A Hilarious Search for the Origins of Flight on the Outer Banks

By Greg Evans

We arrived on the Outer Banks in the middle of what I could only surmise was a category 7 hurricane. Sheets of rain poured down like a Cambodian monsoon. Driving over the Wright Memorial Bridge on US 158, connecting Point Harbor on the mainland with Kitty Hawk and Dare County on the Outer Banks (OBX), Em and I held on for dear life as the wind seemed to blow our VW Tiguan back and forth on the bridge as if a galleon racing toward an unforeseen sandbar. Several times I was sure I saw an approaching rogue wave intent on washing us away to our watery graves, but luckily we made landfall unscathed. My first impression was that Kitty Hawk was more built up than I had anticipated. It kind of reminded me of Cornelius, North Carolina right by where you pick up the entrance to 77 to get to Huntersville.

I have always lived in my own head and tend to visualize the world as I wish it were as opposed to how it actually is. This, I imagined the Outer Banks to be a rustic, old-fashioned fishing village with driftwood houses and endless stretches of dunes, beach and seagrass. Maybe at one time it was. We located our Airbnb, brought in the luggage and went to find some food.

I normally don’t care much for eating out but we were tired and just wanted artery-clogging takeout to wind down the evening.

We did stop at a grocery store for snacks amd beer and ultimately decided on Chinese take out for dinner. We should have gotten tacos. It’s incredibly difficult to mess up bean tacos. Em ordered chicken chow mein. I asked for vegetable lo mein. Em got chicken chow mein and sure enough, as usual, I got something not even close to what I ordered. I don’t know if I mumble or what the problem is but my orders are never correct. I was looking so forward to 1-3 pounds of noodles, 7,000 grams of sodium, sticky toxic sauce, and a plethora of southeast asian vegetables. Instead of vegetables was some kind of fowl, maybe chicken or seagull, maybe some beef, pork or iguana, I don’t even know because I didn’t eat it. Em ate it instead.

So, after a long drive through incessant rain and traffic out from Williamsburg to the OBX, I subsisted on bland crackers and hummus for dinner as the storm raged around us. I’d also purchasd a small tub of potato salad and, unlike me, failed to read the ingredient list on the back before hand. I just bought it. I ate 1/4 of the container before realizing the main ingredients included “Natural flavoring chemicals, sodium benzoate (the leading cause of leukemia in every factory in the known universe) and a slew of other “ingredients” that I couldn’t pronounce. I threw the remaining sludge into the waste bin and ran into the bathroom to aneorex myself, but to no avail. My blood is now thick with radioactive chemicals, preservatives, herbicides, pesticides, homicide, fratercide, and whatever other “cides,” that can make them money while killing me, and you.

By morning, the storm had lifted and a beautiful yellow sun rose over the ocean and dangled in the sky. There are only several places I have ever been that I wondered and even hope that heaven resembles, and this windswept stretch if sand and sea is one of them. I was immediately at ease, like being placed into a warm bath as a child. It is a place I felt connected, like I supposed to be there, like I belonged.

It was time to go see the Wright Brothers Memorial. For those of you traveling to the OBX with a 16-year old teenage daughter, if you plan to leave the house at any point, I recommend giving them at least 6 hours notice to get ready lest it is 3 am., by the time you get out the door.

It might help to just have her pack a pair of shoes for each of the fourteen outfits to help save time. There is no point trying to rush with a teen. Everything takes 7 times as long as it should, usually because they are texting. The house could be burning to the ground. You are frantically looking around for her and sure enough, you’ll find her texting.

“Come on,” you say.

“Hold on!”

One thing I noticed driving into, and around the Outer Banks, so similar to Johnson City and all over East Tennessee, from where we

fled, is the poison of development - land for sale, the squealing, rumbling, shrieking, crashing, shattering, smashing, howling sounds of rotten construction - everywhere you look. It’s hard to watch. I look away but the sounds are penetrating. It is a seething horrible vortex of spine-wrenching, ear-splitting dreadful noise to accompany the salacious view. One aspect of the Outer Banks the Wright Brothers found so appealing was its isolation from the chaos of normal society.

