An interesting article...

A blog reader sent me a link to this article. It's a really good one - and very thought provoking. It describes the reality that there's a duality of feeling about visitors to Ocracoke. The people who live and work here feel ambivalent about the tourism - on the one hand, it is welcome for the effect it has on the economy, but on the other hand, the very fact of this tourism means that the character of the island is changed.

Further complicating feelings and thoughts is the knowledge that many of the people who visit here (especially those who do so repeatedly and often) love it as much as we do. And many - myself included - first discovered it as visitors ourselves. I first came to the island, as so many do, as a day-tripper from Avon on Hatteras island. I have a picture of my family on the ferry as it pulled out of the slip at Hatteras, and there is NOTHING behind us. (The huge vacation houses, the pastel pink "mall", even the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum building - none of those were there yet.)

I had a conversation once with someone who said she could be more annoyed than others by the tourists because her job was not dependent on them. I thought about that for a while and realized that it's not true of more than a small handful of people here on the island. Even if you work in a business which appears to not be directly a tourism establishment (the school, the water plant, etc.), the size of the population (and therefore the number of school students, water users, etc.) is directly affected by the success (as measured by the traditional American definition of monetary affluence) tourism has brought to the island.

I wish I had a deep and meaningful final thought, but the truth is this is a difficult question. Like many things in life, it is quite gray - it is true that Ocracoke residents enjoy (and benefit monetarily from) the visitors who flock here and it is also true that we are frustrated by how many of them there are, and enjoy our quiet off season times as well. It's one of those paradoxes, I guess.

Philip Howard wrote a very thoughtful blog on this topic, which you might find interesting too.

One final thought to share: Owen Gaskill, who is quoted in the article linked at the beginning of this blog, did in fact stay on the island until he died, as he said he would. So some of the lovely traditional things which are a part of Ocracoke's character (like Owen's veggie stand) will always change, with or without the visitors. That is, of course, life.