on the Peninsula and on nearby Cedar Island, I found a place where I crossed over into that twilit border between past and present, self and other, being and nonbeing.

The area is also famous for the Cedar Island National Wildlife Refuge, a well-preserved tidewater ecosystem, encompassing thousands of acres of marshlands and pine hammocks, as well as hundreds of species of wildlife, especially birds. This land is a birding dream. Herons, egrets and ibis are abundant, though you will also see, willets, oystercatchers, black skimmers, plovers and sandpipers and many other species.

Awed with the area I spent some time there exploring and photographing the region before I caught the ferry to Ocracoke. Time seemed to have stopped; the old South seemed to peek out of the countryside like a quick glimpse of a grand lady's petticoats. The area abounded with Spanish moss, old colonial period homes, as well as thousands of acres of longleaf pines, from which North Carolina gets its nickname, the Tarheel State, as pitch and lumber from the trees were used for naval stores and ship construction in the early days of the colony.

Cedar Island, where only 350 or so people live, is a land isolated by its remoteness and ties to a past that goes back to settlements in the early 18th century. The older residents there still speak a variation of Elizabethan English known as the "High Tider" dialect.

As I explored and photographed that secluded land, the landscape seemed held in some dusky mystery, as if some little-known, ancient god had rubbed the earth with salt from humid air and swampy marshes; perhaps, seeking to preserve the teeming wetlands and obscure, crumbling manses out of time.

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