Beautiful sand dunes and other once unmolested shrub-land, Pink Muhly Grass, Seashore Mallow, Goldenrod, Thickweed, Autumn Sage, Quercus Virginiana, Willow Oak, savagely bulldozed over, skewered by cheap metal columns, smothered in prison-gray concrete, for mile after sandy mile. What is already here is not enough. It will never be enough. There is no point in going into it again. Sleazy land salesmen and women, smiling like nitrous oxide addicts on tacky cardboard billboards, whoring out the last bit of land available. “It’s lucky we are getting here now. Before it’s all gone. My conjecture though, even now it’s too late,” I said.

Depraved developers appear like cockroaches to deal in blood money. Progress hangs like a thick evil fog, like an alcoholic depression squeezing away any life if any hope that may flicker.

In 1900, when Wilbur first arrived to the Outer Banks, to Kitty Hawk, there was little here but glorious nature, sand, wind, salt, shrubbery, and a splattering of fishermen and their families, maybe 50 homes total, a handful of Life-saving Service Stations, and a Weather Bureau Station. It was said the majority of residents were descendants of shipwreck survivors whose boats were smashed to pieces by the unforgiving North Carolina coastline. There were no bridges to connect the mainland. The only recourse was rickety, leaky boat across the sound. One could only describe the place as an isolated paradise.

During Orville and Wilbur’s stay on the island, void of grocery stores, and much of anything else he js credited with saying, most likely in a letter back home to his sister Katharine, or to his father, something to the effect of, “all that thrives here, on the Outer Banks are mosquitoes, bedbugs, and wood ticks!”

Just wait until the fat developers with big teeth and wanton land dealers with lizard smiles arrive.

We stayed for those three days in a coral-pink cottage at 1822 North Virginia Dare Trail. It was glorious, especially with the morning sun rising up over the sea.

We spent considerable time at the Kill Devil Hills sand dunes where now stands the Wright Brothers’ Memorial and museum. As they were working to create a flying machine, scoundrels belittled their work at every turn. The Chief engineer of the Navy, George Melville, a small-minded sot declared, “A calm survey of certain natural phenomena leads the engineer to pronounce all confident prophecies for future success as wholly unwarranted, if not absurd.”

There was also the “distinguished” professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, Simon Newcomb, a splinter on the bottom of your foot, who said that the dream of flying was no more than a myth. “The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect.”

While working to build their glider in the backyard of their Dayton Ohio home at 7 Hawthorn Street, a neighbor sneered, “Some say the boys just go camping and they make their own tents. Others say they are trying to fly. I don’t believe they are that foolish.” The Wright Brothers’ journey was peppered with criticism, sniveling, spittle-laced debasement and every other ridicule spewed by the average rabble. Anyone who has ever done anything different or great has been chopped down time and time again by the faceless, nameless mob, those people history quickly forgets.

Follow your dreams and never listen to the critics. Their words and opinions are as hollow as their achievements. They drip in jealous wonder.

As you all well know the Wright Brothers changed the world. Aviation exploded and flying has become as normal as BBQ’s in labor day. One thing I noticed reading this book is like so many other great accomplishments in history, the glory was in the journey. The brothers Orville and Wilbur, their sister Katharine and their father, Milton, there was teamwork, love, camaraderie, each person working towards this goal that was bigger than themselves, each providing input in their own way. But at the end, it was somewhat of a tragic story, like so many others. Wilbur died young of typhoid fever. Milton passed on. Katharine married a man Orville disapproved of and they became estranged. Katharine moved to Kansas and Orville only visited her when her health became incurable and death was imminent. Despite the incredible achievements and the fact that their creation has grown to such grand proportions, I was and am still bothered by the fractured ending that should have gone differently.