The Generator Society

Michael Kruse: One of the southernmost parts of the Old North State, one of the northernmost points of this country's subtropics, hard where the warmer, calmer waters of the Cape Fear River clash with the colder, roiling currents of the Atlantic Ocean, Bald Head Island juts into the sea toward the treacherous Frying Pan Shoals. Barrier islands are as much the former as the latter — they are barriers — and so they bear the brunt of the surroundings' relentless assault. The water and the wind spray tiny shards of salt and sand. The dunes get hit first. They protect the maritime forest. The maritime forest gets hit next. It protects the marsh. A healthy barrier island has these three environments, needs all three, disparate but dependent, and the forest in particular is the most important piece of this delicate alchemy of reciprocity.

On Bald Head, the forest is atypically lush, verdant with red cedar and cabbage palmetto, wild olive and American holly, yaupon and loblolly pine, and finally the linchpin laurel and live oaks. The enduring species of trees sport hardy, waxy leaves, resistant to the corrosive, airborne swirl — but just as important, maybe even more so, they grow in groups, like flocks of birds or schools of fish, better and more able together than they would be alone, and they form a dense, protective canopy. They interact. They cling to each other, and they move as a unit, their branches reaching to touch.

It's almost as if the trees hold hands because it's how they survive, and they know they won't if they don't.