North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge spits drivers out onto a series of bridges along the final stretch of Highway 64.

Belle Orchestre’s complex and explosive cover of “Bucephalus Bouncing Ball” is the perfect accompaniment to highway driving in the sun…

If curious, here’s the frantic yet graceful original by Richard James:

After making a right on Highway 12 in Nags Head, encroaching dunes battle pernicious bulldozers along a series of awe-inspiring islands known collectively as the Outer Banks.  The photo above was taken in the Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge.

A kayaker’s dream, each island’s western edge hosts a tannic labyrinth of canals teeming with waterfowl and reptiles.

Tourists from around the world (and beyond) descend on the Outer Banks each summer.

Prometheus, are you getting this?

Frisco Campground rests among sand dunes and shrub thickets in the Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

In one of Janissse Ray’s memoirs (maybe Ecology of a Cracker Childhood?), she describes a friend who, within a given year, measures his quality of life by the number of nights outside, dreaming under the stars.  This character resonated in a way that wouldn’t take effect for seven years.

So this is a summer of firsts.  On a tiny ribbon of sand and scrub over 600 miles from home, I camped alone for the first time, and surfed waves above shifting sandbars closer to the edge of the continental shelf than any shore on the eastern seaboard.

What’s next?