Passage Of Light: A Transformational Return To The Outer Banks

Circular rhythms of my southern paw pulled a lens cloth along my Leica, clearing flecks of dust and stubborn dirt that had gathered in its rangefinder after hanging out a window through several states.

It had taken 1,500 miles from Missouri to come here — to end up back at a place my younger self had witnessed countless times as our family pilgrimaged to this island. This slip of land off the tail of Hatteras had been our escape from the known world, calling us year after year to understand it better.

When and how we first discovered it isn’t easy to recall, but every return since has changed me — first for my parents, then just my father, and by proxy all of us siblings when we could gather beside him. Each return marked a new chapter of the creative life inside me, every cake with candles a milestone. The self-doubting, green, uncertain photographer I used to be once believed that magic lived here — the kind my grandfather’s old beach-trip albums carried.

The air against my skin felt like salt-coated sandpaper. Idling in my Jeep, letting an algorithm reshuffle Bon Iver’s discography, I watched gulls hover outside the windshield as messengers for the car carrier easing toward the dock. I scribbled pieces about this into a worn-out journal while the ferry opened its jaws. Crews ushered a dozen vehicles forward as rain began to fall heavily on the deck. Water lapped white against the hull. Hydraulic yawns from the engine rooms clashed with the screams of gulls. A thumbs-up confirmed the parking brakes were locked, and just like that, the voyage began.

I squeezed my linebacker shoulders through narrow rows, shutter finger ready, lungs open. The ferry ride was bare for what it carried — wide enough to feel endless, stripped enough to feel humble. No free alcohol. No stewardesses grinning as they dropped another bag of pretzels in your lap. Just the droning of engines and the possibility of sea air misting your eyebrows. My legs already knew how to find the stairs and climb upward toward the passenger seating area encased with bay windows on every side. My curiosity wondered if a specific seat was still there. One of my earliest portraits that I loved — of my sister and mother — was shot through these same windows. The condensation and the light had made a remarkable, painterly scene. Intuition goaded me toward that feeling, so I leaned in.

In the lounge, tide-chart posters, portraits of government officials, and the green uniforms of staff scrolling TikTok in brief peace completed the aesthetic warmth of cold leather and linoleum. My chrome-finished camera drew glances. I raised my hands, laughing as I announced to the other riders that no lens would go in anyone’s face and be called art. They chuckled. With the tension broken and all my cards on the table, their acceptance gave me freedom to move about with intention — to finish my search.

Past a few rows, I found the exact chair I had used so many years before — the one where I’d rested with a Canon Rebel kit lens, and a dream of being an artist before I even knew what that meant. Resting back into its cold and familiar shape, My eyes drifted past the glass and railings to the infinite horizon beyond. Moments after I sat, it was there again — that same splintered feeling of light from an age when the family still moved as one body. When life was simpler and holidays for the younger siblings didn’t alternate houses. Recollections of my little sister laughing tinged my fingertips with a sudden chill. My lashes stayed motionless as the horizon began to glow. Eggshell creams of cumulonimbus overtook the gray drizzle, and Tiffany-blue skies pushed through behind them. The same horizon and line of sight—though they weren’t here on this pilgrimage—felt like proof that the past and the artist I once was still exist somewhere in those clear blue skies: an endless expanse of possibility, space, and potential. The flashes of togetherness and joy passed as shadows and dissolved with the lowering sun reaching from the expanse to touch my face. I raised the camera and exhaled; the shutter sealed the memory back into the past through the creation of a new one. As had happened so many times before, I was new again. A changed person inside and out.

Light doesn’t ask for permission when it folds time — it simply collapses years into a single breath. When it does, an unconscious trigger switches inside me; an intense, surreal focus locks my body into stillness. Yet that same, consistent joy of making pictures is the energy that thaws me back into the present. Like the constancy of the sun, it drives my belief and capacity to rest in an ever-changing world of colors, visions, and details — to find peace within an atmosphere called art, dispersing light and warmth across the rugged and scarred landscape of our human condition. And it’s in these recurring rhythms of pilgrimage that the love of what I do begins to truly sing, sharing verses and notes that testify to the endurance of being alive and the magic of becoming myself, over and over.

I pondered this while walking back to my Jeep. It felt worth jotting into that beat-up journal for a later time. Gathering myself for the impending departure from the boat, I glanced at my camera in the passenger seat; it shimmered with anticipation for what would come next. Seeing the green light flicker, the crew began waving us onward. Slowly pulling off the flat-bed, and following a single line of vehicles, I looked back one last time — to that ferry cabin, to the lower forty-eight now too far to see, exchanged for this tiny grain of dirt miles into the Atlantic. Through the windshield, my eyes embraced the future. That horizon shrank behind dunes of golden tones, and some long, narrow pavement of byway welcomed us with a cracked face and a smile of southern hospitality.

Toward the familiar village we’d loved so many times, East of where East begins.